I love depth crawls. I used this mechanism for a horror journaling game, and it worked great to allow me to make the prompts for early in the story be relatively mundane and then get progressively more unnatural as the story unfolds. I used a “Stress Level” to track the “depth” on the prompt table that the player rolls for events.
Iko has a few nice ones for Skyrealms: The return of the She Goddess, an ecological heat-crawl and Stranded in the Skull, a depth crawl. Both of them fit one single postcard.
Inspired by him I also made one for Pine Shallows. Grasp of the Understory, is a depth crawl into a weird hidden pocket realm, to rescue a missing teacher of the player characters.
Fantastic read! I've been hooked on depth crawls since the Stygian Library - thanks for sharing stuff I didn't know about and adding to my reading queue.
I love depth crawls. I used this mechanism for a horror journaling game, and it worked great to allow me to make the prompts for early in the story be relatively mundane and then get progressively more unnatural as the story unfolds. I used a “Stress Level” to track the “depth” on the prompt table that the player rolls for events.
That's cool! I hadn't considered abstract concepts like "stress" vs. more physical ones like depth, height, or temperature. I like it!
Iko has a few nice ones for Skyrealms: The return of the She Goddess, an ecological heat-crawl and Stranded in the Skull, a depth crawl. Both of them fit one single postcard.
https://the-lost-bay.itch.io/skyrealms
Inspired by him I also made one for Pine Shallows. Grasp of the Understory, is a depth crawl into a weird hidden pocket realm, to rescue a missing teacher of the player characters.
I love the idea of "an ecological heat-crawl"! Thanks for sharing!
Fantastic read! I've been hooked on depth crawls since the Stygian Library - thanks for sharing stuff I didn't know about and adding to my reading queue.
Thank you!
The Vast on the Dark’s Pillars and Ruins procedures are so rich…
You might also know https://seedling.itch.io/procedures-to-discover-the-path-ahead which I can’t help but mention everywhere because its “journey” increment is like a depth mechanism that generates believable hexcrawls.
I hadn't seen that before! I'll try to check it out. Thank you!