The Downcrawl Deck: Instant Ideas
One of Downcrawl 2E’s big innovations is an optional add-on card deck that makes generating weird new people, places, and ideas for your underworld adventures nearly instantaneous. How does it work?
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The Downcrawl book, as with many TTRPG tomes, contains a robust set of tables filled with evocative prompts and ideas. These are often used in combination: for instance, a random underground landscape might be a result of Ambiance + Terrain. Generating a new kind of Folk (the strange peoples you meet in this underland) means rolling on Appearance + Folk Concept + Reputation.
What the Downcrawl Deck cards do is put one result from each table on each individual card, with the results arranged such that frequently combined tables can easily be stacked for an immediate combinatorial answer.
For instance, you might get a new NPC by combining Reputation + Person. Here’s two examples:
Or a subterranean landscape that your journey takes you through by combining Aspect + Terrain.
Normally prompts that go together are color-coded, as seen above, but a certain rule allows you to get more unpredictable results by crossing category boundaries:
The Downcrawl Deck contains 36 cards, to align with Downcrawl 2E’s tables which all have 36 rows (which you consult by rolling d66, or 2d6 read as two numbers like 1-1, 1-2, 1-3 etc). But each Deck card (between the front and back side) covers 22 tables, meaning there are a total of 36×22=792: nearly eight hundred prompts across the whole deck. Given the myriad ways these can be combined, these cards allow for tens of thousands of unique ideas to be generated at the table with each deck*.
(*Does this mechanic allow for the hypothetical possibility of multiple decks that can be selected between (or mixed and matched from) to vary the style of your Downcrawl campaign? Am I, even as we speak, working on a deck called “Even Deeper” with extra-weird prompts for people who want their underworld adventures to contain “luminescent babies” or “primeval numerologists?” Pure speculation, I assure you, pure speculation…)
It’s important to note that the Downcrawl Deck is completely optional: the game works just fine when you roll dice and consult tables in the traditional style. (In fact the 2E book’s design has been carefully considered to make finding and cross-referencing tables as easy as possible.)
But in playtesting, the Deck has proved to be a huge win. It really lowers the friction for triggering a move that involves rolling on a table. Rather than needing to grab the rulebook, find the right page, roll some dice, and consult the correct table row—then potentially doing it all again for a combinatorial result—you just flip over the top card of the deck and align two color-coded categories. It makes it way faster to generate ideas live at the table, which in turn brings more serendipity and surprises into your game. It’s just plain fun, and I’m really proud of how (after many playtest iterations) it’s evolved into a really cool tool to help generate Downcrawly stories together.
(The Downcrawl Deck has even inspired a standalone worldbuilding game, which you can optionally use for a Session Zero… but more about that in a future update.)
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