Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay, background & contrast enhancement by Mike

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer.

Despite the official discontinuation, every release of D&D from 3rd edition onward has perpetuated content that at the very least, tips its hat at the game setting, which remains popular in certain segments of the gaming community. Now, though, there’s a new game on the blocks for fans of this type of sub-genre to consider.

It’s called Skycrawl, and back in November, I was offered a review copy by the author.

Because I live in Australia, and there were no doubt some Covid-related delays, it finally arrived a couple of weeks ago, and in between other activities, I’ve been reading it since it landed in my letterbox.

Here’s what the author told me about it at the time:

    Hi Mike,

    I’m writing to offer a review copy of my new tabletop roleplaying book “Skycrawl,” a system-agnostic guidebook for running pointcrawl-style adventures in a setting of floating islands, airships, and endless skies. Skycrawl is the follow-up to Downcrawl, a DriveThruRPG Gold-selling title, and is by the author of the 2019 ENnie award winner “Archives of the Sky.” Skycrawl is a slim 75-page digest-size book packed full of generation tables; encounter seeds; systems for sky voyages, strange alchemies, and zero-g ship battles; and gorgeous woodcut collage illustrations. The game launches Dec 8 on DriveThruRPG.

    …

    I think your readers might be interested because of the book’s focus on giving GMs tips to generate interesting places and encounters both offline and live at the table, and weave them into a compelling overall narrative.

    …

    Thanks for your time and take care,
    — Aaron A. Reed

Now, I’m happy to review anything RPG-related that sounds interesting, and this definitely sounded interesting. So that’s what today’s post is all about.

Strange Suns, Strange Worlds

The game is set in an endless sky which has sources of light and warmth floating around in it, called the Azure and Sols, respectively. Each Sol is alive and has its own personality and characteristics, and these define the nature of the region of the Azure around the inhabitable spaces, which are called Lands.

Every land is unique and different; a Land may be a city, a ruin, a crossroads, a trade-port, a forest, a fortress, a pirate, a rock, a mountain, a sea, or many other alternatives. The only piece of real estate that is fixed is the one you happen to be anchored to at the time.

This owes a direct conceptual debt to Flash Gordon and the “moons” of Mongo, but spread onto a broader canvas. The game mechanics of the movement of Lands relative to wherever you are could have been a total nightmare, and are instead a triumph, infusing everything else with the flavor of anything being possible.

Whenever you have a strange environment like this, you always run headlong into traditional physics, that being what your players and yourself have lived with all your life. That matters because the people who live in this environment will be just as familiar with it as you are yours, and so you have to somehow bridge the divide – at least enough for the suspension of disbelief. It’s going too far to relate the whole credibility of the game setting to the treatment of the unusual aspects of the environment, but it’s almost that important.

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with some sort of “meta-law” that explains an unusual environment. Star Trek used to do it in almost every episode. “Captain’s Log, Stardate [whatever]. We have entered a region of space in which….” and you just describe the uniqueness, throw in a little technobabble, and frame the setting for the adventure of the day. Where some of those TV episodes feel down (or rose up) was in the consequences of the physical anomaly being described.

I’ve talked before about how I re-imagined the fantasy environment from TORG at the start of my campaign in that game setting; named Aylse, it is essentially a disk-world with inhabitants on each side of the disk (unlike the Pratchett version), in which gravity was in the same direction everywhere on the disk. I postulated a Dwarfish material that generated “down” (their name for gravity) when it got hot, and the direction of down was always toward the local concentration according to an inverse-square law. But what really sold this as reality was a Dwarven rapid-transit system – basically ore carts with a lump of ‘down-stuff’, and an adjustable ring mount to hold a simple torch so that the flames licked the ‘down stuff’. That meant that on a level track, the cart was always rolling downhill – at least until you pulled the torch away. The Dwarves also used the same technique to lighten their siege weapons, and to induce water flows through pipes, and to make their armor a little lighter when worn than it was ‘cold’, and dragons used it just to lighten themselves so that their wings were enough for them to fly on. The more things that were done with ‘down stuff’, the more plausibly and tightly-integrated into the campaign world it became.

The ‘pseudo-physics’ employed by Skycrawl is more complex, but no less tightly integrated, and the complexity is itself an asset because of that integration – something I’ll get to, a little later. For now, suffice it to say that the ships (or hot air balloons, or whatever) use exotic materials to generate their own localized gravity, so that you can walk around on the deck of a ship fairly normally even though the ship itself can fly through the skies in a zero-G environment, propelled by the winds, and it works as perfectly “plausible” pseudo-science. I think of it as a “gravitationally-strange” environment!

Lands

Lands are milestones in the overall adventure, destinations. that require considerable effort to reach. They are places to adventure, places to rest, places to meet others, and places to explore. Some will be well-known by name, some may have overt reputations, some will be threats, and some curiosities. Lands can either be the setting for the majority of the adventuring that takes place or mere pit stops in a life of exploration and discovery, or something in between. There may be one particular land to which the PCs are (socially, politically, economically, or metaphorically) tethered – or not.

The movement of individual lands is a critical element of the game system, and it takes place on the Zone Chart.

The Zone Chart

This is the first element of the game system that recognizably derives from board games. In essence, reality is divided into six zones. When PCs learn of a land that is (hypothetically) within reach of where they are, it’s name gets written on an index card which is then placed into that zone.

The zones are “Lost / unknown” (an unofficial one), Distant (approaching), Approaching, Nearby, Receding, and Distant (Receding) – though abbreviated names are used by the rules, this is what they are attempting to convey.

So, except in unusual circumstances, a new Land would start off in “Unknown” (which basically means ‘you can’t get there from here’). When first detected, it gets put into the Distant (approaching) Zone, and it then migrates from there through the other zones until it once again becomes Lost/Unknown. The difference is that you don’t ‘un-learn’ knowledge of the Land; on the contrary, you’ll know thereafter that it’s out there – somewhere.

There are also three types of “Orbit”, which describes the trajectory of the Land – Standard, Eccentric, and Wild. To reach Lands in a particular Orbit, you need a vessel or means of transport that is rated as appropriate for that Orbit, or have to get/earn some form of special assistance.

The Flow Dynamic

There are three essential phases of the game which comprise the flow dynamic that propels a Land (and the accompanying Sols) from one Zone to another. These are defined in a very board-gamish nomenclature, and described in mechanics that would be familiar to most players of board games.. They are, respectively, “Updating The Chart”, “Charting Your Destiny” and “The Heavens Turn”.

“Updating The Chart” happens whenever you reach a Land, even if it’s one that you’ve been to many times before, and interact with a source of news or rumors. Your primary goal in this game phase is to earn Tack. (The actual rules specify “Locals” but I can think of several sources of news or rumors that wouldn’t fit that description, but with whom this option would be appropriate.

“Charting Your Destiny” permits you to spend Tack to gain information about where you are and launch an interaction with the environment.

“The Heavens Turn” takes place whenever an adventure ends or when the PCs have been in the same location for a few weeks, whichever comes first.

These timings have to be borne in mind when attempting to understand the dynamics and their interplay, and this is the real genius in terms of generating the “flavor” that I was complimenting earlier.

    Updating The Chart

    Each PC engaging with a source of information gains 1 tack for the party and can choose 2 events from a list. This is that PC’s one and only chance to do so – choosing not to is choosing to earn no Tack in a location (possibly because there will be undesirable consequences to interacting with the news source), and once you’ve done it once, that’s it – you’ve earned your Tack for the phase. Tack is also available from the GM as a group experience award, and for various action choices when traveling from one Land ti Another.

    There are 7 items on the list. It follows that with 3 PCs, even with the best of intentions, one just won’t happen – and it might be more if two or more PCs double-up on one of the choices. They are

    • “What’s the News?” (collect a rumor or a story seed about the Land);
    • “Ask For Directions” (get Reliable in-Land directions to a well-known Destination – a marketplace or lodgings, for example);
    • “Seek Refreshment” (if possible in this location, find a place to relax and remove a point of exhaustion);
    • “Ephemeris Update” (learn the name of one Distant or Uncharted Land that is now approaching, nearby, or receding, or tell you there are no updates available)
    • “Find A Departure” (learn of a vessel setting sail in the next few days for a Nearby Land. If there are no Nearby Lands on the chart, the GM can choose to add one – I personally would do so from the “approaching” zone. This means that PCs don’t need their own vessel, they can simply sign on to work for, or book passage with, someone else.
    • “Gather Stories” (the GM either gives the PC a rumor about a random known Land or adds an Uncharted Land to the chart in any zone he likes and shares a rumor about it.
    • “Keep Your Ears Open” – earn one extra Tack for letting the GM choose which of the preceding options you experience.

    In other words, these provide the starting points for adventures – some relating to where you are now, some relating to somewhere you could go, or to how you could get there.

    Charting Your Destiny

    When a PC sets out to gather information, he can either spend 1 Tack for a certain success in one of six options, or make a skill roll to achieve success – which risks failures and complications. The GM shouldn’t simply give the results, he should furnish some sort of interaction between the PC and an NPC that (eventually) yields the information or opportunity to roll.

    The choices include the 7 “Updating The Chart” options, and five other specific pieces of information. You can get hidden information about something, get information about a specific resource, get a rumor about a specific Land other than this one, let you meet with the captain of a vessel capable of transporting you somewhere you want to go, or (crucially) get the option of treating the orbit of your next destination as Standard – making it possible to get there (but not making it any easier to get back).

    This dynamic permits you to engage more fully with one of the plot seeds from a previous “Update The Chart” or to develop a link to an existing plotline.

    The Heavens Turn

    This is more of a process than the other dynamics.

    • You remove the destination or the Land that the PCs have spent time in from the chart and set it aside;
    • If the Land set aside was Distant, gather all the NON-Distant Lands and shuffle them;
    • If the Land wasn’t Distant:
      • gather all the Distant Lands (both approaching and receding) and shuffle them;
      • move all the remaining lands to adjacent zones, in the sequence
        Receding → Distant;
        Nearby → Receding; and
        Approaching → Nearby.
      • Then draw one Land from the shuffled stack and place it in Approaching;
    • Put the Land that was set aside into the Nearby Zone.
    • Move all the remaining shuffled cards into the Distant Zone. The rules don’t distinguish between Distant (approaching) and Distant (receding), but the dynamic makes more sense if they are in the Distant (approaching).
    • The GM may then choose one of the Distant Lands (approaching or receding) and announce that it is now so far away that it’s location is no longer known, moving it into the Lost/Uncharted stack.

    The net effect is that every other known Land moves, relative to the Land that the PCs are in. Sometimes, they don’t move far, or come back again; sometimes, they vanish forever when they fall out of the local region described by the Zone Chart.

    I would personally add two more steps to this process:

    • If a Land is in Approaching, or Receding, and is in an Eccentric Orbit, roll a d6; on a 1-2, it moves back one Zone, on a 5-6, it moves one Zone more than indicated. Repeat the roll for all other Lands in Eccentric Orbits that are not Nearby.
    • If a Land is in Approaching, Nearby, or Receding, and is in a Wild Orbit, roll a d6; on a 1, it moves back two Zones; on a 2-3, it moves back one Zone; on a 5, it moves one zone more than indicated; on a 6, it moves to Distant (receding). If such a Land moves as a result, skip the next one meeting the description; if it does not, repeat the roll for the next Land in a Wild Orbit.

    This simply reflects the instability implied by these “orbits” in their relative positioning.

    But that’s just me.

The Compound Effect

When you put these dynamics together, you have a tool that forces characters to engage with their surroundings in order to earn Tack, then advance a particular plotline from amongst those on offer while reducing the amount of Tack available, while the Lands freewheel across the sky in a semi-predictable manner, taking some plot seeds off the table and replacing them with new ones. Players would quickly learn that if they were interested in pursuing a plot seed, they would have to act quickly or risk losing the chance – and, of course, there’s a limit to how many plot pies a character can have his fingers in at once.

From One World To Another

Implicit in the above is the ability to travel from one Land to another. This is another involved process; suffice it to say that it costs Tack and time to do so, and is never a sure thing. What’s more, healing while in the Azure isn’t permitted (or is severely limited). The winds can be capricious, becalming you or blowing you off-course toward a completely different Land than the one you wanted, but you can’t linger indefinitely; sooner or later, you will have to make Landfall or risk becoming Lost.

Various encounters are possible, and the GM has various options up his sleeve to influence the journey and make it dramatic. The rules don’t say so, but some of these options should be used sparingly, in my opinion, or it will have the effect of the GM cutting off access to various plotlines in which the players have engaged. On the other hand, if the GM has exhausted his idea stockpile for a particular plot thread, this might be a way out!

Luck in Skycrawl

While Skycrawl uses a number of dice, the most common is the standard d6. One thing that the GM and Players will have to wrap their heads around is that “2d6” doesn’t quite mean the same thing as it usually does in an RPG. Instead, it means “roll 1d6 on this table and 1d6 on the indicated sub-table” – so it’s more like a slot machine’s reels than a continuous range of numeric outcomes achieved by adding two die results together.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but the shift in nomenclature does take some getting used to.

By the way, if you are looking for an interesting British online gambling platform, check out Novibet. Visitors from other countries might not be able to see the site.

Cropped by Mike

The Concept Of Orcery

Skycrawl features ten “Heavy Elements” which function as wealth and trade goods, and have specific qualities. A character with the right training can mine or “distill” a unit or “measure” of one or more of these heavy elements as a ship travels from one place to another. These heavy elements are increasingly rare and valuable as one moves up the scale, and the less predictable the orbit of the destination land, the more likely you are to get a rare result..

Another way that such a character can use his day is to “fuse” two measures into the next higher (and more valuable) type.

There are rules for substituting measures of alternative elements in such a process.

Marrying two measures of the heaviest of the stable elements, Phire, creates an eleventh element, “Obscenity”, a dark point of incredibly destructive energy (with you at ground zero for that destruction).

These elements generate artificial gravity, but this can be nullified during the ‘distillation’ process.

There are built-in consequences for having too much of any one element in one place at one time. It’s in the nature of these elements to try and combine – two coins of the same type can stick together very easily. There might be only a 10% (or whatever) chance of such a spontaneous combination, but if you have 100 such 10% chances, you’re in trouble, as I explained in my recent article, Everything Happens At Once: A statistical principle.

A typical ship can carry about a dozen measures of heavy elements safely, before unwanted interactions become a problem.

    Universal Wealth & Economics

    One of the options that a character skilled in Orcery has, while transiting between lands, is to transmute a measure of one of three elements into a more stable form which is used as near-universal coinage.

    This transmutation is one-way, and cannot be readily undone (the rules actually say it can’t, but ‘never say never’ – I can imagine an adventure to steal/destroy a formula/technique for doing so, and the political ramifications of someone claiming to have such a process).

    Ten coins of a given type are the equivalent of a measure, but fractional measures don’t count. So 100 of the most valuable coins takes you to the brink of disaster – some of them could explode, or melt, or become valueless base metal, or whatever, until the total drops below the critical threshold.

    Sociologically, that means that Banks would be incredibly rare, and would charge an arm and a leg. Instead, you would want to convert coins into possessions or trade goods as often as possible.

    Wealth thus becomes about having things, the prettier, more exclusive, or more functional, the better. This would logically produce a system of artisan commissions or patronage in which skilled craftsmen convert the wealth of others into products, in the process disseminating wealth to the purveyors of raw materials.

    I didn’t see too much discussion of this in the rules, which conveys the impression that maybe the ‘excess coinage’ ideas were either an afterthought or were at least partially abandoned. Or perhaps some sections of the rules give the impression that coins ‘count’ in large numbers toward the number of measures, and this was inadvertent and is not correct.

    Personally, I like the notion of a ‘self-correcting’ problem of wealth concentrating excessively, it expresses a unique aspect of the setting to solve a problem that can plague other game systems.

    You might think that this makes large constructions impossible – castles and ships and the like – but I disagree; such things would simply not be bought as a unit, but piecemeal on an ongoing basis. This week, you buy the keel and some ribbing, next week to pay to have them assembled, the week after you buy more ribbing, and so on.

    Anything that can be broken down into sub-units in this way is perfectly viable in such an economy. What goes off the table are ultra-expensive single-function goods like magic swords – since these are crafted in one hit, not in sub-units, there is an inherent cap to the value of such things, which generally equates to a cap on the game impact that they can have.

    Character Improvement or the lack thereof

    This becomes critically important as I didn’t see any mechanisms for character progression in the rules (they might be there and I simply missed them – never discount the possibility of human error!)

    When you can’t raise your stats, and can’t improve your skills, at will, the principle mechanism characters in most game systems turn to is an improvement in equipment. Putting a cap on how much can be done in that respect is of vital importance.

    Characters can accumulate wealth in the form of more and more things – but have to be able to take them with them because they could vanish at any time as the Land where they are located migrates. Again, there’s a natural cap. Spending on a vessel is an obvious wealth-soak with immediate rewards, and is the logical destination for PC wealth as it accumulates.

    So, how can characters progress?

    Well, the GM has near-total control over the forms of experience that he hands out, how much, and when. Permitting characters to exchange wealth for “beginner’s lessons” in a new skill practiced by the locals is perfectly within his purview, and such can even be sought out by the PC desirous of such using the rules. But access to such improvements is a function of plot and game-play, it can’t be taken for granted the way it is in D&D, for example.

    Characters improve, in other words, by improving their circumstances and environment and – to a lesser extent – their possessions and conspicuous wealth. Abilities and capabilities are largely fixed and unchanging – and that means that characters effectively have unlimited longevity to adventure.

    The Alchemic Payoff

    If you have ten elements, you have 10×10=100 ways in which they can combine, two at a time. Ten of those combinations have already been discussed, yielding a single measure of the next element up the ladder.

    Which leaves 90 more, even at this most basic of combinatorial levels. These combinations are known as Admixtures, but just about everyone will mentally file them under the heading “Potions”.

    It’s perfectly acceptable (and recommended) for the GM to hide some of the more unusual combinations and let a PC discover them by experimentation.

    A character can have a maximum of about 10 Admixtures on or around him at a time. You don’t need Orcery to use an Admixture, just to make one. Another wealth-sink is buying Admixtures that someone else has prepared – but, since repeat business is rare in an environment like the Azure, these may or may not be trustworthy. Either way, this is also capped as a way to improve a character.

    In general, the effects of an Admixture will last for 24 hours, and that immediately distinguishes them a bit from most D&D “potions”.

    There are two basic approaches, from an RPG perspective, on this alchemy, either individually or in combination.

    One is that each process, or group of related processes, is different. This makes the production of Admixtures the pinnacle of expertise in Orcery, and is what I think the author was aiming for without being explicit about it.

    The alternative is that all 100 outcomes are the results of applying a single suite of basic techniques, which opens the door to expanding the Lore and producing more combinations, and spending lots of time and money on experimentation. The basic process of combination is hinted at as placing the two components under pressure, which seems too simple and straightforward to me, but let that stand, because it opens the door immediately to three alternative processes: heat, electricity, and catalysis. Even if these only result in two elements being combined, they add 100 more possible Admixtures to the range each, and that’s before combinations of techniques are taken into account. Then there are complex interactions in which four elements are combined to yield two different admixtures outside the normal group, or one unusual admixture and ‘leftovers’. There are effectively unlimited options open to you.

    For example, you might have to dissolve one Element in a caustic liquid like acid to extract some “vital essence” from it, vaporize the resulting fluid, then expose a second Element to the hot gasses under pressure in the presence of a third Element (which is not consumed by the process) in order to produce an Admixture that is different from simply melting the two elements and stirring them together. There is zero chance that you would stumble over this combination of techniques by accident! Get any one of the steps wrong, and you end up with nothing. Or maybe you end up with something else!

    There is a danger, though, of letting the character with Orcery overshadow the campaign. The more of this stuff that you permit, the greater the danger of that – the 100 is an about-right compromise.

The Orcery subsystem is a key element of the rules and one that can easily be extracted and used in other game systems.

Encounters

A critical element of any RPG are encounters of multiple types – conversations, negotiations, purchases, trade, relationships. In a board game, these functions tend to be reduced to combat, or to rolling dice – get the right number and the encounter outcome pops out like a slot machine payout.

This is therefore an area of critical interface and distinction between the two types of game rules.

You will already have seen in the excerpted “Update The Chart” outcomes that some critical encounters fall into the slot-machine category, but others are left more open.

As a general principle (and one that I hadn’t given any thought to until now), board game encounter mechanics produce dictated outcomes or challenges, RPG encounters produce open outcomes as a consequence of the interactions between the characters/beings encountering each other. One points to a specific end to the process, an outcome, the other to a beginning with little or no predetermined idea about where it will end – though possible outcomes may be enumerated, there is no road map to them.

There are a great many locations where encounters become possible in Skycrawl.

    In Transit

    When traveling from one Land to another, you may encounter someone else doing the same thing, or something local to the destination or origin Land. This type of encounter includes (by default) atmospheric conditions, and a large table of these are provided.

    Some of these encounters can be the most complex a GM has to run – contemplate a situation in which you encounter Pirates. Not only do you have the usual two-dimensional movements to contemplate, but there may be a faster air-current below the one you’re both in, or an air-current flowing in a completely different direction above you. On top of that, different “atmospheres” can have exotic effects. And that’s a vastly simplified battle environment!

    On Lands

    If you land on (or even just approach) a Land which is inhabited by some hostile species, trouble is sure to follow.

    In Cities & Communities

    A certain level of similarity gets forced on creatures when a lot of them live in the same space. There are certain social functions that have to take place, and are recognizable, no matter how dissimilar the specifics of the approach relative to what you are used to.

    For example, all species will have some form of food collection and distribution mechanism within their society, but the specifics may vary.

    PCs can easily engage with a social function – “we need to buy more food” – but can’t predict the shape of that engagement.

    It’s going too far to say that every encounter will be a first encounter, but different societies will do these basic things differently.

    Unexplored Wilderness

    If you land on a Forest world, you can expect to have encounters with the local wildlife.

    Alien Life

    With each Land being different, so are the life-forms indigenous to that Land. Anything from Hippo-people to Bird-Men and Women, from Giant Wyrms inhabiting a free-floating sea to… well, you get the idea.

    There’s a strong resemblance to a Sci-Fi show like Star Trek – but you only need the equivalent of a local runabout, the weirdness comes to you and something new is always on the horizon.

    Don’t fall into the trap of making your aliens too much like humans wearing rubber masks.

    As a comment to one of my answers on Quora, I offered a list of relevant articles on that very topic, and I think it might be worth repeating here:

    Oh, all right, one or two more:

The Genre Jigsaw

Another consequence of the multitude of possible Lands is that while your campaign may have one central genre, it’s easy for it to make excursions into other genres, because each Land is carrying it’s own style and flavor and environment.

Sometimes, you might need to stretch the fantastic as an underpinning – think of the axioms, world laws, and their consequences in TORG:

  • Axioms (a bit like Tech Levels and Law Levels in Traveler and other RPGs, these define the fundamental underpinnings of an environment, and define what ‘fits’ within that environment);
  • World Laws (internal rules about how a world works, which actions tend to bend reality in your favor and which ones are like trying to argue with gravity while you’re already falling).

The Boardgame Potential

As a board-game, this is an extremely cooperative environment in which to operate, and the rules for imposing a competitive structure aren’t included – though it wouldn’t be too difficult to create some.

Within that context, there is huge scope for flexibility. For example, you might have two or three teams of players – the expectation would be that the members of a team will cooperate with each other, but each team is competing with the others to be the first to achieve X – whether that’s earning a certain amount of wealth, or finding the macguffin hidden somewhere in one of the Lands on the current Chart and getting it back home, or a race, or whatever. You would still need a GM, so he can set the victory conditions. This transforms Skycrawl into a board-game with RPG elements, and is possibly Skycrawl at its best..

The RPG Potential

It’s easy to use Skycrawl as a one-day RPG; it simply requires the incorporation of appropriate narrative elements, which (at a conceptual level) the game rules will help you to create. There are times when the rules permit a player to dictate a particular outcome from an encounter; while this is contrary to the inherent philosophy of RPGs (see the introduction to the “Encounters” section above), it may be an acceptable compromise to keep the game moving at a pace conducive to resolving an adventure in a single day’s play. In fact, if that’s the only compromise that you have to make in order to achieve this, you’re probably doing well!

The Campaign Potential

Things become more complicated when you start thinking about a bigger picture. If you want to string a series of one-day adventures together with recurring characters and a common “home base”, and assume that there’s enough time between adventures for the chart to completely transform, that’s probably the simplest approach. As soon as you introduce anything more than the simplest-possible continuity, you begin to run into problems.

The biggest of these is the Chart. With continuity, the Chart at the start of a game session has to derive from the Chart that was there at the end of the previous game session. And that means recording the status of the chart.

I would start by adding the type of Orbit to the name on the card. Next, you need a quick-and-easy way to list the Lands that are in each zone – so I would number these as they appear within the game. That means that the status list can be reduced to a list of the zones and the numbers of the Lands that are within.

It also means that if random shuffling produces a Land with a number already on it, you know immediately that this Land has appeared before – there is campaign history there. While you might recognize the name, you might not just as easily, so this can be a handy mnemonic device.

That’s all that’s really necessary for campaign play. You can go further.

For example, you might roll 2d6 and write the result on the card for any Lands in a Standard Orbit – this being the number of game days or game weeks before that Land automatically reappears in the Distant (approaching) Zone.

You could decide to add another pair of Zones outside the Distant ones – call them Remote – too far away to reach without stopping at an intermediate point, but close enough that you still know where they are.

You could reduce the number of Lands and have distinct ongoing plotlines taking place on each – which one advances depends on where the PCs go, anywhere they go will present an adventure. They can spend an hour’s play or an entire game session there and then move on to a different Land and a different plotline. You could also use different Lands to spotlight specific characters.

As these suggestions show, there’s a lot of scope for a very successful strong-continuity campaign in Skycrawl.

The Game Author

Author Aaron A Reed is a multi-award winning game designer and author. His website also has all sorts of other tools and goodies that might be of interest. I was intrigued, for example, by 18 Cadence and Almost Goodbye.

Buying

Purchase from DrivethruRPG – current prices $8 PDF $15 Softcover Hard-copy, B&W Interior (5.5″ x 8.5″) or get the PDF Free when you buy the Printed Book.

Freebies & Extras

The Official Website
doesn’t host the book itself (just a link to DrivethruRPG) but it does host some free handouts (in one 7-page PDF) and a 12-page preview.

The Verdict

There are some games that have interesting mechanics and elicit an intellectual desire to try them out. There are other games that suffuse every page with genre atmosphere and elicit an emotional desire to immerse yourself in them, one rooted in your appreciation for the genre in question. It’s really quite rare to find a game that ticks both boxes. And yet, there is a sense of the systems being just a little incomplete, of needing to do more work before the game is ready to run, as shown in both the Boardgame and the Campaign sections above..

This is both a virtue and a curse. A curse because this is work that has been left to the individual GM to do; a virtue because this is an opportunity for each GM to customize the game and campaign infrastructure to suit the campaign that they want to run.

If you have any interest in running a fantasy campaign in which things that can usually be taken for granted are constantly changing, if you have any interest in pulp-style adventures in a fantastic game-space, if you want an interesting new perspective on game mechanics and the potential for importing board game rules into the RPG rules space, this game is worth your money and time. But more than any of those things, if you want a game that reeks of wild, unpredictable, fun, you should buy this game.

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