Blog Intro & “Depth Crawls” - 12/19/2025

I have been playing a LOT of TTRPGs recently, and I’ve got some thoughts! My main game right now is Shadowdark, which I play as an open-table style game (click the link to learn more about how it’s set up).
The TL;DR is I kind of run an in-person, offline MMORPG in my living room. Once or twice a week, ~3-6 players (out of a pool of ~40!) come to my house and explore dungeons in a “living” world episodically. Some players have a stable of different characters ready to play, so if (for example) there’s a rumor about a vampire lord, they might want to bring a party of Clerics to deal with him. Other players will only focus on their “main,” and get a single character very powerful. We game a lot, both playing homebrew content and published modules, so I hope to use this blog to share my experiences and thoughts.

With the introduction out of the way… DEPTH CRAWLS! As far as I can tell, the idea of a “depth crawl” was created by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen in her excellent books The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, both available via Soul Muppet Publishing.
Depth crawls are procedurally generated adventures which get weirder and more dangerous the deeper you venture. Exploring a depth crawl means rolling on a Locations table, a Details table, and a Random Events table to generate points of interest. Each turn, players must decide if they should go deeper, remain, or turn back. Going deeper increases the group's “depth” by one point, which adds 1 to the procedural rolls. The tables are organized such that higher numbers have weirder and deadlier results, which, since you are adding your “depth” score to these rolls, means that deeper is usually more dangerous. Since each area is randomly generated, no advanced preparation is needed.

I’ve been using The Stygian Library for several months and it’s amazing! It’s an extra-dimensional, ever changing, infinite library containing all the multiverse’s knowledge. If something was ever written in a book, anywhere, that book exists somewhere within the library. Forbidden or arcane knowledge is, of course, only accessible deep within. My players use this as an in-universe Google search:
Does the big bad have any weaknesses? Where can I find a new magical sword? Any juicy gossip on the town mayor?
Their delves aren’t always successful, but they are entertaining. The library itself also has a meta-plot, but (to many of my players, at least) that is secondary to the utility of being able to find information. The library itself is eerie and liminal: endless rows of shelves broken up by strange locations. The back of the book is also stocked with tons of great tables, including d100 “what book is this?”

I only recently picked up The Gardens of Ynn (this year at PAX Unplugged!) but I’ve already got a chance to run it a few times. Instead of an indoor library, the Gardens are an endless and uncanny gardenscape. Studio Ghibli’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky is an obvious inspiration (and named as such in the foreword), especially the scenes where that ancient, moss-covered robot endlessly patrols the forgotten, ruined castle walls. The Gardens of Ynn is written very evocatively, and my players are itching to return and discover more secrets. A recent session generated an unexpectedly hilarious combination:

There’s a bit of an art in combining these random prompts together, and I decided to really lean into the Zero Gravity aspect this time. The players, seeing the graves, immediately bound towards them and began digging.
First result: Treasure, sweet.
Next result: Angry skeletons. Ugh.
Wait... how does combat work in Zero-G? Well, even accounting for wind resistance, shooting an arrow will still launch you backwards. Grappling an opponent could launch them (or you!) into space. For a few glorious moments, the way everyone thought about combat totally changed. Players and skeletons alike were flying and firing arrows and javelins to try to right themselves. With nearly all skeletons dealt with, they decided to dig up some more graves.
More angry skeletons! Sweet!
Between Shadowdark’s inherently fast combat and my driving the players to make quick decisions, everyone was deeply engaged, despite a spirited argument over whether throwing a baseball in space would actually launch you backwards. A few of my players asked if I could add more Zero-G areas because it made combat so chaotic and, well, different and fun.
Both books have very permissive (Creative Commons) licenses, and the publisher created automatic rollers if you’d like to roll up some locations yourself:

(Looks like the official generators are currently offline, I'll add the links here when they come back!)

Despite the online rollers, I really like to keep things as analog as possible, and I heartily recommend both books. Part of the fun, I think, is asking the players themselves to roll the dice and discover what weird areas lie ahead! They are also written to be system agnostic, with monsters helpfully statted with recognizable terms like "Armor as chainmail," so these modules could fit into many different styles of games.

It’s got me thinking about creating my own depth crawl. One of my favorite episodes of Adventure Time is “Dungeon Train,” where an infinite and randomly generated train has increasingly weird foes in each train car. The show presents the train as totally random and full of combat, but I think I can take inspiration from Cavegirl and create a meta plot with more intentionally placed encounters and set pieces (not all of which are combat, of course). In addition to the regular suspects in a train dungeon (a dining car, sleeper cars, observation car, coal car, engine, etc), the deeper “levels” could get really weird. It’ll take some more fleshing out, but I’ll post it here if I end up writing something!