How to Crush Your Players at Depth
An extremely short review of the RPG zine Crush Depth Apparition and some suggestions for GMs who want to run it
Swimming with the submarines
Here is my spoiler-free review of the RPG zine Crush Depth Apparition, written by Amanda Lee Franck:
Your players get to be the crew of a early submarine, on a trans-Atlantic trip. That’s amazing. My group was really excited to play as that, and who wouldn’t be?
There are some surreal parts of the adventure. They are very-cool, spooky surreal, not I-don’t-understand-what-is-happening surreal. My players had a fun time with that. And the beautiful and evocative art (also by Amanda) only adds to that.
The adventure could be run with any RPG system with appropriate skills, but it comes with its own system, a stripped-down and enjoyable skill-based system that gives just what you need for this short adventure onboard a submarine.
And to be clear, it is a short, focused adventure. I ran it in one night (more on that in a bit), but I think at the most it’s likely no more than a two-session game. And that’s great. This will be an experience for your players, and it will be a focused, intense one.
I do have some caveats about the game, however, and I ran into some problems running it. Most of that was due to some lack of clarity (at least to me) in the module, but that can be fixed by adding in your own clarity. And I think at least one procedure should be tweaked, to make the game work better.
So beyond me exhorting you to pick up this game and run it, I’d like to mention a few of the problems I had and how I would suggest running it.
I’ll note that it’s very possible, maybe likely, that my problems were simply due to my own misreading of the zine. (If you’ve run it, please tell me if you believe that to be true.) In any case, it’s a great piece of work, and all my comments are simply an attempt to give you the ability to experience all of it, easily. Amanda Lee Franck (as well as layout designer Micah Anderson and editor Jack Fortune) doesn’t need my thanks, but I’ll thank her here for writing it (and her other maritime works, which I’m equally fond of).
Everything from here on contains spoilers.
Some problems
When I ran Crush Depth Apparition, there were two basic problems.
The first was I could not clearly understand some procedures or events in the adventure.
The second was that, as written, or at least as I understood it, the bulk of the adventure could be skipped. Which, in fact, my players did. Running it took just one night because the players were able to avoid engaging with almost any of the interesting parts of the adventure. And based simply on the procedures in the book, the adventure could have ended with eight dice rolls.
Here are my major issues, broken down into points, based on notes I made on Discord after running the module, with some additions:
The module lays out the maximum speed of the sub when it is at the surface and when it is submerged. It also tells you that the submarine is eight days from the nearest port. But because it doesn’t give you a distance from port, those two sets of numbers don’t intersect.
And because a sub presumably won't run at maximum speed constantly (one of the members of my group is an experienced sailor, and he said that 60% power is the norm for vessels), and since there are different rates at the surface and submerged, it's a bit strange to talk about how many days out you are rather than a distance. After all, the numbers of days out you are will depend on how fast you’re travelling.
(We set our distance from port to be 1350 nautical miles. Because the book says that you’re halfway through your trip from the US to the UK, this seems to be accurate.)
The module doesn't make it clear whether your captain plans to dive at any specific point and if so, how many times. Because the haunting section of the book only starts once you dive, if you never dive, you’ll never get into the majority of the adventure.
If you rely on rolling random events to cause you to dive, you could theoretically end the entire module after eight rolls, if they all are uneventful rolls that don’t cause you to dive or your players accept some damage to the submarine. So, again, your entire experience of playing this game RAW could be making characters with your players, then you rolling the dice eight times. And that’s it.
In general, the players may never go into the labyrinth that appears during the haunting section, because they can easily skip it, at least in the early stages of the haunting. There aren't a lot of clear reasons for them to enter it. If they choose not to engage, they are never forced to.
And player buy-in isn't a good argument, because all they know, at the outset of the adventure, is that they've bought into a submarine voyage, with a lot of rules and systems itself that they've already been introduced to and are probably thinking about. And from the perspective of their PCs, for preservation purposes, they might avoid entering the weird space that just opened up.
My players only minorly engaged with the labyrinth (to humor the module, in a sense) and then decided they didn't want to deal with it anymore. That meant we skipped a good deal of the adventure, which is both fine and also a little sad.There are monsters, but I found that the procedures for using them aren't that clear. My players never met them, even when entering the labyrinth.
There was an ambiguity in regard to some of the haunting effects (in level 1), because some of them include objects, such as a dead body, appearing. But the zine also says that the effects of a haunting disappear when the door to the labyrinth is closed. Does the dead body disappear? I wasn’t sure.
Some suggestions
Okay, for some of these, the correction is simple. Simply decide on what you’re going to do about any ambiguity up front. I didn’t realize that they were ambiguous before I started running the module, and now you’ve been warned. So decide on how the monsters will move and attack, and decide whether the dead body from a haunting disappears when the door is closed.
But I have two specific suggestions to make, after talking with the other members of my group, that will be .
Set a minimum number of dives you need to carry out in order to please the British Navy rep before you get to shore. That will create at least some progression of the module's content, with repeated hauntings, and will ensure that you can’t just roll eight times and skip all the content.
If your players refuse to open the door at the end of the corridor, don't make the progression of the hauntings to level 2 dependent on the opening of the door. That, together with repeat dives, will also ensure the progression of the content, because eventually the labyrinth will appear between spaces on the ship, and they will be forced to engage with it.
As a player in the game you've documented here, I think there's a good rule to follow when designing a module, which is something like "If your players' stated goal is to make it through Door A, don't just lock Door A and put all of the fun behind Door B. Chances are, your players will spend more time breaking your lock then just taking what they've been told is the WRONG door."
In the case of this module, "Door A" is "Complete your journey across the ocean," which led us all to create characters who are hyper-capable of doing exactly that. But I think the module seems to want players to make a lot of obviously bad decisions (like wantonly exploring spooky sidequest stuff) in order you to find the Fun Bits.
Sounds like a great game! So nice that you are acknowledging the creators by name! Lots of talented artists and creatives make these games succeed