Crawler TTRPG Devlog 1 - Origins

Previous post >here<

Back in 2022 I had gone back to uni to study game development, and as a final project, decided that it would be super within scope to design an immersive sim.

As it turns out, it is never within scope to design an immersive sim.

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The core gameplay design pillar was 'what if immersive sim but gun isn't your main way of interacting with the world', not necessarily non-violent, just you don't know how to use guns, and also you likely can't get your hands on one.

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The game was set in a giant superblock belonging to a company that at some point made something, but what specifically isn't known to anyone in the building. They and you, the player character, perform menial tasks under the watchful eyes of the boots and managers. Each subdivision of the block had its own purpose and a population of 50 - 150 people. Your character would start as a waste management engineer in the reclamation subdiv, and movement between subdivs is highly restricted and essentially has customs/immigration checkpoints at every elevator bank.

The building is over 200 years old, and no one really knows the exact floorplans anymore, except maybe some of the fortunate up high beyond the airgap. But then there are the crawlers that have made a society in the forgotten/abandoned voids and technical spaces running up and down the building.

My favourite cost saving idea from this time is that the story would start with your character getting blinded by steam and getting super shitty eyeball implants that can only see outlines, or maybe LIDAR readings. This woulda saved a lot of effort on making textures :p

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And so after shelving the idea for a while, I decided that, why not TTRPG, i love TTRPG and this way my shitty coding abilities won't get in the way of progress. Only ADHD and life get in the way, so progress is still slow af.

And here I am, 4 years later, prepping to run another round of playtests.

The hardest thing so far has been writing the material to give other GMs to run the tests: quickstart guide, scenarios, lore, etc...

Where i'm at so far:

Things that are in a good state for playtesting

• [y] Dice System
• [y] Skill-Based Character Creation
• [y] Professions / Special abilities
• [?] Debt System (initial ideas are here, but need campaign testing to see how this actually works)
• [y] Combat System
• [y] One Shot Scenario for testing
• [y] General City Map with 20ish districts
• [y] 10ish Corp profiles
• [y] General setting timeline and setting constraints

Things that are lacking in content

• Augs (prosthetics)
• Items
• Drugs
• Factions
• Pregen Character
• More things but i forget

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anyway, that's it for this post! thanks for reading! especially if you got this far <3

Next one i'll do will be some lore/setting info, hopefully over the weekend, but my goal is to post one of these a week at least.

Much love to all!