Through Monday, March 9 we present the new Downcrawl-Skycrawl Bundle featuring Downcrawl and Skycrawl, twin toolkits from designer Aaron A. Reed that help you create spontaneous adventures in the Deep, Deep Down and the Azure Etern. Whether you’re guiding a group or playing solo, Downcrawl‘s evocative prompts frame your own stories of dangerous travel through subterranean realms where the Sun is mere legend. A Skycrawl gamemaster sends players on serendipitous skyship voyages through whimsical twilights.
These ebooks work with any fantasy RPG rules set. Explore weird and wondrous environments in pointcrawl adventures through forgotten labyrinths, cloud kingdoms lit by intelligent suns, stalactite cities, and hollow asteroids – the Clutchlands and Drizzle Deep, the Shattermoon and Godwood, the Bubblemuck and Zenith Ring. Deal with obscenity moss, worm tamers, outcast sorcerers, fungal druggists, and zero-gee Spindlefolk vagabonds. Take a Brass-Bound Elevator down into the Crystal Fissure, find a floating god-corpse swathed in immense mushrooms, and face the shunned and spiderwebbed warehouses beneath Grand Lithic Station.
Downcrawl‘s designer, California writer and researcher Aaron A. Reed, is the author of 50 Years of Text Games (2022), co-author of the textbook Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, 2020), and longtime experimenter with procedural text generation and interactive fiction. In 2010 he told a web-based story called “Blueful” via a trail that stretched across three dozen different social media sites, maps, e-commerce reviews, and even spreadsheets and T-shirts. Readers followed a trail of links to piece together a story of a painter lost between worlds. To learn the outcome, you mailed Aaron to request a physical postcard with the story’s conclusion. More than a thousand people on six continents took the journey and requested a postcard.
The Downcrawl games show Aaron’s gift for invention, with unusual Impromptu Moves like “Find Inspiration” and “Greetings, Stranger” that help solitaire players or play groups improvise a storyline. Funded in an October 2024 BackerKit campaign (865 backers, US$80.9K), Downcrawl Second Edition (2025) features new rules for solo or collaborative play and an optional deck of idea cards that inspire weird underworld places, characters, and details. Recombinable oracles send you down unpredictable pathways so every journey is always unique. You’ll never guess what lies down that tunnel or past that cloudbank.
In a May 2024 blog post, “Downcrawl: Making Up the World,” Aaron wrote: “One of the big differences between original Downcrawl and 2E is that generation of weird places and peoples happens live at the table, rather than offline between sessions. (By default, anyway – you can still do it the old-school way if you prefer.) It’s certainly fun to spend a quiet Saturday worldbuilding by yourself in advance of a game, but it’s also time-consuming. Volume generation in Downcrawl 1E had ten steps, some of which involved multiple spontaneous acts of creation in a row, like ‘come up with 3-5 interesting and creative ideas for encounters here.’
“Downcrawl 2E takes a different approach. By default, no Folk or Volumes exist in the world until the moment your players need one. When they do, you generate just enough detail to meet the needs of the current moment. […] If later the players want to investigate this place further, or plan a journey to visit it, you can generate additional information, enhancing your picture of this place. As you learn more Details, it becomes easier to plan a journey to this Volume; by the time you arrive, you will have learned six unique Details, enough to paint a complex and interesting picture of this location.
“It’s up to you and your table who generates these answers. The GM might do it in secret, behind a screen; the players might do it and announce their results, leaving it to the GM to synthesize them. […] Everyone gets to discover the world at the same time, together, without any wasted generation that never gets seen. It can make sessions feel much more dynamic and player-driven. GMs won’t be railroading players toward pre-planned creations, because most of the world is made up on the fly, and players themselves drive the worldbuilding through the sparks they choose to follow.”
This new Downcrawl-Skycrawl Bundle brings you the whole line, including the latest supplement, for less than the price to hire Rizzmer, an elder Otterkin explorer in the Drizzle League, to guide your Venture to the Aquaeon Conclave on the trail of the Elderfish Typhon. Pay just US$14.95 to get all seven titles in our Crawling Collection (retail value $62) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Downcrawl 2E core rulebook along with the Delver’s Guide; the standalone companion game Skycrawl and its location sourcebook Ten Ports in an Infinite Sky; and all three issues of the Downcrawl Adventure Zine: #1 The Hypogean Solution, #2 Where the Rock Stops, and the just-published #3 The Drizzle Depths.
Note: We presented the First Edition of Downcrawl in the November 2019 Worldbuilder’s Toolkit 6. This is the new Second Edition corebook.
This Downcrawl-Skycrawl offer goes missing under Scribbler’s Rock in the Buried Archive way in the Deep, Deep Down Monday, March 9.
