Generators

Creating Folk

The GM keeps a catalogue of each Folk thus far invented, called, naturally, the Folk Lore. For a new campaign, seed this with at least four Folk, either chosen from the Example Folk or randomly generated with the Folk Generator. Create one or two more Folk between each session.

Your Folk Lore will never stop growing: there are always more strange cultures and creatures waiting to be met. Eventually, you’ll have a whole palette of weird and interesting peoples inhabiting your underworld.

1. Basic Concept

Each Folk is seeded by two ideas. To generate each:

1. Roll on the Table of Folk Ideas for a verb.
2. Roll on the Table of Folk Idea Connections to see where to get a noun.
3. Depending on that result, roll on the given table or choose from the given list for the noun.

Once you have two ideas that intrigue you, summarize them in a sentence or two and move on.

Example: The GM rolls d20 and d10 on the Table of Folk Ideas for a starting concept, and gets a 9 and a 5 (odd) for the result “Searching for the perfect…” Next, they roll d4 on the Table of Folk Idea Connections and get 1: a Terrain. Flipping to the Terrain table, they roll d100 and get 67: Underground Sea. The first core idea for this folk is that they are searching the Down for the perfect underwater ocean.

Next, the GM rolls d20 and d10 again and gets 18 and 2 (even): “Code of conduct based around…” Since this result provides its own subject, they roll d4 directly to get 2: “Truth.” The second idea for this folk is that they have a code of conduct based around absolute truths. That’s two ideas, so the GM’s ready to move on to step 2: the Folk’s appearance.

Table of Folk Ideas

Roll d20 and any other die; use the second die to pick the odd or even column.

Table of Folk Idea Connections

Roll d4.

2. Appearance

Roll twice on the Table of Folk Appearances (selecting a parenthetical option, if any), and let the results inspire a basic look. You can loosely interpret or discard anything you don’t like, but be open to radical ideas.

Most results might be interpreted in many different ways. “Bones and rot” and “Heat and flames” could mean zombies with burning eyes, or a folk who paint their bodies with a vibrant red-orange paint that smells like death.

Table of Folk Appearances

Roll d20 and any other die; use the second die to pick the odd or even column.

Rolls with seemingly contradictory results are the best, because they let you stretch your creativity. Got both huge and tiny? Maybe these folk are huge for snails, but tiny for people. Maybe they have huge eyes but tiny teeth. Maybe they’re tiny in reality but use latent mental powers to loom large in the minds of others. Go wild.

Reputation

Roll twice on the Table of Reputations to learn how these Folk are seen by others. Again, you can loosely interpret or discard anything you don’t like, but be open to radical ideas.

Reputation is the way others would describe these folk in a word or two. This is a kind of stereotype, and should be treated as such: a broad generalization at best, slander at worst. Perhaps a folk deliberately chooses to be seen this way to hide a deeper truth, or perhaps only some outsiders think of them like this while others think the opposite. Individuals might have as much or little relation to this as a specific human does to a statement like “All humans are arrogant.” Make this a starting point, not a complete characterization.

Table of Reputations

Roll d20 and any other die; use the second die to pick the odd or even column.

Name

If you haven’t yet, give these folk a name. You can use online fantasy name generators, or find an etymological dictionary and look up real archaic words relating to the folk’s core concepts, but I like to use a quicker method:

1. Write down the first and most obvious thing that comes to mind. Spider-folk that live in cold caves? Maybe Ice Spiders or Cold Crawlers. If you like what you wrote, just go with it: it’ll be easy for both you and your players to remember.

2. If you don’t like what you wrote, rearrange the letters until you find a few syllables that sound fantastical and interesting. From the letters in “Ice Spiders” you could get Sedri, Pridic, Redisps, or Dris. Adjust spelling and format as necessary (The Ridisps, Spiders of Driss, the Lost Sedrians).

Creating Volumes

Volumes are the stages for your ongoing story, places of wonder and possibility worthy of journeying towards and spending time in. The next few pages will help you generate these special places: except the process to take from twenty minutes to an hour per volume, depending on how fast inspiration strikes and how much fleshing out you want to do.

Keep all created volumes together in a physical or digital Guidebook, and update it when new information is invented or discovered. A volume is unknown if the players have never heard of it: as soon as they have, it gets added to the map and becomes known, even if it has no connections yet to other volumes.

1. Determine volume themes

Skip this step if you already have a concept for the volume in mind (say, a pitch-black prison fortress). Otherwise, roll twice on the Table of Volume Themes.

Table of Volume Themes

Roll 2d8 and read as two numbers, from top to bottom as the dice fell.

For results below, also roll d4: Ruled by, Famous for, Hostile to, Unusual

2. Terrain

Next, roll twice on the Table of Terrains to establish the general environs of this volume.

Table of Terrains

Roll d100. If your number is 60 or under, get a second word by either reading straight across, or rolling again, swapping digits or rerolling for a result under 60.

3. Basic Sketch

Let the ideas prompted by your theme and terrain rolls percolate for a minute. Try to reconcile them together into a coherent whole. Once you’ve got the spark of an idea, write it down in sketch of a couple sentences.

4. Give it a name

It’s okay to be obvious: “The Icy Caverns” is fine. If you want to punch it up, troll through your dictionary or thesaurus, especially for synonyms marked “obscure” or “archaic” (“The Rime Grottos,” or “The Burrows of Frigid Winds”).

5. Decide what’s abundant and scarce

Based on your sketch:

• Choose one resource from the Table of Resource Types that’s abundant in this volume, and one that’s scarce.
• Then roll twice more, and assign one result as a second Abundance, and the other as a second Scarcity.

Flesh out the Abundances and Scarcities with a few clarifying notes, if necessary, and add or remove others if the fiction suggests.

Table of Resource Types

Roll d20 + d10.

6. Inhabitants

Choose two peoples from your Folk Lore that are commonly found here: one Folk the players have encountered before, and one Folk they haven’t. (For your earliest volumes, of course, they’ll both necessarily be new.) What is the relationship in this volume between these two peoples: friendship, subjugation, indifference, uneasy alliance? How do the residents of this volume differ from each Folk’s default norms and reputations?

Alternatively, perhaps this volume is a true melting pot where folk of all kinds can be found, an isolated monoculture where outsiders are rare, or a lonely place with few or no inhabitants.

7. Remoteness

Decide how difficult this volume is to find. This might be implied by the fiction, or you can roll d3.

1. Well-Known (base 3 difficulty to reach)
2. Sheltered (base 4 difficulty to reach)
3. Secret (base 5 difficulty to reach)

8. Create a Touchstone

Each volume has a touchstone, something massively strange and massively wonderful. It might be the coolest thing in the volume, something representative of the place as a whole, the obvious reason for its existence, or something hidden. But it’s definitely something the party will hear about and maybe interact with during their visit. Give the touchstone a short description (a sentence or two).

The touchstone should grow from the ideas you’ve created so far in your volume, so there’s not a table for it: but here’s a few nudges to spark your imagination.

palace, tavern, library, dungeon, festival, university, tower, fortress, curiosities shoppe, ossuary, avenue, speakeasy, specialty market, zoo, monument, haunted battlefield, queen, art gallery, secret garden, arena, exclusive club, salon, bookshop, vista, town square, park, grove, clock, factory, machine, wonder of the Down, map, castle, immortal, pier, ride, train, wall, theater, circus, tomb, portal, pit, temple, graveyard, mystery, competition, phenomenon

9. Make Opportunities

Pulling from everything created so far, come up with 3-5 intriguing opportunities here. These might be events the party can’t help but get involved in, NPCs with interesting problems or offers, places that demand exploration, or dangers waiting to be unleashed.

Opportunities are story hooks to offer players as they explore the volume. You can develop them in advance as much or as little as you like, depending on how much you enjoy improvising on the fly. I like to keep them open-ended, writing a sentence or two for each, and maybe an NPC name and core concept if I think I might need it.

Here are a couple techniques for brainstorming opportunities:

• Take anything you might find in your story world and imagine a surprising juxtaposition or reversal of a key quality. A tiny dragon; a kindly vampire; a glowing teacup; a frozen fountain; unspendable money; permeable rock. Now think about why something like this might exist in this volume, and where it would be found.

• Think of something threatening or dangerous inherent in or attracted to this volume. Lava caverns might have flame-wolves and the ruthless guild who hunts them; magical darkness might hide echolocating monsters, a guild of blind thieves, or dangerous pits. How might such dangers make themselves known to the party?

• Brainstorm something weird or wonderful that could only happen in this unique place. Worm breeders might have worm races; a place known for its toys must surely have a great festival to unveil them; and in a temple to shadow, the lighting of a lamp might be an ultimate blasphemy. When and where does (or could) this unique thing happen, and how might the players get invited or involved?

10. Finishing Touches

Add any final notes to your Guidebook, and update other notes like your Folk Lore if you invented anything new along the way. That’s it: your volume’s ready to be added to the map the next time the players hear news about the world.

Think of your stock of created volumes like a palette of colors you can use to respond to the way the players direct the story. Have you created a mystic library? If the players find themselves in need of a scholar or a translation, drop rumors of a new route opening up to it and give them some Tack. Action trailing off? Have a threat from an unvisited volume attack them and leave a clue as to its origins. If the players have a half-dozen unvisited place-names on their map they’re dying to get to, you’re doing things right.

Encounters

Within volumes, tailor encounters to the ongoing storyline and plot threads you or the players want to develop. But during journeys, play the Travel Encounter move each travel day.

Travel Encounter

When the players have resolved their journey rolls for a day’s travel, roll 3d6 and read the dice from top to bottom.

The top die sets the general tenor of the encounter. Add the Danger modifier (if any) to this die only.

Opportunities and Threats are fairly straightforward rewards or setbacks the players might encounter. Use the middle and bottom dice of your 3d6 roll to get a specific result on the Opportunity or Threat tables. Depending on your preferences and desired pacing, you can either roleplay these out as full encounters, or present them in a straightforward summary (maybe giving players a single die roll to claim or avoid them).

A Challenge is a more complex encounter with potential for both danger and reward. The players might reap either or both depending on how they approach the situation.

When you roll a Challenge:

• Use the middle and bottom dice to get a box from the Table of Challenge Contexts.
• Pick a result that you like from the options in the box (avoiding ones you’ve picked before).
• Now, roll 3d6 again. The top die indicates a category on the Table of Opportunities, and the bottom die a category on the Table of Threats. These indicate what potential reward and danger are present, depending on how players resolve the situation presented in the challenge. Feel free to modify the opportunity or threat if the fiction suggests something more relevant.

It’s always up to the GM whether an encounter includes a threat of combat. Create your own campaign-appropriate random monster table if you like, or hand-pick something from your arsenal that makes sense given the terrain and context.

Okay, fine: if you want a purely random result, include combat whenever the middle die of your 3d6 roll is odd.

Table of Opportunities

Something the players can get without too much trouble, either for free or with an easy skill check. Use the upper d6 for category and lower d6 for subcategory; parentheticals for inspiration.

Table of Threats

When appropriate, let players make a saving throw or other hard check to avoid. Use the upper d6 for category and lower d6 for subcategory; parentheticals for inspiration.

Table of Challenge Contexts

Use your middle and bottom d6 to get a box, then choose one option.

1-1:
Undead guardians of an ancient bier
Every inch covered in historic carvings
Crumbling bridge over hazard
Excited costumed travelers en route to major festival; completely, utterly lost

1-2:
Traveling performers
Ancient battlefield, thousands of skeletons
Cocky sword-for-hire, looking for new employment
Ornate, long-abandoned railroad cars

1-3:
Grotto with six thrones and a locked chest
Slippery stairs
Traveler’s waystation built into natural feature
Dusty gearwork fortune-telling machine: first one is free and demonstrably true

1-4:
Area filled with dense mist; can’t see more than a few feet ahead
Way forward overgrown with thousands of tiny, sweet-smelling blue-green mushrooms
Dead End
Burrow of adorable, wounded animal with hungry cubs

1-5:
Caravan of suspicious travelers
Massive rubbish pile, some city’s garbage chute: salvage and scavengers
Sump ahead filled with flammable, unbreathable orange mist
Abandoned, crumbling village; no bodies; only one thing the looters missed

1-6:
Stand-off between opposing forces; a diplomat is needed
Chokepoint ahead: signs of ambush
Chambers draped in curtains of black felt, swaying in unfelt winds
Wild beast

2-1:
Thousands of unbound pages litter the ground, fragments of an immense epic
Fifty-foot gap in the path with a hazard in between
Blind albino birds
Panicked wanderers fleeing a swarm of ordinary insects, but like, millions of ‘em

2-2:
Starving, lost teenager
Huge rotating sphere, players must slip inside when entrance lines up
A difficult vertical climb
Wizard’s tower built into natural feature

2-3:
Hospital for terminally cursed patients, staffed by silent Formic Nuns
Lair; owner is annoyed by whatever’s transpiring here
Abandoned carnival
Dripping acid ooze

2-4:
Way ahead increasingly cluttered with webs; way back riddled with hidey-holes
A vein of a precious mineral
Massive obsidian rod emitting constant spears of lightning
Path joins with what looks suspiciously like a racetrack; distant rumbling begins

2-5:
Tunnels constrict till you can barely wriggle through
Crack oozing bright orange goo with a fungal effect at drug strength; ownership contested
Opulent funicular, donation box, twenty-minute ride, windows painted black
Mysterious, ancient book, alone on a jade plinth

2-6:
Walls broken by glittering crystals, razor-sharp
Slippery slope of butterscotch flowstone
Small, cheerful homestead; everyone inside is very recently dead
Astonishing viewpoint

3-1:
Eight-sided pillar, 1000 feet high: same declaration of principles carved in 8000 languages
Settlers with a busted cart
Seemingly abandoned military outpost
Sinkhole with increasingly sloping sides

3-2:
Tendrils of Fuzz converge at an oasis of warmth and light
Devil’s Breath Zipline, three miles long: safe, probably
Path becomes wide level roadway, well-lit and maintained; ends a mile later at impassable wall
Ticking clock until a hazard becomes a real problem

3-3:
Automated ooze farm
Enslaved rock-creatures digging a tunnel; master is away, for now
Desecrated tomb
A far-off, ominously blinking light

3-4:
Hunter stalking a (possibly imaginary) predator
Hurricane winds rush through chokepoint between zones of different pressure
Deep blue pool blocks the path, something sparkling at the bottom
Stampede!

3-5:
Boulder-hops across a zone of hazards
Immaculately detailed miniature city, 200 feet wide; shame if there were combat here
Lair of sleeping monsters
Something is wrong with the gravity

3-6:
“Rain” courses down from stalactites above, soaking everything
Earthquake!
Something is stalking from the shadows
An ancient ship from the surface, wedged in a crevasse

4-1:
Sealed-off bunker with “warning: magical contamination” signs
Slope of loose gravel and boulders, delicately balanced
Grandma Ebb’s Megapede Farm: expensive, but -1 to journey target if everyone buys a megapede mount
Dusty, pompous court of a room-sized kingdom, population three

4-2:
Zealous religious crusaders want the party to convert; won’t take no for an answer
Swaying catwalks
Grove of enchanted mushrooms
Lava flow erupts through the walls

4-3:
Long, straight passage with no side exits
Fallen road sign; two groups of travelers arguing over which way it should point
A tiny trading post
Toll bridge over a hazard

4-4:
Lonely mushroom farmer, will make trades for good stories
Sprung pit trap
Mini-dungeon: a sealed tomb and its eternal guardians
Cheerful traveling portrait artist, gleaming teeth; people in the portraits are all screaming

4-5:
Gear-room of an enormous clock keeping an unfamiliar time, still working
Pilgrims on a holy quest
A dead or dying traveler
Way forward narrows; single-file only

4-6:
Lighthouse, beacon shining brightly; no obvious purpose
Refugees from a far-off war need an escort to safety
Path scales a massive chain, each link a hundred feet long
Plucky girl collecting funds to resurrect dead grandpa, who she has in a cart

5-1:
Ceiling lit by thousands of glowing dots of fungus
Path climbs the torso of forgotten hero’s colossal statue
A cube of magical darkness
Medical emergency

5-2:
Slide down a long, oozing shaft
Huge out-of-control automaton
Someone studying an old ruin needs assistance translating some glyphs
Competing ferry boats

5-3:
Inn hosting a bardic competition
Ancient coliseum
Ducking under ceiling with razor-sharp stalactites
Two mute children

5-4
Dripping sign: “Flash Flood Warning”
Vast hollow sphere, floating light in exact center
A winding stair
A gallery of eight huge statues

5-5
Old man in a deep pit needs help
Magic mirror shows what you most want
Friendly gelatinous cube, speaks through half-dissolved body’s mouth; wants to be an adventurer
Heavily armored inspectors need to check the party for Blight

5-6
Wagon of slaves and slavers under siege by freedom fighters
Discarded, enormous sculptures
Strange animal pinned by collapsed rock
Pile of treasure in center of route, obviously a trap

6-1
Rope across hazard to precarious reward
Former enemy of the party, claims to be reformed
Happy family of four living in large glass terrarium; beg you not to break the seal
Would-be bandits attacked by their enraged mount

6-2
Gallery filled with hundreds of crude statues of same party member
Sleeping leviathan with dungeon inside
Way ahead blocked by rubble, might be possible to clear
Muddy footprints suddenly vanish

6-3
Enormous mural has vital clue about history of this area
A dormant campaign plot thread is resurrected
Two aged knights claim one always lies and other always tells the truth, but they’re just having you on
Way ahead choked by tall spindly plants with closed, vibrating buds

6-4
Mini-dungeon: filled with traps, pressure plates, and weighted plinths
Thieving bat-things stealing your stuff
Dust-choked gallery, enormous orrery
Huge monster, way too powerful: run!

6-5
Travelers seem to have died peacefully in their sleep, leaving their mounts behind
Ancient glyphs might be a warning about the way forward; can anyone read them?
A conclave of tiny spore-fairies, barely large enough to see
An automaton lies in pieces, along with assembly instructions

6-6
An unexpected hazard for the terrain (i.e., fire in an ice maze)
Be absolutely silent, or you’ll wake The Creatures
Slippery floor
The troll demanding a toll is actually a softie

NPC Generator

When you need a spur-of-the-moment NPC, choose which Folk they are, then roll on the…

Table of Quick n’ Dirty NPCs

Roll 2d20 and read as two numbers. Use the first d20 for Affect, the second for Desire. Pick an option from each entry.

An NPC’s Desire is usually what they want from the party right now, but to spice things up, roll d6 and interpret it as 1: a long-term goal, 2: something someone else wants that they’re involved in, 3: a lie to cover up or distract from something, 4: something they are clearly ambivalent about, 5: they have a very strange way of finding it, 6: they’re selling it as a service.

Examples

Example Folk

The Catanae. Skeleton wanderers, a dead race brought back by a whimsical god. They love life and music and paint their bones fantastic colors. Every ten years is their glorious festival, the Ebon Fantastic, where their souls swirl together: some new Catanae are born, others return to eternal sleep.

The Chitter. Insectoid constructs, creepy but polite, many ceremonial rituals. They graft parts of living creatures to themselves, which they believe gives them a soul. Can be extremely persistent if they find a part they like, even if still attached to someone else.

Spear-singers. Graceful, with long flowing red hair or beards. Carry huge, beautifully carven spears that whistle in complex harmonies when thrown. Believe in honor, love, and self-immolation by age 35.

Marblekin. Pearlescent giants, crystalline-eyed, dour-faced. Patrons of the arts. Rarely show emotion, which can make them seem cruel or callous. Very long memories. Grow larger the older they get, or perhaps it’s older the larger they get?

Find more example Folk in the full version of Downcrawl.

Example Volumes

Bone Falls

Themes: Booming, Famous for Nomads
Terrain: Vertical River, Ossuary
Abundant: People, Water
Scarce: Open Space, Heat
Remoteness: Well-known
Currency: skeleton keys

Amidst the constant thunder of a massive waterfall that stretches out of knowledge both up and down, Bone Falls is a place no one calls home for long. New arrivals are welcomed and given a mist-wet, sturdy shack, nestled among the sprawling array of catwalks, ladders, and moss-covered platforms that make up the settlement. But they’re also given a strict warning: by inviolable custom, none may reside here longer than a single year. Despite this restriction, the town is booming, expanding up and down the falls like wildfire, with a growing reputation as a place for those who need a fresh start or temporary respite.

Life here is not without danger. All types are welcome, including those not welcome anywhere else and for good reason. The risk of falling off a slippery catwalk or being swept away in an unpredictable surge of falling water is very real. And it’s wretchedly cold as the freezing falls raise clammy mist that seeps through everything. More ominously, the endless cliff which the falls slowly erode away is riddled with the tunnels of a massive catacomb, filled with the bones of millions from some lost and ancient empire. Not all the dead sleep peacefully, and those who go exploring don’t always come back.

But the danger and impermanence lend residents an air of reckless gaiety and instant camaraderie. There’s a lively art scene and many bustling markets, and folks here cheerfully check in on their neighbors or take part in all-volunteer service guilds to provide repairs and basic services. After all, you’re only here once, and you can’t take it with you.

Touchstone: Dangles, a bar with no floor, cantilevered away from the waterfall and suspended over the abyss. Tables and chairs hang from chains, which servers and patrons alike must adroitly swing from. Surely no one would start a fight here.

Opportunities:

• The Citizen Council: anyone can walk in and be a politician for a day
• The former occupants of the party’s new home left a map of the catacombs
• Durge the elevator boy: pulls folks up and down all day, knows everyone, sees everything
• The Misty Lady, seen more and more often on the especially moist bridges, dead, smiling
• With a deafening clang, a body from somewhere far above crashes onto your catwalk, causing it to partially detach from the cliff face.
• Yesterday should have been Jett Mossweaver’s final day. This morning he’s still here. A mob is gathering.

Find more example volumes in the full version of Downcrawl.

Worldbuilding

Additional notes on the setting of the Deep, Deep Down: feel free to use as much or little as you like in your campaign.

The Fuzz

A glowing, purple mold, running in rich veins and arteries through the roots of the world, ubiquitous, present to a greater or lesser extent in every volume. Some say it’s the root of all food chains and thus the living Down itself. It’s certainly true that the cold, dead regions with no Fuzz at all are bereft of light and life.

The Fuzz has several effects: - Glows with a dim but steady light, even after scraped off - Edible, if not very tasty - Causes certain kinds of magic to catastrophically fail, especially teleportation - If brewed as a tea, creates a telepathic link between its drinkers (see Languages)

The Fuzz’s effects on magic vary in particulars from region to region, often in arbitrary-seeming ways that create suspiciously interesting narrative complications. Long-range teleportation, especially, ends more often than not with catastrophic results, making its use almost unheard of.

Attitudes to the Fuzz vary. To some, it’s as invisible a resource as the air; others worship it as a living, sentient god. Folk set their clocks by the ebb and flow of its brightness.

At the very least, it makes a good liner for your pack.

Languages

There is no common tongue in the Down.

Language here has taken every form imaginable: speech in a million variants and styles, sign language performed with all manner of limbs, subsonic rumblings, coded flashes of rainbow light, odor sequences, rhythmic dances, even hair-growth patterns (though this makes for a rather slow conversation and one is advised to skip the pleasantries).

Each Folk have at least one language of their own, and probably a great many more. A long-inhabited and populous volume may have developed its own language, generally influenced by the tongues of both its present and ancestral inhabitants. Travelers, traders, merchants and nobles often know some dialect or other of the Grim Speech, the Undertongue, the Lingua Motivia or the guttural Gab Gab, but most of the general populace do not, and none of these are ubiquitous. Criminal types, entertainers, servants of evil, and religious faithful each have their own argot or patois. The languages of love, of course, are reasonably universal but not generally applicable outside their very specific domain.

Given all this, the odds that two random inhabitants of the Down speak a common tongue are slim. Fortunately, the Fuzz once again proves useful: those who share a pot of tea brewed from the stuff develop a limited shared telepathy that allows them to understand each other’s speech until the effects fade, generally after a day or so. Tea-sharing is therefore an incredibly common greeting ritual, like a slower, tastier handshake. Get used to drinking the stuff: most non-combat encounters will begin with a ritualistic pouring. The language-comprehension effects can be mentally directed and toggled at will, allowing for slipping back into one’s own tongue to speak privately (though this is considered rude if teacups aren’t yet empty).

Languages can also be learned the old-fashioned way. Learning to speak a handful or two is a popular way for folk with leisure time to pass it. There are fungi and drugs available to accelerate this process, and no lack of willing instructors seeking employment.

Sometimes, regrettably, there’s no time for a language lesson or even a cup of tea. Bartering is often accomplished with an elaborate system of frantic gestures, good for discussing prices, quality of wares, or how offended one is by either; but little else. Lack of a common tongue might explain why so many encounters in the wilds lead to bloodshed (although surface folk seem to need no such excuse). Travelers often find simple actions like pointing, rubbing one’s belly, or terrified screaming may provide all the communication that’s necessary for discussing nearby points of interest.

Currency

The Deep, Deep Down also has no standard currency, and indeed it’s rare for even adjacent volumes to share the same coinage. Still have any of those gold pieces from the surface? No one down here’s ever seen one, nor do they think very highly of gold in general, which runs in crumbly mustard-brown veins weakening foundations: a nuisance mineral. Currencies here come in as bewildering a variety of forms as do languages: glimmering threads, gem-carved buttons, serpent’s feathers, pennies of glass, banknotes stamped by the local monarch, lines of credit invisibly tracked by local banker-ghosts, and anything else you can imagine.

Moneychangers are common in heavily-traveled volumes, with currencies from all corners jangling in a bewildering array of hanging ropes and mirrored drawers. Such services, of course, take a hefty cut of each transaction.

Drugs and fungi come closest to a universal currency, with reasonably consistent value across the Down. Gems are precious in some places, but paving stones in others. Art is even more subjective, though it’s hard to put an upper cap on how much the right buyer might pay for the right piece. A volume’s scarcities, of course, will attract premium payment, while its abundancies will be hard or impossible to sell locally. Useful goods like weapons can often be sold for local lucre in a pinch, and stories of brave deeds and far-off lands are always in demand. Generally, though, one’s best bet when arriving in a new volume is to find someone hiring heroes and paying in the local scrip.

Table of Random Currencies

Roll 4d6 and read from top to bottom: first pair is Adjective, second pair is Unit.

Directions and Orientation

Surface compasses won’t work in the Down. The six cardinal directions here are up and down (the axis of gravity), faezward and murkwise (toward or away from the brightest local cluster of Fuzz), and dextral and sinister (to the right and left of faezward). All well and good except two of those three are relative or subjective, hinging especially on one’s interpretation of words like “brightest” and “local.” This can lead to unhelpful directions from locals like “Oh, just go upwise and sharp sinister past the palace, then head true faezward, you can’t miss it. What? No, not Lord Utter’s faezward, are you daft? Use the Shestal’s faezward, of course.” (And this is after drinking the tea.)

Despite centuries of attempts by the Flinj with lodestones, the Kestei with phlogistonical alembics, and the Serimange with vibrating ley lines, no universal system of coordinates, directions, or mapping for the Down has ever emerged. Large-scale maps simply do not exist, and even regional ones are hard to come by and prone to getting outdated. Routes between volumes are constantly collapsing or being re-dug, altered by isolationists or trade monopolists, or melted away by an upswell of magma or magical catastrophe. Some claim the very rock is less solid than it seems, flowing and shifting in silent, unknowable currents, making any attempt to permanently fix points of the Down relative to each other an utter impossibility. The Flinj, the Kestei, and the Serimange all vehemently deny this theory, especially in their grant proposals.

If some reliable method were found to navigate between volumes or make better maps, it would of course have immense potential value, and certainly no forces in the Down would have incentives to destroy, sabotage, steal, hoard, or denounce it.

Legends of the Surface

Few will credit claims that the party is from the Surface, nor that such a place even exists, though most have at least have heard the term. Hazy legends sing of an impossibly distant land “where the rock stops,” even if most folk don’t really get what that means. At best they might interpret your wild stories of an outside with a moon and sun as describing a very large cavern with huge glowing marbles rolling across its top. The strange appearance of player characters provides no evidence either, as the Down is chock-full of curious folk, many almost as queer and misshapen as the PCs themselves.

Somewhat more familiar are standard subterranean folk (dwarves, dark elves, and so on) who many believe in and some might even claim to have met. These peoples are generally thought to come from a place far above full of strange creatures and customs. Any such folk encountered will be just as lost and cut-off from their homes as the players. If they do know secret ways up, they’ll be as protective of them as surface traders of their spice routes.

“Day” and “Night”

The Fuzz glows in a strange rhythm. It lightens and darkens in a cycle that roughly approximates the terrestrial cadence of day and night, and is used in a similar way to mark the passage of time. But it’s been known to act strangely at certain times or places, bringing darkness for a month or a purple dawn every fifteen minutes. In volumes where such irregularity is frequent, folk have adopted different strategies for dealing with it: an unscheduled long night might signal a lawless free-for-all in some places, while in others it’s a time of reflection or religious devotion.

In rare volumes, the Fuzz stays in a perpetual blaze of purple light, or eternally dim or even dark. Inhabitants of such places find new rhythms to mark the passage of time. Locals may not need sleep (or do it differently), or might use the regular tempo of steam vents, the ebb and flow of magma currents, or the hatching of scrabbling insect broods as their temporal heartbeats.

I hope you've enjoyed this free version of Downcrawl. The full version is a 60-page book featuring gorgeous woodcut art of caves, maps, and creature from vintage books; additional examples of play and rules clarifications; and more sample Folk and Volumes. It's available now in print and PDF from DriveThruRPG. Here's those sample pages again, and the cover:

About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the players of my Under-Chult campaign for gamely putting up with all the weird relationship mechanics, beta travel systems, and Serimange I could throw at them: Matthew R.F. Balousek, Michael Chemers, Melanie Dickinson, Jacob Garbe, Nick Junius, Stella Mazeika, Johnathan Pagnutti, Kara Stone, Phoenix Toews, and Tiffany Wong.

Recommended readings:

• Role-playing books: Dungeon World; The Perilous Wilds; Veins of the Earth; Wormskin (periodical); Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game; Stars Without Number; The Undercroft (zine); Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master; Underdark (4th ed D&D supplement); Necropraxis Productions Hazard System
• Books: Alice in Wonderland; Perdido Street Station; Mythago Woods; Journey to the Center of the Earth; Imajica; The Longest Cave
• Artists: Remedios Varo; Zdzisław Beksiński; Wayne Barlowe
• Digital games: Fallen London; Uru; Kentucky Route Zero; Hunter, In Darkness
• Podcasts: Welcome to Nightvale