Dungeon Crawler Carl: A Battle Pass from Another Gaming Dimension

Just imagine it for a second. Sandfall announces a Season Pass for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Larian does the same for Baldur's Gate 3. CD Projekt follows suit for The Witcher 4. You’d either laugh or cry. And you’d be right to.

Yet, the tabletop role-playing game industry is currently embracing this exact model without so much as a debate.

On May 19, 2026, the crowdfunding campaign for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game wrapped up on BackerKit.

The result? $13.29 million raised from 55,972 backers. The initial goal was $250,000. That’s a 53x multiplier.

It’s the most-funded campaign in BackerKit history. It’s also the third most-funded tabletop game of all time across all platforms, sitting behind the Cyberpunk TCG and the Cosmere RPG. It even managed to beat Frosthaven and its $12.97 million Kickstarter run.

There’s no doubt about it: fans of Matt Dinniman’s work showed up in force to bring this tabletop game to life.

Tucked away in the backer rewards was a product that received far less attention than the miniatures and cards: the Season Pass.

Here is the mechanic announced by Renegade Game Studios:

The publisher has already confirmed their intention to extend the model beyond the first season.

In practical terms, each delivery brings text and illustrated content: rules for new playable classes, creature stat blocks, location descriptions, magic items, and equipment. You download everything as a PDF.

Once downloaded, that content is yours. If you don't renew for Season 2, you keep everything you received during Season 1. Renegade can't reach into your hard drive and delete your files.

The Season Pass isn't a subscription that cuts off your access if you stop paying. It’s closer to a pre-paid subscription for scheduled supplements. Think of it like a magazine subscription, not a Netflix account.

The Season Pass, in its modern form, was born in a very specific corner of the video game world: competitive multiplayer games and "Games as a Service" (GaaS).

Think Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, or Diablo IV’s endgame. These are games designed to be played for hundreds of hours, in competition or cooperation, featuring endless progression and a constant need for fresh content.

These games share three characteristics that the Season Pass feeds perfectly: a highly active player base, a never-ending progression loop, and a format that thrives on a continuous stream of new content.

Now, let’s look at the biggest video game RPGs of the last decade:

No Season Pass. No Battle Pass. The developers of Clair Obscur, the freshly crowned 2025 Game of the Year, even publicly announced that they have no plans for major paid expansions.

Narrative video game RPGs have rejected this model. Their players aren't asking for it. And yet, these games sell millions of copies.

Why is Renegade, a developer of a tabletop RPG, looking to Fortnite for its business model instead of Baldur's Gate 3?

Culturally, tabletop RPGs share much more with narrative video game RPGs than with competitive multiplayer games. They share the same long-term commitment (a campaign lasts months). The same primacy of storytelling over stat-grinding. The same intimate connection to an imaginary world.

Yet, Renegade chose the business model of the other family. The "Games as a Service" family. The one where the player is expected to return every single week so they don't miss out on anything.

Hypothesis 1: Renegade has identified a specific audience. Fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl come from the LitRPG genre, which directly mimics video game mechanics (stat bars, XP, visible interfaces). This audience might be more comfortable with a "Games as a Service" logic than with traditional TTRPGs.

Hypothesis 2: Renegade is testing a new model because the TTRPG community is aging, and younger players, raised on Fortnite, expect this type of structure. Whether that's true or not, it’s a calculated industrial gamble.

Hypothesis 3: Renegade is simply capitalizing on a trend surrounding a red-hot license. The Season Pass is a marketing hook that increases the average order value without permanently disrupting the TTRPG space. If the trend dies, the publisher will move on to something else.

None of these hypotheses are mutually exclusive. They could all be true at once.

In January 2023, Wizards of the Coast tried to modify the Open Game License for Dungeons & Dragons. The new version aimed to impose royalties on third-party publishers and give Wizards perpetual rights to their creations. The TTRPG community fought back en masse. Wizards backed down within weeks.

That episode sent a clear message: the tabletop community is deeply attached to an open, owned, and sustainable model. They refused to have a new form of economic dependency forced upon them.

Three years later, 56,000 people just funded a Season Pass. Not because they were forced to. But because they chose to.

Renegade’s success doesn't prove that the Season Pass is going to take over the TTRPG world. The precedent of narrative video game RPGs, which have rejected this model for a decade, suggests that deeply narrative genres are resistant to this import.

But $13 million is a signal. Other publishers will test it. Some will succeed, others will fail.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has just posed its own question. It’s up to us to decide if we answer "yes" out of habit, or "no" out of principle.

© Illustration credit: Ondřej Hrdina