RPG Review: Skycrawl

Skycrawl is a systemless setting book to help you build a hex-crawl adventure through a world of endless skies. Airships sail through the Azure Etern, full of 19th century physics and strange elements.

Skycrawl is designed for any RPG, but borrows from PBTA in dealing with exploration, in that when you roll for travel and exploration, you have degrees of successes. The book provides a table to allow you to use the dice of the game system you’re using so that it blends seamlessly into your game.

The ships of the Azure are wide and varied, as are the immense skybeasts who inhabit it. Sols, the suns of this universe, are immense glowing lights that provide heat and breathable air while generating their own gravity. Lands are island big and small that the Sols orbit around. Between those Sols, the pale blue sky turns to twilight, and the air grows thin and cold.

The book describes the flora and fauna of the world. Tall beanstalks stretch high above the Lands and can be used as skyship tethers, Tremantas are enormous floating manta rays, some of which hold whole villages on their backs. Windpigs are… well, they’re pigs with bat wings who are endlessly hungry. The world of Skycrawl is beautiful, varied, and strange.

Because the worlds of the Azure are constantly moving, maps are nearly useless, so players will spend some of their time seeking out locals and learning rumors to learn about their next location, including where it was last seen. This can help improve the travel. Travel between worlds is cold and miserable, so you can’t gain the benefits of a full night’s rest (based on the RPG you’re using). Planning your journey requires a special roll with all kinds of modifiers based on how well you learned about the new land you’re traveling to, while each day of travel allows all of the players to make various rolls to help contribute to the ship’s travel. These are various tables based on tasks, and operate like Moves in Powered by the Apocalypse games, but are explanatory enough that you don’t need to be familiar with that game system to use this. Failure on rolls, can lead to complications, including becoming lost, being forced to circle back, or simply losing a day as your ship mindlessly drifts.

One of my favorite sections is Orcery. This is the study of heavy elements, and the book provides 10 different elements and their Orchemical effects. Combining each in different ways will create different chemical compounds which can be used in REALLY interesting ways. Some are just colors and pigments, some are flavors, while others provide actual magical effects. Combining two different orchemicals together can create a heavier orchemical, so constant combination can create all kinds of interesting effects.

The book is full of all kinds of tables for helping you imagine the various Lands your characters will visit, including atmospheric conditions and land, as well as interesting encounters you’ll experience. There are also campaign arc seeds to help give you a complete storyline. It also includes some sample lands, which are all very interesting in their own right. Further tables generate NPCs you may encounter, and there is a phenomental set of tables to create interesting and exotic ships. For example:

The Ember Duchess, an archaic but reliable peacekeeping vessel on its way for a refit. It is a flat-decked ship that uses large propellers to move it through the air.

Ship combat is handled in an interesting way, allowing you to play without needing to keep track of D&D HP for a ship, or spending hours and hours in a slog of a battle.

All of the art in the book are modified public domain pieces, which all fit in perfectly to the theme of the game, and are quite beautiful.

I really, really love this book. I intend to use it whenever my players in D&D find themselves in the Astral Sea, though it could also very easily be used with Savage Worlds, any PBTA, or even something like Burning Wheel. It’s definitely worth picking up for a wealth of story seeds. You won’t regret it.

You can pick up Skycrawl at DriveThruRPG in both digital and physical formats. Aaron A. Reed has also published Downcrawl,  a similar book set in an underdark-like world, as well as Archives of the Sky, an Ennie Award-winning sci-fi GM-less RPG set a million years in the future.

Physical and digital copies of Skycrawl were sent to Dice Monkey for review.