{"id":177,"date":"2025-04-07T21:35:58","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T03:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fluoriteguillotine.com\/blog\/?p=177"},"modified":"2025-04-07T21:35:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T03:35:58","slug":"urban-depthcrawl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fluoriteguillotine.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/07\/urban-depthcrawl\/","title":{"rendered":"urban depthcrawl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I grew up in Suzhou, China, which had a population of about 6 million people when I was living there and has only grown since then. I considered it to be a small city in comparison to Shanghai, which was roughly an hour away and had a population of 25 million and better public transportation. These experiences have shaped my understanding of the term “city” and continue to inspire me to add them to my games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been many<\/a> posts recently about how to run cities in ttrpgs. My favorites are the six-part series by A Knight At The Opera<\/a> and the sandbox post by elmcat<\/a>. Both are inspirations for the city procedure in this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Metru Nui by Faber<\/a>, Ba Sing Se by Connor Sheehan<\/a>, Neketaka from Pillars of Eternity II<\/a>, and Kirkwall from Dragon Age II<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dwiz claims that there is no unified city procedure because the activities players perform are so diverse and depend on the tone of the game. He’s right — which is why I won’t pretend that my city designs will work in every game. I also tend to prefer something like a megacity, which is one of the edge cases where he acknowledges that it makes sense to have a travel procedure. However, I also don’t want to turn my cities into adventure sites where the main objective is to crawl through them — despite this being a popular play activity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"a<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cities should be like fractals in nature: public transporation and main thoroughfares should be plenty safe, and opportunities to get lost should only start to bother players when they move off well-trod paths. Elmcat uses the “Landmark, Hidden, Secret” principle by DIY & Dragons<\/a> to prep neighborhoods with different levels of locations based on how accessible they are. The idea that destinations within a city are unequal contributes to Dwiz’s issues with traditional pointcrawls and other maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where Adam Seats<\/a> over on discord infected my brain with worms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were asking about depthcrawls<\/a> about a month ago, which was a term I had never heard before. It’s vaguely OSR-adjacent, given that it’s mostly about dungeon crawling and the danger getting more intense the further down you go. I later realized that “depthcrawl” basically meant “weighted table” combined with a mechanic that increases your chance to roll higher on the table and made a joke that “lancer overheating is a depthcrawl”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"a<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If we abstract even further it becomes apparent that weighted tables are basically another form of “partial success” with a high amount of granularity. What’s important is that we can apply it to city travel:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"an<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When players travel to a new location in the city, they roll 1d6 on this table. Add +1 to the roll for each of the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n