Today we’re looking at Crawl from the Catacombs, a 12-room gauntlet by Connor McCloskey. The PCs wake up in a crypt, having died at some point, with no memory of their past selves. They roll names on two combined d6 tables with results like “mummy guts” and ” fungus ass”.  And then they dive straight from the frying pan and into a terror-soaked fire.

Despite being someone whose primary hobby is playing make-believe and even writing a few adventures myself, I don’t consider myself to be terribly imaginative. I have some trouble picturing things in my head that I haven’t seen. But this adventure conjures up some vivid and terrifying imagery for me. It is very effective at conveying the horror of the place. And I think that when the GM is able to get the vibe of an adventure so clearly, they will be able to create a more immersive experience for the players. 

The adventure will mostly consist of overcoming obstacles and environmental hazards while avoiding (or getting massacred by the dungeon’s many bloodthirsty inhabitants as the party struggles and dies their way to freedom. There are a lot of opportunities for creative problem-solving and in most cases just moving from one room to the next will be a challenge. It makes the most of its low room count and actually there’s enough here that a few rooms could probably be split up.  

There are also a few moral dilemmas – mostly about whether it’s worth the time, risk and resources to try and save some of the other recently-revived wretches. And there are multiple routes and overall a lot to do with a nice variety of HOTTness. How do you free a prisoner from a cage hanging over a bottomless chasm? It’s not a terribly complex situation but it has that kind of open-endedness that makes it fun to solve. This is typical of most of the interactions – simple but no less effective for it. 

A few rooms and features are difficult to grok. For example, “Sacrificial Door. 10 ft. wide heavy stone door with carving of a massive skull angel. Nude man and woman, nearly regenerated to full human hang chained by their wrists over it, their feet shackled to the middle. It is clear the lever in the middle of the room will drop the door and rip them in half.”

No, none of that is really clear to me. I mean, I can tell the players “it’s clear that the lever does this” but none of the details support this, i.e. it’s not explained why that’s clear. I’m also not sure what “drop the door” means. 

This is somewhat exacerbated by the map. Some areas should probably have been divided into separate rooms. Here’s area 7:

There’s a lot of geography packed into one room key, and it makes the features of the room a bit difficult to place. The red outlines help but probably not as much splitting it into two room keys would. 

For random encounters we’re told “Roll a d6 every 20 minutes of Exploration time (not Combat). There’s no reason to rework random encounters in this way. Torch time already applies real-time pressure on the players, and random encounters should apply pressure in terms of dungeon terms. The encounters themselves are interesting and varied, and we also get a nice table of omens to use when a 2 is rolled. 

Any one of those random encounters is probably 50/50 on adding the current PCs to the ever-growing stack of discarded character sheets. This dungeon is deadly. That’s usually fine, even encouraged for a gauntlet. But it becomes a problem when almost every interaction results in something terrible. Touch the strange plants? Dead. Open the urn? Also dead. Drink from the fountain? Believe it or not, dead. Dead right away. It teaches the players that they shouldn’t mess with anything, and messing around with weird stuff in dungeons is sorta the point of the game. I don’t think that’s the message we want to send – risk must be balanced with reward, and if there’s no upside to taking risks the players will stop doing it.

There is a bit of comic relief in the form of a talking skull that, when reunited with its body, will tell you about the magic potion it keistered. And it culminates in the PCs along with several other horrors escaping from the catacombs into the surface world. It’s a hell of an opening for a campaign where the characters might try to find out who they were or focus on starting a new life entirely. I love that it’s specifically designed so that you don’t need any kind of backstory, but also allows the players to pursue and solve the mystery of their origins if they so choose. It’s a great setup.  

Crawl from the Catacombs could use a bit of tune up to make some of the room descriptions clearer, and to tune that risk/reward ratio. But these are certainly not dealbreakers and this is one of the most evocative adventures I’ve read in a while. If you’re looking to kick off a campaign with strong horror themes, look no further.

On a scale of 2-12, Crawl from the Catacombs gets 8 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558120/crawl-from-the-catacombs