Down Crawl

Downcrawl is a system to help gamemasters run randomly generated, open-ended adventures in a weird and fantastical underworld called The Deep, Deep Down: a place so far from the surface that the sun and sky are only legends, and so vast that no bounds can be placed on its dimensions or contents.

Compatible with any fantasy roleplaying system, Downcrawl contains rules for taking dangerous journeys through unmapped places, tables of fungi with curious effects, procedures for GMs to generate strange new peoples, places, and encounters, and tips for running a satisfying, spontaneous campaign when your players might explore in any of six directions. Oh, and huge intelligent spiders who eat faces. Watch out for those.

Downcrawl Features:

• Gives GMs tools to create player-driven hexcrawls that maintain a sense of wonder and narrative momentum

• Roll dice to generate weird, story-rich Volumes for players to explore, or grab some pre-generated ones:
- Vertical city Bone Falls, where no one can stay for long
- Deepness Bastion, decadant knights at the gate of a long-forgotten portal to evil
- ...and more

• Each volume contains strange new intelligent creatures, and there's a generator (and examples) for those too:
- The Chitter, creepy but polite insectoid constructs
- Pesh, rock-folk whose hands can shape stone like clay
- Lime Lillen, delicate creatures who guide the painfully slow formation of stalactite art
- ...and more

• A Random Encounter generator that focuses on strange situations rather than yet another monster

• Generate thousands of possible underground terrains with a combinatorial generator

• A full Journey system for underground expeditions

• Rules put the focus of rolls on Success or Complications, rather than Success or Failure

• Learn to forage for fungi and enjoy their many curious effects, or seek out a Fungal Druggist to get a more potent variety, with only a small chance of all-consuming addiction

• And tons more tips and tools for GMs on running a campaign in an infinite world where languages, races, money, and maps are always changing