Hi, I’m John Brieger, lead developer on Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable. The development team works with the designer (John D. Clair) to get the gameplay ready from prototype to product.

As you may already know: when Crawlers enter the third floor of the 18-level world dungeon, they are prompted to choose a race and class. We wanted to make sure players had that same freedom of customization in DCC Unstoppable as well.

Your base box contains 8 Races and 8 Classes — and the Crawler Chaos expansion contains 8 more of each!

We spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to mechanically represent races and classes within the systems of Unstoppable. We started with the idea of adding new starting cards to your deck, similar to your character’s abilities, but expanding the deck size made the experience uneven. We also looked at replacing 2 of your “Strikes”, which kept the game consistent, but testers felt like they weren’t getting the feel of being their chosen race/class consistently enough with just 1 card each in a shuffled deck.

Ultimately, we decided to divide similar to a lot of tabletop RPGS: Races customize your initial conditions, while classes give you more active powers during play that are more constantly available.
Races

Races set your initial starting conditions: whether that’s the ability to throw a perfect tantrum, an inclination for picking up higher level skills, or a proficiency for crafting potions.

While by default, you start with 10 Health, 2 Mana, and 3 Gold, these conditions will now vary with your selection of race — so make sure you protect any teammate who chooses cat!

Classes

Classes give you ongoing powers — passive abilities that trigger on specific actions, new ways to spend your mana, or powerful abilities you get once per level.

We also made sure that for each of the 6 playable characters (2 in the base game, 4 in crawler chaos), their canonical races and classes are playable. When you reach floor 3, you can always select the recommended default for your character, such as Cat Former Child Actor for Donut. Or, you can draw 3 and pick 1 for Race, then for Class, representing the top 3 picks from the AI for you.

Crawler Chaos

While full previews are mostly out for the base game races and classes, here are a couple spicy previews from the Crawler Chaos expansion:

Among the additional 8 included races are Infiltrator (which lets you take over an Ally), Nodling (which expands your starting character abilities from your extra head), and Lajabless (which gives immense power, but a dangerous drawback).

Among the included 8 classes are Shotgun Messenger, Santero, and a brand new class you’ll get to explore in the Crawler Chaos short story: Summoner.

Making and testing these powers was one of the highlights of development. It was an opportunity both to represent lore we love from Dungeon Crawler Carl and to expand what Unstoppable can do mechanically. Thanks so much to our many playtesters for trying these out; I know they waded through a lot of broken powers so we could get the best ones to your table!

Note: prototype cards shown — art and text not final