Time to Crawl.

How I run my pointcrawl dungeons.

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We’ve looked at why I love pointcrawl dungeons, and the bones of how I prep one (well most of it, a little bit more on that today).

This week, how do I run one? First though, a project I’m part of just launched...

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Oddity Press has launched Grimwild on BackerKit. It takes classic fantasy gaming and merges it with the best of modern game design to date. I helped with some design review for the system and I’m even writing the two adventure modules that are part of the campaign, Gaelenvale and Nevermore. Check it out now!

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How do we crawl?

I use a procedure I released for free a little while back, MurkyTime. This has most of the details, I just mould it around the dungeon being a pointcrawl.

Here’s the important points. A turn is 10 minutes (as per usual dungeon crawling convention). In a turn, the party can take an action. Examples:

• Move along one connection. I’m not thinking about specific distance here, all I care about is the players choosing to go from A to B.

• Or search a ‘normal’ sized room (an unfilled box).

• Or get a simple locked door open (a check is used to see if the party can do this without spending a turn). Hard locks require a success.

If I think an action should take more than one turn, I tell players the turn cost and they can make a judgement. ‘Large’ rooms, for example, take 3 turns to search (stolen from Mothership’s Gradient Descent). If a connection is long, I might have it cost more than one turn.

I describe rooms and highlight the features I’ve recorded in my key (a specific type of note I keep, see last week’s newsletter). Sometimes I won’t disclose this information if it makes sense that characters would have no idea about a feature of the room. ~Traps are a funny business. We should talk about those some time~

Rolling for encounters

The party make an encounter check every three turns.

According to MurkyTime, rolling 6+ is an encounter. Why 6+? Because I represent levels of danger with different sized dice. Here’s what I do for this map:

The chance of encounter increases as we ascend the levels of this map. For each physical level upwards, the encounter die steps up, d6 → d8 → d10 → d12 → d20. More dangerous zones or situations require a bigger die with a higher chance of encounter.

If an encounter is rolled, the same die is rolled again on the encounter table ↓.

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Encounter table

An encounter table is just a table of events. You roll on it to determine what happens when the players roll an encounter. It’s there to keep the pressure on the players, but also to provide them with emerging opportunities. They look like this one from Mothership’s fantastic module Dead Planet:

Encounter table from Mothership’s Dead Planet.

I prep an encounter table with entries equal to the largest encounter die - if the largest encounter die I have in the dungeon is a d10, I make a table with 10 entries.

You’ll notice the entries in the example above from Mothership’s Dead Planet are specific. My entries are non-specific e.g. 1d6 weak creatures, so the entries are re-usable if players prevail. When the encounter table is in-action, I use the entry to improvise a suitable event/creature, tailoring it to the situation.

It’s easy for these entries to default to combat, which can be boring. Alternatives could be ‘NPC offers help’, or horror-themed entries like ‘hallucinations’.

I order tables so that lower entries are less dangerous and higher ones are nastier. This way the worst possibilities are ‘gated’ behind the highest encounter die. The necromancer doesn’t come at you within 6 turns on the first level. I also order tables alternating between open threats and less obvious situations. This avoids things getting repetitive.

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Done

This is the bones of it - make the pointcrawl map, key the rooms, count turns for actions, and roll encounter checks.

We could talk about how I handle resources or factions. Or about how I handle traps. Maybe another time. I’ve yabbered on enough about this pointcrawl map.

If you are looking for a nice notebook to draw pointcrawls in check out my hexbooks, notebooks designed for GMs running hexcrawls and mapping dungeons.

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Recommendations

Podcast: Actual plays aren’t something I listen to much these days, but I have been enjoying The Call. It’s a Call of Cthulhu actual play podcast that makes for easy listening. Warning: Dark themes present, not for everyone.

Blog: This short post from Sean McCoy (of Mothership) addressed the issues with publishing mega-dungeons. It’s added to the bundle of thoughts I’m having about what the scope of pre-written material should be.

RELEASE REMINDER: The Sanguine Siren - Death in Space / OSR

I launched a Death in Space scenario, The Sanguine Siren. It’s about a backwater sci-fi casino with a cheating patron. Players are tasked with identifying the cheater from a roster of shady suspects. I got to work with cartographer Jog Brogzin on this one. It’s got an OSR conversion kit as well!