#SCRAWL RPG HOW TO#

(This provides a straight-forward prep structure.) Let’s take a moment to review the characteristics of a ‘crawl (based on our analysis of the dungeoncrawl and hexcrawl): A scenario structure that would use the same fundamental principles that dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls use. What I’m looking for right now, though, is an urban crawl. Node-based scenario design is a flexible tool and I’m not afraid to use it.

#SCRAWL RPG HOW TO#

I know how to run effective adventures and entire campaigns that are set in a city. My current 3.5 campaign – set entirely within the city of Ptolus – has been running for 100+ sessions. If that was what I was talking about, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. With the recent uptick in people being interested in dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls, I’ve seen a fair amount of people using the term “urbancrawl” to just mean “a D&D adventure that happens to be set in a city”. (And another year and a half since I wrote the previous sentence.) And I still don’t think I’ve solved it.įirst, let me clarify something: I am not trying to figure out how to run urban adventures. I eventually excised the discussion of urbancrawls from the series, but was fairly confident I would be able to solve the problems and present it independently in the very near future. But as I wrote the series, it became clear that I was not as close as I thought I was. When I started the Game Structures series I thought I was really close to cracking the urbancrawl nut. One of the things that was originally supposed to be part of that essay series was a discussion of urbancrawls: A structure that would have completed the triumvirate of dungeoncrawl-hexcrawl-urbancrawl and given an essentially “complete” structure for running exploration-based fantasy campaign worlds. What’s about to follow may make a bit more sense if you click through that link first. Many moons ago I presented a series of essays on Game Structures in roleplaying games: Learning them, prepping for them, using them, creating them, and so forth.

Scrawl rpg