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Here are a few advanced pointcrawl techniques you may find useful. Or you can ignore them entirely. Or mix-and-match them. They’re tools. Use the right ones for the job.

Some of them may be more immediately obvious in player-known pointcrawls (where the players can directly invoke them), but they can also be useful for GMs looking to interpret PC actions into a player-unknown pointcrawl.

Some of these advanced procedures include suggested mechanics. For clarity, I’ve chosen to present these as they might be used in a D&D 5^th Edition campaign, but they can be easily adapted to other RPGs by simply using the appropriate skills and difficulty numbers for your system of choice.

PATH TYPES

The paths in a pointcrawl can be differentiated by type. Examples might include:

• Roads (including further distinctions between highways/thoroughfares vs. byways/side streets)
• Tracks
• River
• Landmark chain
• Supernatural (portals, fairy paths, etc.)
• Stairs/Shafts
• Mazes

On your pointmap, these types might be indicated by color, line type (dotted, double, etc.), labels, or other iconography. They can be useful for purely descriptive purposes (“you follow the River Wyth as it wends its way through the Forlorn Hills”), but might also be distinguished by:

• Modifying travel time (this could also be done for terrain type)
• Requiring skill checks
• Requiring (or preferring) certain types of vehicles, mounts, or spells

Not every pointmap, of course, needs to feature every single type of path. Think about which paths are most useful and relevant to the pointcrawl you’re designing, and then see if there’s a way that you can make the different types of paths clear and significant.

PARALLEL PATHS: Once you have multiple types of paths in your pointcrawl, it opens the possibility of having two points connected by not just one, but two (or more) paths simultaneously. If you do this, the key thing is to make sure that the paths are distinguished by choice and not just calculation. (For example, if you have two paths and the only difference is that one is faster than the other, the PCs will always take the faster path. Just don’t bother including the other one. On the other hand, if one path is faster but you need to make a skill check to traverse it safely, you now have a meaningful choice in which path to take. Thinking About Wilderness Travel takes a more detailed look at this issue.)

HIDDEN ROUTES

A hidden route in a pointcrawl is simple a connection between two points that is not immediately obvious; i.e., the PCs have to find the route before they can use it. In a wilderness this might be illusory druid paths. In a city it might be linked teleportation circles or perhaps the sewers.

Hidden routes are often discovered as part of a scenario or while exploring a particular location (i.e., you’re looking around the crypts beneath the Cathedral and discover a tunnel heading to the Harbor). In some cases, discovering the hidden route might be as easy as making an Intelligence (Investigation) or Wisdom (Perception) check to find the route.

SHORTCUTS & SIDE ROUTES

The PCs want to move from one point to another without moving through the points between. (For example, they want to go directly to the Trollfens without first passing by the weird red rock. Or they want to go south to the Docks without passing through Shiarra’s Market.) What happens?

In some pointcrawls this might not be possible. (You can’t walk through solid rock.) In a typical wilderness it might require trailblazing (using the procedure below). In a typical, safe city, on the other hand, it usually just means getting off the major thoroughfares and circling around on side streets, and probably just happens automatically.

SIMPLE SIDE ROUTES:

• Determine an appropriate base time. (If they’re trying to go the long way around to bypass something, you can probably set this to whatever the travel time would have been going the normal way. If they’re trying to save time by using an unorthodox shortcut, eyeball the best case scenario.)
• Make a random encounter check.
• Make an appropriate skill check. (This is probably a Wisdom-based check. Perhaps Wisdom (Stealth) if their goal is to avoid attention, or Wisdom (Survival) if they’re trying to cross a trackless waste.)
• If the check is successful, they arrive at their intended location.
• If the check is a failure, then they’re lost and will need to make another check. If they were trying to avoid trouble, the trouble finds them. Either way, they’ll need to repeat the random encounter check and the skill check until they succeed.

TRAILBLAZING

Trailblazing reduces the party’s speed by one-half (adjust the base time of the journey appropriately), but also marks an efficient trail through the wilderness with some form of signs — paint, simple carvings, cloth flags, etc. Once blazed, a trail is effectively added to the pointmap.

Note: If the strata you’re using for your pointcrawl is a wilderness hexcrawl map, you can alternatively use the hexcrawl trailblazing mechanics to create these new trails.

HIDDEN SIGNS: The signs of a trail can be followed by any creature. When blazing a trail, however, the character making the signs can attempt a Wisdom (Stealth) check to disguise them so that they can only be noticed or found with an opposed Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation) check.

You don’t need to make a check to follow your own hidden signs (or the hidden signs of a trail you’ve followed before). Those who are aware of the trail’s existence but who have not followed it before gain advantage on their skill check to follow it.

OPTIONAL RULE – OLD TRAILS: Most trail signs are impermanent and likely to decay over time. There is a 1 in 6 chance per session that a trail will decay from good repair to weather worn; from weather worn to poor repair; or from poor repair to no longer existing.

Someone traveling along a weather worn trail can restore it to good repair as long as they are not traveling at fast pace. Trails in poor repair require someone to travel along them at the trailblazing travel pace to restore it to good repair.

Note: You might use these same guidelines for similar trails on your original pointmap. But it can be assumed that any trails in regular use — whether by the PCs or otherwise — either won’t decay or won’t decay past poor repair.

TRAVEL PACE

You can use D&D 5^th Edition travel pace in a pointcrawl fairly easily. I recommend simplifying/fudging the normal travel distances:

• Slow Pace: 1 interval per watch
• Normal Pace: 2 intervals per watch
• Fast Pace: 3 intervals per watch

(You can replace “watch” with whatever timespan is most useful for the pointcrawl.)

ALTERNATIVE 1: Indicate the connection length in standard intervals, but then separately indicate interval duration for normal, slow (¾), and fast (x1.5) travel paces.

You may also want to reduce the chance of a random encounter for fast travel paces. (Slow travel paces would theoretically result in more checks, but in 5^th Edition this is usually cancelled out by the reduced encounter chance due to the extra caution being taken.)

ALTERNATIVE 2: Reference the pointcrawl’s strata and calculate the actual distance (and terrain modifiers). Then simply use the standard rules for travel pace to calculate time, making encounter checks per watch. (The disadvantage here is that you’re adding a lot of unnecessary complexity to your pointcrawl procedure.)

ADDENDUM
Depthcrawls

Pointcrawls are a pretty straightforward scenario structure: You create a map with locations which are connected with paths, forming a node map. If you want to get more clinical in your descriptions, you can also refer to the locations as points (hence the first half of the name) and the paths as connectors. During play, PCs in a location can choose one of the paths connected to that location and travel along it to another location. They can thus crawl (there’s the other half of the name) through the pointmap.

The concept of the pointcrawl was first formalized by Chris Kutalik on his Hill Cantons blog in 2014, although antecedents can be found. For example, Dragons of Hope, the third Dragonlance Chronicles module, features a proto-pointcrawl of linked regions. Even the famous, multicolored tube map of the London Underground first designed by Harry Beck (and seen above) displays similar properties.

THE MANY-HEADED POINT

What makes the pointcrawl so versatile as a scenario structure is that each “point” can be literally any point of interest. It might be extremely specific, like “that strange red rock outside of town.” Or it could be very large, like “the city of Warnock” or “the Kingdom of Catalac.” The structure can even be adapted to other milieus entirely, with points like “the VR server of Thunderdome, MLC.”

The structure is quite flexible, with points of different “scale” easily coexisting. (For example, “that strange red rock outside of town” and “the city of Warnock” could easily both appear on the same pointmap.) It can also be trivially fractal, with the point on one pointmap being an entirely self-contained pointcrawl in its own right.

LITERAL vs. ABSTRACT PATHS

A pointcrawl exists within a strata, and to truly understand, design, and run the pointcrawl, you need to have an understanding of that underlying reality. For example, the city of Warnock and our strange red rock aren’t just floating nebulously in a hypothetical node map: The red rock lies east of Warnock in the Forest of Arden. Or maybe it instead lies to the west on the far side of the Daggerpoint Mountains.

Understanding this will allow you to answer questions like:

• Which connections exist (and don’t exist) in the first place?
• How long does it take to travel from point to another?
• How should you describe the journey along the path?

And so forth.

The most literal application of a pointcrawl system is to model wilderness travel along a trail system (i.e., the connections between points are literally wilderness trails or roads running between those locations). These are examples of literal paths, and are almost always a player-known structure: The pointmap has a one-to-one correspondence with the game world, and the characters can see the trails or roads that they’re following.

But pointcrawls can also work with abstract paths, which seek to capture the conceptual navigation of an environment in a way that allows you to focus prep and structure play. An example of this is an urban pointcrawl, where a pointcrawl would not for example, include every single street and building in the city. Instead, the connections of an urban pointcrawl represent the way we think about traveling through a city.

This can be a bit harder to get your hands around than literal paths, so how does it actually work?

When the players indicate a navigational intention, the GM basically acts as an “interpreter” who translates that intention into the pointcrawl system, uses the pointcrawl system to resolve it, and then describes the outcome to the players in terms of the fiction.

This works because we naturally think of navigating a city in broad terms. “We need to head west to Lyndale Avenue and then take that south into Edina.” What was the exact route we took to get to Lyndale? Did we take 36^th or 38^th or 42^nd or 46^th? We don’t really care. Particularly in a pre-GPS era, navigation was even more likely to funnel into landmarks and major thoroughfares: Cross the river at such-and-such bridge, head east to the cathedral, and then cut south through Littlehut… and so forth.

The points of the pointcrawl match the mental model we use to navigate through a city.

For example, consider this map of the hellish city of Elturel from the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus:

You can see how this navigation works most clearly at Torm’s Bridges (Area 9). Here the conceptual and literal geographical navigation of the city are basically unified; the funnel effect is as literal as possible: If you want to cross the gorge between the western and eastern halves of the city, you’re going to have to cross those bridges.

But this conceptually remains true even when the literal geographical funnel is not so precise: If the PCs decide to head south Area 1, for example, they’re going to pass through Shiarra’s Market (Area 2). Yes, it’s technically possible to take a different route that narrowly avoids the market, but in the absence of intentionality the point-map represents the general “flow” of the city.

You can also see from this example how literal and abstract paths can coexist in the same pointmap: Torm’s Bridges are quite literal; “you’ll pass through Shiarra’s Market on your way to the Docks” is more abstract. The same thing could hold true in our hypothetical wilderness pointcrawl from before (“you can follow all these literal roads, but if you try to cut through the Forest of Arden you’ll bump into the weird red rock”).

So you can really think of this as more of a spectrum options than a hard choice.

EXPLORATION vs. ROUTE-PLANNING

Another finesse to consider here is whether the PCs are exploring the pointmap (i.e., they don’t know what points are available and/or what paths they can take until they discover them) or if they have some sort of map or comparable knowledge which allows them to plan their journeys.

This may or may not be related to whether or not the pointcrawl is a player-known structure. (For example, the PCs might have a diegetic map of Elturel even if the players don’t know that the GM is using a pointcrawl.) Hybrid approaches are also quite common, with some routes or points being known while others remain secrets to be discovered. And, of course, an exploration model will naturally turn into route-planning as the PCs make their discoveries and create their own maps.

THINGS YOU’RE LIKELY TO SAY

Things you’re likely to say while running a pointcrawl include:

• “Crossing Waterloo Bridge, you head south past the London Eye to Lambeth Palace.” (The PCs are leaving a vampire den somewhere near Covent Garden. Waterloo Bridge, the London Eye, and Lambeth Palace are all locations on the pointmap. In this case, the players already have some familiarity — or perhaps a great deal of familiarity — with the city, recognizing these locations without the GM needing to
• “Following the bonsai turtles, you pass through an arch in the hedgerow and find yourselves standing at the top of an ancient amphitheater. Benches of worn stone descend to a circular area where three of the bonsai turtles have already gathered. On the far side of the amphitheater you can see two other arches like the one you’ve just come through, leading to other paths through the Maze.” (The amphitheater is a location the PCs have just discovered. The GM is indicating the existence of two other paths, leading to other locations, that the PCs could follow.)
• “You’ve been following the deer path for a couple of hours when Lavid hears the distinctive hooting call of the local goblin tribe. It sounds like they’re coming down the path from the opposite direction.” (The PCs are currently traveling along a connection and a random encounter has been triggered.)
• “You take Nephranter’s Street through the Court of the White Bull and then south to the Caravan Court.” (The nodes here are the Court of the White Bull and Caravan Court. “Nephranter Street” is a way of contextualizing the journey; it’s pulled from the strata of the Waterdeep city map to describe the abstract path. The GM could just as easily say “…passing through the bustling crowds of River Street before reaching Caravan Court” or simply “…you cross the Trade Ward to Caravan Court.”)
• “You’ve reached the weird red rock. Do you want to head north towards the Trollfens or south towards the Black Bog?” (The weird red rock, Trollfens, and Black Bog are obviously all points which the PCs are familiar with.)

Although the examples vary, in each case the basic structure of connection-point-connection-point becomes a comfortable framework for the GM to describe the journey, and for the players to understand it and make choices during it.

BASIC POINTCRAWL PROCEDURES

The basic procedures for a pointcrawl are very simple.

STEP 1 – FOLLOW A PATH. The PCs choose one of the paths connected to their current point and follow it.

Time: The length of time it takes to follow a path may be standardized for an entire pointcrawl. (For example, you may assume it always takes 10-15 minutes to move from point to another in an urban setting.) Alternatively, different connections may take different amounts of time. If so, this can be indicated directly on the map using either small numbers or dots (with each dot representing one standard interval of time). In setting these times, you’ll most likely be taking the strata of the pointcrawl into account (e.g., traveling one mile down an open road will take less time than traveling ten miles through the tangled bracken of a wild forest).

STEP 2 – RANDOM ENCOUNTER. Check for a random encounter.

Procedure: Any number of random encounter procedures could be employed here. I discuss these options in more detail in Part 5 of the 5E Hexcrawls series. If you are using standard time intervals for your connections, you might consider making one check per interval.

STEP 3 – ARRIVAL. The PCs arrive at the next point.

If the PCs are in a point on the pointmap, you can simply follow this procedure. If for some reason they’ve slipped “off” the pointmap, simply funnel them logically into the pointmap and continue from there. (You might be able to assume they’re “at” the nearest point on the map; e.g., they may not be at the cathedral, but they’re close enough that they’re basically “coming from the cathedral” as far as other points are concerned. Alternatively, if you want to get all formal with it, you can think of their current location as a “temporary point” and think about how it would attach to the pointmap.)

Go to Part 2: Advanced Pointcrawl Procedures

Go to Part 1

You can run a depthcrawl using just the material above, but you may find these advanced options useful. It should be noted, however, that these options are only lightly sketched in. There are quite a few options and variations you could pursue in achieving any of these.

GETTING LOST

If the PCs become lost:

• Add d4-1 depth increments (instead of whatever the normal depth increment is).
• Generate a location at their new depth, which is unconnected to any known location.

Option: If they roll the maximum result on the d4, re-roll using a d6-1. If they roll the maximum result again, step the die result to d8-1. Repeat as necessary.

PCs could become lost by:

• Fleeing a fight
• Getting captured
• Suffering a catastrophe
• Unwilling teleportation

You might also require navigation checks when the PCs are moving between locations. On a failed check, they become lost.

PROGRESS

If the PCs are searching for something specific, you could:

• Randomly determine which location it’s in (and then the PCs can find it when they find that location); or
• Make a random check in each new location to determine if the thing they seek is there (1 in 6, 1 in 10, or whatever feels appropriate).

Alternatively, you could use a system of progress:

• Set a seeking value based on how difficult and/or distant the desired objective is.
• When the group’s progress equals the seeking value, they’ve achieved their goal.

How the group increases their progress will depend on what it is they’re seeking. Options might include:

• exploring a new location
• getting information from an NPC
• reading a relevant tome
• finding a clue

For example, in The Stygian Library, Emmy Allen includes a progress system that can be used to determine when the PCs have successfully found the information they seek within the library.

PCs might also lose progress by:

• being lied to
• becoming lost
• having information or vital artifacts destroyed

What does “progress” actually represent?

One option is that it’s entirely a matter of pacing: There’s just a point where you finally stumble onto the thing you’ve been looking for.

Alternatively, it can represent a breadcrumb trail: A says they think B might know something, but when the PCs get there B is dead (perhaps leaving a documentary clue or maybe you need to hunt down their phantom) or missing (solve their disappearance) or doesn’t know (“…but you know who might?”) or has reportedly gone to location C (“let’s follow them!”).

In practice, it’s likely that the players will provide their own breadcrumb trail by coming up with some clever idea (or not so clever idea) for how they can pursue their goal.

GETTING DIRECTIONS

One weakness of a procedural generation system like a depthcrawl is that it becomes difficult to provide directions. If they’re exploring some unknown land and you run into a friendly native, it would be perfectly natural for the PCs to ask a question like, “Where’s the Ebon Bindery?”

But in a depthcrawl you don’t actually know where the Ebon Bindery is until you’ve randomly generated it, so how can you respond to the perfectly natural question?

Obviously one option is to stonewall: Nobody ever knows where anything is. But this is unsatisfying for any number of reasons (it breaks the suspension of disbelief, it negates meaningful choice, etc.).

Another option is to use progress (see above): Simply say, “The old man gives you directions to the Ebon Bindery,” and set a seeking value. When the PCs follow the directions, they gain progress.

An alternative would be to pregenerate the pointcrawl map between the PCs’ current location and their desired location. You could do that by just randomly rolling until the Ebon Bindery turns up, but it may be more effective to just arbitrarily decide how far away the Ebon Bindery is (or roll 1d6+2 or something like to randomly determine it) and then simply generate the requisite points between here and there. (This is more time consuming, but has the advantage that you can now tell the players what the actual directions are: “You need to head south past the tree bearing Jarcani runes, then turn southeast until you reach the Crimson River…” And so forth.)

REPEATED LOCATIONS

When you re-roll a location that you’ve previously rolled (and placed), what should happen? Broadly speaking, there are two options.

It’s the same location, in which case you draw a path from the PCs’ current location back to the previously visited location. They’ve ended up going in a circle.

It’s a similar, but different location. Roll a new detail and event to customize the new location.

Depending on the situation, you might:

• Always do one or the other. (Note, however, that never having the pointcrawl map loop back on itself will result in a less interesting and perhaps even frustrating map.)
• Arbitrarily choose based on what makes the most sense.
• Randomly determine. (Perhaps roll 1d6; 1-4 means it’s the same location, 5-6 means it’s a new location. Or the other way around.)

Whatever method you use might also vary depending on the type of location. (There’s only one Crystal Grotto in the Forest of Doom, so once you’ve generated it, all future instances are a path back to the same Crystal Grotto. On the other hand, there’s any number of Ancient Trees to be found.)

CHART A COURSE

Let’s say that the PCs want to go back to a known location but NOT by the route they know. (Maybe the way is blocked by goblin cannibals or a volcanic explosion has wiped out the road they took. Whatever.) To accommodate this, you might add a GO AROUND move:

• Make a navigation check. On a failure, treat this as a Go Deeper move instead. (They cannot find their target location.)
• On a success, move the group’s depth one depth increment closer to their target location.
• If their current depth equals their target depth, they’ve found a path to that location.
• If not, make a depth check on the Location table, a depth check on the Details table, and roll for an Event.
• Make an encounter check.

PCs who are lost should not be allowed to Go Around until they have oriented themselves.

RETURNING TO THE DEPTHCRAWL

If the PCs leave the depthcrawl and later return, how should that be handled?

TABULA RASA: In both The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, Emmy Allen wipes the slate clean. The previously generated map is discarded and you start again from the beginning. These are strange, feyish, and ever-shifting realms, and even your point of entry may not take you to the same place you arrived last time.

PERSISTENT MAP: The other extreme, of course, is to simply not do that. If you leave the Underdark, but then choose to return, the pointcrawl map you’ve generated (and the navigational knowledge the PCs have gleaned) persists.

Of course, if you enter the Underdark or the Venom Abyss from a different location, then it would be perfectly appropriate to begin generating a new pointcrawl map using the same depthcrawl generator. (An interesting question in this case would be whether or not it’s possible to link this new pointcrawl map with the older pointcrawl map. You might take some guidance from “Repeated Locations,” above, but it will also depend on exactly what and where these two entrances are.)

EVER-SHIFTING WAYS: If you want to capture feyish uncertainty or fracturing reality without a complete tabula rasa, you might consider making the paths between locations uncertain. For example, each time the PCs revisit a path there could be a 1 in 6 chance that the path no longer exists, causing them to become either lost or simply stumbling into a different location than the one they expected.

For a truly chaotic landscape, this check might be made every time they revisit a path (even on the same journey). For something subtler, perhaps you check the paths only between expeditions.

CONCLUSION

I’ve mentioned them several times already, but in conclusion I’d like to note that, if you’d like to see what a fully fledged depthcrawl looks like in all its glory, you should check out Emmy Allen’s The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. They were the first and, as far as I can tell, they remain the best exemplars of the form.

The concept of the depthcrawl was created by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen for The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. It’s a method for procedurally generating exploration-oriented pointcrawls with a strong sense of progression into a vast, unknowable domain. Allen, in particular, uses the concept to great effect in creating feyish, non-liminal spaces, but I think it can be put to good effect in almost any number of ways.

WHAT YOU PREP

To create a depthcrawl generator, you need to prep:

• Locations
• Details
• Events
• Encounters

Each of these will be listed on separate random generation tables. The size of these tables, the number of entries appearing on them, and the organization of those entries will depend on both the desired scope of your depthcrawl and the specific depthcrawl procedure you set up (see below). You may also find it useful to create additional procedural generation tools — for example, The Stygian Library has a table of random tomes — but these are not strictly necessary and will depend on the particulars of your scenario.

LOCATIONS are the core element of each point in your pointcrawl. You can go very generic with these, perhaps offering nothing more than a label or a few words of description (e.g., “grove,” “stream,” etc.). But I think you’ll have better results if you provide at least some degree of specificity. A simple example might be something like this:

AN ANCIENT TREE

A tree at least two or three times larger than those which surround it. Its bark is intricately carved with arcane runes which glow blue during the day and crimson red at night. Close inspection reveals that several of these runes have been marred, rendering them unreadable.

But even higher levels of detail are certainly possible, perhaps ranging all the way up to providing a small map of a dungeon, cave, or building.

DETAILS either add to or somehow twist the nature of locations. These might be individual elements (e.g., a lamp-post or Jarcani runes) or they could be broadly thematic (e.g., lurid light or clockwork parts), with the former generally being additions to the scene and the latter usually altering it.

For example, if you combined “abandoned mansion” with “lamp-post,” that probably means that there’s a lamp-post at the mansion — perhaps quite naturally in front of it; or perhaps oddly standing in the middle of the dining room. On the other hand, “clockwork parts” might transform a “forest grove” into a technomantic marvel of mechanical trees and steampunk critters.

EVENTS are active elements that are either taking place in the location when the PCs arrive or which will happen while they are there. You generally want to avoid specificity here, instead indicating a broad type of event, so that events can be repeated again and again — transformed by their immediate circumstance — without the depthcrawl becoming repetitive.

The exception is any element of the setting which should be repetitive. For example, if there are strange crystalline pylons which float throughout the area and periodically send a pulse of light straight up into the sky… well, the arrival of a pylon is probably a good candidate for an event.

Another trick is to use an event to trigger specificity from a different random generator, such as your encounter tables. For example:

TWO FACTIONS ENGAGE

Roll twice on the Encounter Table to determine which creatures are present. Then roll on the Reaction Table to determine what their current relationship is (friendly, uncertain, or hostile).

Or:

MAGICAL GATE OPENS

Roll a random Location to which the gate leads. On a roll of 1, it instead operates as a sphere of annihilation.

ENCOUNTERS are a standard check and table for wandering monsters. You could flesh this out into a more robust generator (adding a reaction check, % lair, or other such things that seem appropriate), but you really want these to be procedural encounters, not designed encounters. You want to be able to inject these denizens freely into any number of situations.

CREATING LOCATIONS

The magic at the core of the depthcrawl is taking a location, detail, event, and (optionally) an encounter and weaving them together to create something unique. So if you prep twenty locations, twenty details, and twenty events, you don’t end up with twenty options, you end up with eight thousand options.

And really it’s even more than that because there are lots of different ways to interpret each combination of elements.

For example, let’s say you roll up:

• Location: Ancient Tree
• Detail: Clockwork Parts
• Event: Magic Gate Opens

You might decide that the interior of the tree is laced with strange clockwork parts (which you can see where a bolt of lightning split the trunk long ago) and the runes are part of the powerful technomantic construct which can be used to open a magical portal.

Or, alternatively, you might decide that a strange clockwork device has been attached to the side of the tree and is very carefully slicing out each arcane rune from its bark one at a time. They are being collected by (roll an encounter) strange warriors wearing insectile-helmets, who return via a magical portal that opens while the PCs are investigating the tree.

DEPTH

The core concept of the depthcrawl is that the rolls on these random tables are affected by depth, with the results of the checks sliding across the table based on how far the PCs have progressed into the depthcrawl.

Note: Event rolls are often not affected by depth because they typically flow depth-affected content — i.e., random encounters — into a generic event type.

Depth itself is an abstract concept, representing how far the PCs are from where they started (the entrance of a labyrinth, the interplanar gate, their base camp, the silver skein that lies on the border of the afterlife, etc.): You can think of it as literal depth beneath the earth (i.e., similar to how you descend from one level of the dungeon to the next), but that’s probably more deceptive than not. Depth in a depthcrawl could just as easily refer to how far you’ve journeyed into the Venom Abyss of Planegea, for example.

Regardless, the further you get into the depthcrawl, the larger your depth becomes.

The most basic version of a depth check is a die roll + depth. For example, 1d20 + depth or 1d8 + depth. In setting these values, you’ll want to consider how deep a typical adventuring party will go and how many entries you want to key to each table.

For example, let’s say you see a typical adventure in the Venom Abyss going to a depth of 10-15 locations. If you’re rolling 1d20 + depth, that means you’ll need to key at least 35 entries (the maximum roll on the die + the expected maximum depth of 15).

You’ll also want to think about the cap value (i.e., 35+ if you’re keying for 1d20 + 15 depth). Broadly speaking, you can either set a maximum effective depth (i.e., even if you go past depth 15, you just roll as if depth were 15) or you can have some sort of endgame result, such as:

• You arrive at Blood Mountain in the heart of the Venom Abyss.
• You have passed into the Underdark or out the far side of the forest.
• Reality itself begins to fray and break apart as you journey further into the Madlands of the Feywild.

You can also see how the group’s current depth creates a strata. If you’re rolling 1d10 + depth, for example, and you’re at depth 10, then you’ll have a “strata” of possible results from 11 to 20. Each change in depth changes the range of possible results, creating a “definition” of that strata that obviously overlaps with other depths: depths 10 and 11 are largely identical, but the difference between depth 5 and depth 10 is quite large, and the difference between depth 5 and depth 15 is complete.

Note: Hey! Couldn’t you just do a completely separate table for each individual depth so that every depth would be completely different from every other depth?

Sure! What you’re describing is actually quite similar to the dungeon level encounter tables from the original 1974 edition of D&D, but you may not find it particularly effective when used as part of a depthcrawl: Dungeon levels, for example, are filled with lots and lots of rooms, so you’ll use the level-based encounter tables repeatedly. In a depthcrawl, however, the PCs are almost always moving from one depth to another after just a single location, so you’d use all of your specialized tables only once-ish.

The other value you can play with is depth increment. Instead of increasing depth by just one point, you might instead increase it by 4 points (or 2 points or 5 points or whatever). The effect, obviously, is to more rapidly shift the group through the distinct strata of the depthcrawl. (Which can have the potentially negative result of either shortening the depthcrawl or requiring you to key much more material to handle much larger depths.)

Another technique you might consider is a depth pool. Instead of making a die roll + depth, you could instead roll a number of dice equal to the depth. For example, at depth 4 you might roll 4d6. This has the effect of rapidly increasing the average depth result while keeping lower results possible. (For example, each additional d6 of depth increases the average result by 3.5 and the maximum result by 6, but the minimum result by only 1. If you calculated a depth increment from the average of the roll, 4d6 would be equivalent to die roll + 14. But whereas die roll +14 has a minimum result of 15, the 4d6 roll obviously has a minimum result of 4.)

Note: You could mix-and-match different depth checks for different elements of the depthcrawl. For example, maybe you roll 1d20 + depth for locations, but roll 1d6 per depth for encounters, so that the location types throughout an area remain fairly constant, but the danger of encounters shifts rapidly.

RUNNING THE DEPTHCRAWL

When it comes to running the scenario, you can think of a depthcrawl as a kind of “cap system” for a pointcrawl: The core scenario structure is the pointcrawl itself. The depthcrawl is mostly added on top of that procedure in order to generate the pointcrawl map through play.

Start by creating the ENTRANCE:

• Make a depth check on the Locations (You start at Depth 0.)
• Make a depth check on the Details
• Roll on the Events

This is the location where the PCs enter the depthcrawl.

On each navigation turn, the PCs will choose one of three moves:

• Stay
• Go Deeper
• Go Back

If they STAY, they are remaining in their current location. Follow your normal procedures for that location.

• Make an encounter check.

If they GO DEEPER:

• Increase the group’s depth by one depth increment.
• Draw a path between their current location and the new location.
• Make a depth check on the Locations
• Make a depth check on the Details
• Roll on the Events
• Make an encounter check.

If they GO BACK, they travel along a path they’ve already explored to a location they’ve previously visited:

• Set the group’s depth to the established depth of the location.
• Make an encounter check.

You can choose to make this a player-known structure by telling the players that these are their three navigational options (stay, go deeper, go back), but they’re structurally broad enough that you can run the depthcrawl as a player-unknown structure by simply interpreting their navigational declarations according to the appropriate move.

(For example, if they say, “Let’s head down the river and see where it leads,” that’s Go Deeper. If they say, “Let’s search the mansion,” that’s Stay. If they say, “We should go back to the Old Mill,” that’s Go Back. Possibly multiple Go Backs, which you can resolve one at a time, depending on how many points they need to pass through to retrace their steps.)

A key thing to remember is that the depthcrawl is designed to cover a vast and enigmatic territory. In general, it should be assumed that there are any number of potential ways that PCs could enter or leave a location. The fact that they only have a binary choice (go deeper or go back) is not reflective of every location being a chokepoint; it’s that in the absence of navigational information the choice of direction is arbitrary.

As they explore, of course, they will be gaining navigational data (i.e., the paths which connection locations), and will then be able to make meaningful navigational choices.

Go to Part 2: Advanced Options

In the world of Exandria, in the city of Bazzoxan, there lies Betrayers’ Rise. Once a “dark temple instrumental to the machinations of the Betrayer Gods during the Calamity” (Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount), the Rise is a gargantuan complex worming its way into the earth; a place of vast, unexplored depths where explorers delved too deep and woke up abyssal horrors from an elder age, placing the people of Bazzoxan on the front lines of an ancient war.

As presented in the Call of the Netherdeep campaign, however, Betrayers’ Rise is a tiny little dungeon with just sixteen rooms.

They’re good rooms. Great rooms, even.

But it doesn’t quite deliver the experience promised by the lore.

THE PROBLEM

To be fair, Call of the Netherdeep knows it has a problem. The writers kind of toss out the idea that “the characters experience a particular version” of Betrayers’ Rise, and that others experience “different configurations” of the dungeon. They also provide “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” (p. 63) that can be used as inspiration to “expand” the Rise.

And this is not actually an unusual problem: You want to send the PCs into a legendary dungeon — Moria, Undermountain, Castle Blackmoor, Betrayers’ Rise — as part of a larger adventure. But these vast dungeons have dozens of levels and hundreds, possibly thousands, of rooms.

At that scale, in published adventures, page count becomes an issue. For another example of this, consider Ed Greenwood’s FRE3 Waterdeep module. Greenwood wanted to send the PCs through the well in the Yawning Portal and into Undermountain as part of this adventure, but obviously couldn’t include the entire dungeon (which usually requires hundreds of pages) in a 52-page adventure. (His solution was to create a previously unmentioned secret well in the Yawning Portal’s backroom that conveniently led directly to where the PCs needed to go.)

But even if page count or prep time weren’t important (which they obviously are), there’s also pacing to consider. Megadungeons are awesome. I love megadungeons. But it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to put Call of the Netherdeep on hold for 10 or 20 or 40 sessions while a largely unrelated dungeon crawl is happening.

So what’s the problem?

If I’m saying that you can’t do a megadungeon in Call of the Netherdeep and that you shouldn’t do a megadungeon in Call of the Netherdeep, don’t we just have to accept that micro-dungeon that Call of the Netherdeep presents?

No, actually.

THE SOLUTION(S)

We’ve been hearing “vast underground complex” and we’ve been defaulting to “megadungeon” as the solution. The solution is to shift our paradigm, and we can do that by rephrasing our goal.

The micro-dungeon in Call of the Netherdeep is (a) good and (b) probably has about the right narrative weight for its role in the campaign. So what is it that we want?

Ideally, we’d take the exact same micro-dungeon and present it in a way that’s consistent with Betrayers’ Rise being a gargantuan complex with vast, unexplored depths where explorers delved too deep and yada yada yada.

OPTION 1: MULTIPLE ENTRANCES

Instead of Betrayers’ Rise having a single entrance that leads to a sixteen room micro-dungeon, the Rise has multiple entrances leading to a convoluted honeycomb of many different dungeon complexes. Some of these are small; some are vast. Some are connected to each other; others are not… or, if they are, the ways are secret, blocked, or only accessible through interdimensional spaces.

One of these entrances, of course, leads to our micro-dungeon.

The key question now is, how do the PCs know to use this specific entrance?

To answer this question, we simply step back and look at the PCs’ goal in Bazzoxan: They’re here to get answers about the Jewel of Three Prayers, the enigmatic Vestige of Divergence which has come into either their possession or the possession of their Rivals.

Therefore, this entrance must have a specific connection to the Jewel of Three Prayers.

There are many ways you could create his connection, but you can keep it quite simple: There’s a giant drawing or bas relief of the Jewel depicted on the entrance or near the entrance or just inside the entrance.

The next question is: How do the PCs learn about this connection?

This revelation is essential for the adventure, so we want to use the Three Clue Rule here. In fact, there are two closely related revelations here.

REVELATION 1: WE HAVE TO GO TO BAZZOXAN.

• The Elder in Jigow who told them to go to Bazzoxan (p. 37) should tell them: “I was in Bazzoxan once, where the legacy of the Calamity lingers more strongly anywhere else in Xhorhas, and I saw this very Jewel depicted on the walls of the Betrayers’ Rise. Perhaps you will find answers there.”
• The PCs can discover references to this depiction of the Jewel at Betrayers’ Rise through their own research.
• The Rivals will conduct their own research (or perhaps seek the casting of a legend lore spell) and discover the Jewel’s depiction at Betrayers’ Rise. They’ll then inform the PCs, ask for the PCs’ help, or the PCs can pursue them there.

REVELATION 2: THE LOCATION OF THE JEWEL’S DEPICTION.

• The PCs can do their own survey of the Rise’s exterior to find the depiction.
• The Three Scholars of Ank’Harel in Bazzoxan (Question, Prolix, and Aloysia) are all here researching ruidium (which is specifically found around this entrance and in this micro-dungeon). They can be questioned and their notes also include depictions of the Jewel.

Design Note: This conveniently also addresses some other structural weaknesses in Call of the Netherdeep. For example, in the adventure as written the Elder doesn’t actually give the PCs’ a reason to go to Bazzoxan; so when they arrive, they end up just kind of wandering around hoping to bump into the plot. By having the Elder give them this specific connection to Bazzoxan, the PCs now arrive in town with a specific agenda which will drive the action forward.

You could also further develop this lore to strengthen connections between Bazzoxan and Ank’Harel. Perhaps the excavations in the sunken city of Cael Morrow have recently discovered a depiction of the Jewel of Three Prayers, and some or all of the scholarly factions have independently discovered its depiction in Bazzoxan (providing an alternative or additional motive to ruidium for coming here).

OPTION 2: THE POINTCRAWL

If you want to actually delve into the “true” Betrayers’ Rise — that vast, unexplored depth which yada yada yada — then what you need is a pointcrawl.

A pointcrawl adventure uses a point-map to represent navigation at an abstract level. One way of understanding a pointcrawl, and its original application, is modeling travel along a trail system (i.e., the connections between points are literally wilderness trails running between the locations).

In the case of a dungeon pointcrawl, like the one we would use for Betrayers’ Rise, the points represent notable locations or regions within the dungeon and the connections between them model the navigational connections between them. Because these navigation connections are being represented at a high level of abstraction, they are often not specific. (There might be several different passages you can take from the Low Halls to the High Throne, but they’d all be represented by a single line. This is similar to how there are many streets you could take while driving across town from McDonald’s to the Museum of Natural History, but they’ll all be heading in basically the same direction.)

Let’s make this less abstract. The way a dungeon pointcrawl would work here is that the vast depths of Betrayers’ Rise would be abstracted. You’d narrate large spans of the journey as a sort of travelogue through terrifying-yet-empty vaults.

The Rise is not a beehive with every inch filled by demons. It is a wasteland.

If you want a touchstone for what this would look like/sound like in actual play, consider the journey through Moria in The Lord of the Rings:

For eight dark hours, not counting two brief halts, they marched on; and they met not danger, and heard nothing, and saw nothing but the faint gleam of the wizard’s light, bobbing like a will-o’-wisp in front of them. The passage they had chosen wound steadily upwards. As far as they could judge it went in great mounting curves, and as it rose it grew loftier and wider. There were now no openings to other galleries or tunnels on either side, and the floor was level and sound, without pits or cracks. Evidently they had struck what once had been an important road; and they went forward quicker than they had done on their first march.

They had marched as far as the hobbits could endure without a rest, and all were thinking of a place where they could sleep, when suddenly the walls to right and left vanished. They seem to have passed through some arched doorway into a black and empty space. There was a great draught of warmer air behind them, and before them the darkness was cold on their faces. They halted and crowded anxiously together.

Gandalf seemed pleased. ‘I chose the right way,’ he said. ‘At last we are coming to the habitable parts, and I guess that we are not far now from the eastern side. But we are high up, a good deal higher than the Dimrill Gate, unless I am mistaken. From the feeling of the air, we must be in a wide hall. I will now risk a little real light.’

He raised his staff, and for a brief instant there was a blaze like a flash of lightning. Great shadows sprang up and fled, and for a second they saw a vast roof far above their heads upheld by many mighty pillars hewn of stone. Before them and on either side stretched a huge empty hall; its black walls, polished and smooth as glass, flashed and glittered. Three other entrances they saw, dark black arches: one straight before them eastwards, and one to either side.

Then the light went out.

The “points” of the pointcrawl would be points of particular interest/danger. They’d also represent key navigational choices. In the movie version of Moria, for example, these are:

• the Entrance;
• “I have no memory of this place”;
• Balin’s Tomb; and
• the Bridge of Khazad-dûm

In designing this for an RPG, you would need to include options for the paths Gandalf didn’t take (so that the players would have navigational choices).

PREPPING THE POINTCRAWL: Unlike Option 1, therefore, this option would require significantly more prep, because you’ll need to create other points within Betrayers’ Rise in addition to the original micro-dungeon (which I’m going to call the Cyst of Avandra).

My guess is that you’d want at least a half dozen points that are actually micro-dungeons. (You could think of each of these as a 5-Room Dungeon.) And then you’d probably want another dozen or so points that are just individual rooms or cool landmarks (a statue, a strange chasm, a subterranean bridge, etc.).

Some of these points might be better thought of as entire regions, out of which navigational choices can be made.

“You’re in the Hex Pits. You see a number of stairs winding down. Or you could perhaps try to make your way up one of the great ramps at either end of the Pits.”

OPTION 3: THE GUIDE

If we consider Gandalf an NPC instead of a PC, then we can get some of the atmosphere offered by the pointcrawl, but wrap it in a simple package (with near-zero prep) by simply requiring the PCs to have a guide.

What guide? One of the Three Scholars, of course.

And how do they know where to take the PCs? Once again, it’s the depiction of the Jewel of Three Prayers. Rather than being an entrance to Betrayers’ Rise, the painting or bas relief of the Jewel is located deep within the Rise.

The chosen scholar(s) can guide the PCs there in abstract time (a montage of moments as they delve into the dungeon; just like the hobbits’ experience in Moria), perhaps triggering a few “random” (actually scripted) encounters along the way.

When the PCs arrive at the depiction of the Jewel, you simply shift to now time as they come to the entrance of Cyst of Avandra.

Design Note: You could enrich this interaction a bit by having the Three Scholars each propose/take differing routes through the Rise. But there’s probably not a huge gain from this unless the PCs can make some sort of meaningful choice between route options.

The PCs could also avoid the need for an actual guide if, for example, they steal one of the researchers’ notes from their rooms. (Allowing them to study the notes and guide themselves.) You can prompt this as an active premise by having one of the scholars ask the PCs to steal a rival’s notes. (Prolix might do so in order to figure out what Aloysia is doing in Bazzoxan, for example.)

For the encounters studded along the route, you can use (or at least start with) the “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” on p. 63 of Call of the Netherdeep. Try to have these encounters really reflect the vastness of the spaces through which the PCs are traveling, however: They pass through a galley looking out over a vast underground chasm or chamber, lit by the ruddy light of a lake of fire on the far end. In the center of the lake is an island upon which is a slab of stone. And upon the slab of stone there lies a sleeping balor.

Best not to rouse it.

FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running the Rivals