The Dark Crawl

A Dark Crawl is a kind of adventure or RPG session, a gritty exploration into the weird and unknown, laden with danger and consequences, where informed player choices have strong influences. This may differ slightly from OSR-style play. Player choice is highlighted as a feature of OSR, lending impact to sessions, providing player satisfaction and enjoyment.

A dark crawl distinguishes itself with the word informed. Player immersion is key to a dark crawl, investing participants in it by not just providing player choices that impact the session (or adventure, campaign, setting), but that give these choices with accompanying context and details.

In an example from Questing Beast, "deciding whether to go left or right in a dungeon" is given of player choice. The emphasis is on players not feeling nose-ringed, that adventures avoid a linear design with few choices, or even no choices at all. For dungeon crawls, this is accomplished by "Jaquaysing The Dungeon."

A dark crawl takes this a step further by giving choices where players are aware of their context and details. For instance, when coming to a fork in a dungeon, footprints of a villain followed may lead to the left, dust and cobwebs lie to the right. Now the decision is more interesting, prompting other, now informed, considerations: Does the villain know we're following him and now leads us into a trap? Does the right passage connect with the left further along? Could we get ahead of our adversary through the right passage and set an ambush?

This is my opening salvo about the Dark Crawl and how it might add a little more to your gaming that is different than other RPG styles/cultures. Providing meaningful clues is not new to RPGs, nor is it a singularly defining feature of a particular method. It is, rather, one way to inject player immersion. "Dark crawl" conjures an image of squeezing through deep passages, alone and absent of light, emphasizing that what YOU do right now is crucial and important. While immersion, and even roleplaying, are more often not the focus of many RPGs, it is definitely key to a dark crawl.