Depthcrawl Design, pt 4 - Death and the Comet

29 August 2024

Note: this post is part of a series! Check out the other entries here: 1 2 3

Contents

Intro

Depthcrawls!

esmeralda, by karina puente

Following my last post, I'm going to be laying down the bedrock for my own depthcrawl. My plan is to synthesize what I've learned into a coherent whole while noting vibes / themes I want to touch on in the future. Unfortunately I still haven't worked out a good name for the City oops!! I've been mulling over the comet idea I was cooking with last post, so I'll use that as a placeholder for now. Let's dive in.

The Comet

just kinda feeling the energy of this rn

"Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I will have to devise other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

- Borges and I, by Jorge Luis Borges

They say: the Comet is the center of the universe, or at least our universe. They say infinities drape its core like soft webbing. It wasn't built (they say) but birthed fully formed from the feverish soul of civilization. They say we live inside a dream, but what does that mean? Some say it's a rising tide that will one day claim us all; others say it already has, and our lives are dying fragments in the Comet's memory. They say it's shaped like a city, and that's about all we really know. So they say.

Layout

comet

Two infinite layers wrapped around a dense, stagnant nucleus. The Sprawl and the City fight eternal, borders grinding like rusty gears, leaving jagged semi-urban splinters where they meet; they crash around the Manor and extend forever in its wake. Yesterday's housing litters the endless horizon.

Getting There

zora, by matt kish

Ride the Expatriate's Byway! Here's the ritual: take any land vehicle. Jerry rig her so you can refuel while she's still running. On any given midnight, put her on the road, face the East, start driving and don't you dare stop. The third time the sun rises, it'll be over the Comet.

The type of vessel doesn't matter - the ritual works for whatever fits your cultural definition of "vehicle". The Byway's been taken by carriage, wagon, car, bus, and motorcycle. Some folks have even tried on bicycle, for all the good that did.

Nobody knows exactly when your original road becomes the Byway. Most folks are too delirious to care. They say this, though: the first sign is the bodies. Those who failed the drive don't get a second chance - their vessels hang around, perfectly preserved at the moment their vehicle stopped. See them now, hands on the wheel, eyes closed as if asleep; the lights are off and they'll never come back on. Some lie in the road with hands outstretched, awaiting their fate. Keep driving.

Why Visit?

tecla, by karina puente

Wealth, for one. Infinity cooperates strangely with ideas of value. The Comet's inhabitants, with their desire for something new in the face of forever, are prone to obsession. They tinker endlessly on odd projects that crossed the border of outsider art long ago. Trifles for them, but to us their detritus is often valuable, sometimes useful.

d6 One Man's Trash
1 A commemorative coin bearing an old woman's face. While touching it, one becomes incapable of perceiving anything except for the coin. It is their entire world.
2 A radio locked to one station - a static-filled wave of numbers shouted in the tone of a preacher trying to save your soul.
3 A blindfold covered in concentric circles. Wearing it moves your soul a half-step to the right of your body. Causes intense vertigo.
4 An unmarked CD. Consuming it causes you to experience the life of its creator in real time. Eighty years of love, lived in one instant.
5 A hand mirror reflecting your unlived lives. The image changes every time you make a decision. Any decision.
6 A small button, held in the palm. Pressing it wakes you up. If already awake, your character disappears for exactly 16 hours.

And then there's the Manor. Not infinitely expanding like the other layers, but infinitely expansive. Between its walls waits an ocean of repeating hallways. They say if you walk this infinity long enough you'll reach a core of sorts, and from this core branches tendrils to every possible world. Some zealots believe that the tendrils don't exist until they're traversed, thus following these paths will birth a new universe whole cloth. More than that, they believe they can influence these new worlds in some way, and so are driven to creation. Such is the path to godhood.

Assimilation

zoe, by matt kish

"Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him."

- Borges and I, by Jorge Luis Borges

Every traveller knows the feeling of a city sinking its fingers into your heart. One day you're just passing through, the next you're married, buying bread from a man who was already old when you first met him, wondering when the skyline became so unfamiliar. The Comet, like any city, cannot survive without its people, but with infinite space to fill it hungers harder than most.

To represent Assimilation, set up a game of Hangman on your character sheet. When an event, effect, or failed save specifies that you assimilate, roll on your current layer's table, apply the result to your character, and draw a new limb for the noose. Let's count them out: left arm, right arm, torso, left leg, right leg. Save the head for last.

When the noose is full, your character is no longer yours, their desires overwritten by a yearning to settle down in the Comet. They slip between the cracks and are gone, forever. In the moment of annihilation, narrate their final, fading thoughts, and say goodbye.

Layers

The Sprawl

deer crest ii suburban california, by christoph gielen

"To the left and right of the automobile, the city disintegrated; the firmament grew larger and the houses meant less and less and a brick kiln or a poplar grove more and more. They reached their miserable destination: a final alley of rose-colored mud walls which in some way seemed to reflect the disordered setting of the sun."

- Death and the Compass, by Jorge Luis Borges

Suburban neighborhoods spiraling fractal-like away from the Comet's heart. Each district is only nominally different; they all share several key qualities: pristine architecture, manicured lawns, expensive water features, and a healthy disdain for outsiders.

I imagine this layer to play the most like a "standard" depthcrawl. The main faction is the Homeowners, nuclear communities easy to anger if you break their constrictive rules.

Sprawl Moods

untitled iii arizona, by christoph gielen

These are mostly just off-the-dome ideas that I think can convey the tone of this layer while still being gameable or mechanically interesting.

consider the (in)famously bourgeois CVS from Madison, Mississippi

Sprawl Assimilations

d6 Effect
1 Your clothes no longer wrinkle.
2 Decorative piercings seal up. Any tattoos slough off the skin and sizzle on the asphalt.
3 You develop a sudden, powerful addiction to red wine.
4 You may only speak in a jovial "howdy, neighbor!" type voice.
5 You are psychologically compelled to report any crimes (real or imagined) that you see.
6 A spouse and 2.5 children (you choose which half) emerge from a nearby house and follow you from a distance.

The City

leandra, by karina puente

"I emerged into a kind of small plaza — a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself."

- The Immortal, by Jorge Luis Borges

Ecelectic, maddening, a surreal cultural mishmosh. The City delights in cannibalization of the self, repurposing abandoned buildings and old trends for bizarre new uses. What else is there to do for fun in an infinite world? Its citizens swarm the streets like termites. To them, a fresh idea is as necessary as breath itself.

I'd like for the City to play higher-energy than the Sprawl. My goal is for it to be less of a hostile environment and more overwhelming, alien, difficult to navigate, threatening not because it hates you but because you just can't learn the steps to its dance. Honestly, the hard part will be doing this without just recreating Electric Bastionland.

City Moods

from @swyatozzarra on twitter

City Assimilations

d6 Effect
1 A company ID card appears in your pocket. Locals ask: shouldn't you be at work?
2 You're learning the language. Invent 1d6 slang terms to pepper into your speech - these endear you to city folk and enrage Suburbanites.
3 Your clothing (and home wardrobe) is radically altered to fit the local fashion. Describe it!
4 A candid photo of you with the party goes viral. Strangers flock while you're in public.
5 Your mental map is rewritten. When going deeper, you may add 1 extra depth to your descent at the cost of 1 new assimilation per use.
6 Your hand clasps around something - a key. Inserting in any door always opens into a dingy apartment. Technically safe but comes with 2d6 annoying roommates who steal anything left unprotected.

The Manor

the house on ash tree lane, by amindele

"The diffusion of light guided him to a window. He opened it: a round, yellow moon outlined two blinded fountains in the melancholy garden. Lonnrot explored the house. He traveled through antechambers and galleries to emerge upon duplicate patios; several times he emerged upon the same patio. He ascended dust-covered stairways and came out into circular antechambers; he was infinitely reflected in opposing mirrors; he grew weary of opening or half-opening windows which revealed the same desolate garden outside, from various heights and various angles; inside, the furniture was wrapped in yellow covers and the chandeliers bound up with cretonne. A bedroom detained him; in the bedroom, a single rose in a porcelain vase -- at the first touch the ancient petals fell apart. On the second floor, on the top storey, the house seemed to be infinite and growing. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude."

- Death and the Compass, by Jorge Luis Borges

The center of it all. Cold, repetitive, stagnant, shadows moving around every corner. I'd like for this one to play more tense than the other sections - violence ideally won't be an option at all. I adore the above quote, it feels like the transition point between dream and nightmare. Lonnrot's ultimate fate is hiding just barely out of sight. It's stressful. Can I capture that energy? Here's hoping!

i'm also drawn to the lofi delirium in thecatamites' work

Manor Moods

Manor Assimilations

d6 Effect
1 Your right side is now the perfect mirror of your left. Freckles, birthmarks, scars, extra limbs, internal organs, stomach contents - all are mirrored in one indescribable instant. And yet you live.
2 A stooped servant delivers a letter. Inside is one word - your new name (what is it?). All IDs, certificates, contracts, friends, and family update to reflect it. You only remember the original in dreams.
3 Your facial features become unmoored. Keeping your eyes, nose, etc. in line requires pushing & holding them in place.
4 You no longer sleep. Each night at midnight you die and are revived 8 hours later. Visions of the afterlife hang around like breath on the neck.
5 Your reflection becomes... something else. Around broken mirrors, your reflection attempts to crawl out and replace you.
6 A knife blossoms from your ribcage - you die. Your killer absorbs your spirit and burdens, supplanting their own; you control them now. Who were they? What flickering memory of theirs still lives on?

What's Next?

zora, by karina puente

Roadmap!

(tell me why I called the Manor a ring when it's not even surrounding anything. that shit's just a circle!!)

It feels good to actually start the process of Doing This Thing. Even if this is mostly just an outline before the hard part, I'm happy to have moved on from the pure theorycraft aspect of this series. Next post is going to cover the Sprawl (which I guess is going to be a ton of content? like a whole ass crawl by itself?) BUT per Josh McCroo's twitter there's gonna be a game jam for His Majesty the Worm in September. I had a lot of fun making a tarot spread to seed dungeons for that game, so I'd like to revisit that and cook something up for the jam. Just gives this series more time to percolate. Either way, I'll see you when I see you. Take care!