Depthcrawl Design, pt 3 - New Blood

21 August 2024

Note: this post is part of a series! Check out the other entries here: 1 2

Contents

Intro

Depthcrawls...

eutopia, by karina puente

Since my last post, I've seen a few bits of depthcrawl content posted elsewhere: Deep Delve by Dice Goblin Games and a post by Farmer Gadda prototyping a Nether-from-Minecraft-themed crawl. I'm not sure why all of us started thinking about depth stuff at once but I'm very into it. Must be something in the water.

Seeing other folks post cool shit does make me want to just get in and start writing, but I think one more (quick n dirty) post studying other material will be valuable. Today I'll be covering Downrooted, by Jason Christopher Burrows, which is unfinished but still has a lot of Good Stuff to study / steal.

Case Study - Downrooted

Downrooted is a module for Cairn, submitted to the Town/Forest/Dungeon jam (which I also wrote for!) although it is still in active development. It revolves around a massive, magical woodland area (once home to an advanced civilization) and the relatively simple town at its perimeter that sends expeditions inside for tools and materials far beyond their ken.

pic unrelated (from @equine_dentist on twitter)

Again, this isn't going to be a review, because again, I don't have much to say about it as a product other than: "I'm a fan"! I was impressed with Burrow's writing and ability to wring a lot of weirdness from the fantasy forest premise. There hasn't been an update on the project in a while, but I hope he finishes it at some point because he's really got the juice.

Setup

A few things immediately stood out on my readthrough.

Multiple Layers!

the children yearn for Triple Layered Zones

I was stoked to see this one. Three layers of woods, each associated with different depth ranges, each overlapping. It's not far off at all from what I was thinking in my last post, and it's cool to see parallel ideas like this. The only thing I'm not a fan of is the advice for overlap, which is just "describe how they mix". What a missed opportunity to go big with it!!

Takeaway: build bespoke layer-mixing details into the description for each location.

Unique Locations

When rolling a new Location, a few areas can only be generated once. On rolling them again, the next spot up on the table is selected instead. These areas range from important NPC hideouts to weird puzzles to structures that crumble after interacting with them.

Takeaway: Would I use this? Eh. I think if I'm playing with the idea of infinity then truly unique stuff maybe runs counter to that. This is basically just turning location rolls into NPC encounters though, which is worth mulling over. I could add friendly NPCs to the Encounter table, or have them setting up temporary camp as a Detail. Which is more interesting? The latter, probably. It's kinda Dark Souls-y. I like the idea of NPCs making journeys of their own and following you into the deep.

New Movement

moves

Rove aligns with my thoughts on adding a new move - something to roll a new location without moving forward. Farmer Gadda's post from earlier posits something similar. However, where Gadda's depthcrawl aims to incorporate (I believe) fast travel on an X/Y grid, and I introduced my move with the idea of adding blockages / others reasons to use it, I'm struggling to find a purpose for Roving.

My best guess is that it's to give you an extra shot on unique / quest-specific locations in case you missed them, but the players wouldn't have access to the depth tables, so how would they know to use it? Is it a way to get you back to the entrance if you get lost? That doesn't sound interesting. Not sure what to think about this, but it's got me feeling more convicted in the idea that I should build reasons to use a new move if I'm adding one at all.

Structure

Unlike the OG depthcrawls, this doesn't take place inside a pocket dimension that you can access wherever. The Erstwald Forest is a whole ass place in the world that you have to go out of your way to find. More than that, the border town of Brimton acts as a hub with sidequests, important NPCs, and events that play out on return from the forest.

this dude canonically has 8 kids btw

The expectation here is that you make increasingly deeper excursions to the forest while doing R&R in town between trips, compared to the Stygian Library where you're mainly going in, grabbing what you need, and getting out. The module supports this via a few key changes to the quote-unquote established formula.

The map doesn't change

This may just be something the author forgot to include, but that's not my impression. Unlike in Ynn or the Library, the map appears to remain static whenever you leave and come back. Normally I think that would feel a little lame, but you're given an interesting form of fast travel in the form of Shaper Dungeons. These are actually also procedurally generated, which is really cool but not worth going into for this post. The gist is that they're each connected to a mycelium travel net and, once you explore your first, you'll recognize that a strange pillar in the hub was a Shaper Dungeon entrance all along, preventing you from having to retread old ground.

Takeaway: fast travel is a solid idea. I'm less interested in an unchanging map. Maybe have an optional fast travel unlock available at the entrance to each of my three layers?

Your depth rolls are smaller

1d6 + Depth instead of 1d20. My gut reaction to this was that a smaller die would result in a lot more repeated locations, so I wrote a quick script to test this out. The following graphs are the likelihood of encountering a location at least once, going straight down from depths 0-34, across 10000 tests.

ynnOdds

stygOdds

downOdds

I wasn't actually expecting this! Maybe my gut health needs work. The Downrooted results are skewed a bit because of unique locations, which makes sense, but otherwise the distribution is similar to Ynn's. These graphs also call attention to a funny detail: in these vast, unknowable environments, the rarest locations are actually the shallowest ones, because your increasing depth makes it impossible to encounter them after just a few Go Deeper actions.

Another fun fact: because the Stygian Library rerolls anything over 35 on 1d20+1d12+2, you get a nice little curve. According to this graph, the most likely locations to hit on a straight shot to depth 34 are the Phantom Databanks, the Spider Trapdoor, and the Ossuary. Sorry, Printing Machine, you'll get 'em next time.

Takeaway: is a smaller depth die actually the way to go??? Maybe you'll encounter similar stuff more often if you muck around at the same depth, but is that really that big a deal? Or is it a good excuse to add more flavor? I can't tell if I'm cooking with this or if I need to be kicked out of the kitchen.

I think as far as pure vibes go, this method is a good way to run a longer journey with slowly encroaching weirdness. You can tightly control your location/detail tables to make sure you're rolling milk before meat and not going too crazy, too early. But, ugh, I also want that possibility because it's more dreamlike and strange!!

There's a climax

Really there's two climaxes: one is at 36+ on the Location table, the Bleeding Heart. This is where the various forest NPC motivations are centered, and the character stuck inside is responsible for the forest's continued existence. One way or another, dealing with her is probably going to resolve the stories of Brimton and the woods. There's also the Nadir, the only non-procedural dungeon in the document, but it's still WIP so I won't yap about it.

Summing Up

That's not everything worth talking about with this module, but imo the rest is outside the scope of this post. Everything here combines to evoke a certain image: small, increasingly deep trips into the forest, slowly pushing forward, teleporting back to town when necessary, always heading towards the climactic encounter at the heart of the woods.

That... doesn't sound too different from what I want! It's got me thinking about what I can adjust from my last post, and here's what I've come up with. My original idea for having layers overlap on the depth table looked like this:

prototype

What I'm considering instead is this little adjustment:

proto2

With this, like, reach-around setup, explorers have a choice: enter a new layer at Depth 10 (and start from Depth 0 on a new location table), or push deeper into their current layer. Why? Better loot, helping out NPCs, setting up some kind of shortcut from Depth 10 to the surface (getting public transit up and running?), whatever. This feels like it scratches the itch that I'm searching for - the idea that a layer can both border another and also extend past it into infinity. I think ring is no longer the right term for what I'm thinking visually, but I'm struggling to find a better one. Comet, maybe?

something like this?

Either way, using this method means I can maybe get away with not adding a new move at all, since the image I wanted to evoke could be better represented by this table alone. Makes me think: what if a possible location option for the back half of the table is just The Entrance? The next point on the infinite line where the spot the players' base camp is repeated, but with subtle differences?

as a visual aid here's a pivotal scene from famously comprehensible 2014 film Coherence

Modules I Have Read But Am Not Talking About In-Depth

The Mausoleum of Memory by Unenthuser. This was an attempt to do a depthcrawl in a mini-zine - the whole thing fits on two pages. I think it's a little too small for the structure to shine, but still a worthwhile attempt.

The Cyclopean Organ by Glass Bird Games. This one's a funnel written for Cairn. There were enough overlaps between this and Downrooted that I didn't feel the need to dig in here. It's got some good stuff, but I'm not sure how much I like a procgen funnel - IMO the fun of the format really comes from bespoke gruesome deathtraps (I feel similarly about FIST's Hazard Function).

Modules I Have Not Read But Are Worth Mentioning

Nova's Hell On Rev-X, Dice Goblin's Deep Delve, Joseph R. Lewis' Undying Sea, Mothership's Hull Breach, and Cloud Crawl by AwkwardTurtle (for CBR+PNK). All look great, just not in the budget right now. My impression of the Undying Sea is that it has a similar hub structure to Downrooted, which seems cool, and I love the idea of sailing to strange, misty islands as a depthcrawl.

Too Dark by KNUCKLEPUNK GAMES, Caverns of Caarn by Lord Lint, and Yet Another Labyrinth - Troika! by Cdw0. These are all free, but like a fool I searched for games on itch tagged depthcrawl rather than games with depthcrawl in the description; I only saw them while finishing up here and tbh at this point would rather just send the post and move on to Actually Making Something. Whoops!!

Labyrinth: The Adventure Game by River Horse. This one's interesting. Everything I've seen about it comes from several posts of effuse praise from Dwiz. It's not styled strictly as a depthcrawl, but it shares a few similarities. You get a big bespoke d100 table and roll 1d6 to move along it, incrementing your depth by the result. If you "solve" whatever room you land in, it becomes your new checkpoint, otherwise you reroll from the previous depth. Rinse and repeat. I really like this structure on the surface, and if I weren't so excited about the random Location/Detail combinations I'd probably be emulating it instead of a more typical depthcrawl. A design series for another time? Maze Mechanics when??

sorry but the rest of this post is OFF LIMITS until you listen to my fav song from the movie

What's Next?

tamara, by karina puente

Let's see that roadmap!

Next part is where this gets really fun. My plan is to solidify everything I've been waffling on and lay out the (hopefully) final structure, plus an outline of vibes & initial ideas for each layer. See you soon!