Review 51 - Crush Depth Apparition
Next up I'm going to talk about one of the most unique adventures that I've run thus far, partly due to the fact that it was not written for any particular system but rather includes an ultralight system of its own, making it a truly stand-alone adventure. The adventure is Crush Depth Apparition by Amanda Lee Franck.
Amanda is also responsible for the illustration and cartography of this one, with layout by Micah Anderson and editing by Jack Fortune. The general premise of the adventure is that the PCs are crew members aboard an experimental submarine in 1902, out on a test voyage. Each time the submarine dives under the water, strange haunting effects occur and escalate. The PCs must discover a way to end the haunting and survive the trip to a safe port. As mentioned, there is no intended system other than the basic "d20+modifier against a target number" resolution method, with modifiers determined by PC skill and the situation.
Getting it to the Table
I will be honest, this one took a few read-throughs before I felt I was ready to run it for my players. The first ten or so pages include a lot of detail about the submarine itself; a map, a list of systems, fuel and battery trackers, depth and dive trackers, and an area key to go along with the map. Having all of this be the first thing you see gives the impression that it's going to be a fairly crunchy simulation of the voyage, and indeed much of the discussion I've seen about it has definitely seemed to focus on the verisimilitude of things like travel speed and fuel and battery. Next, we are shown a character sheet, and the presentation transitions to a much more rules-light tone. There are practically no stats-- just three stages of "health status" and areas of general and special training that will impact the modifiers when making rolls. An explanation of how this built-in system works follows, and it is very much at odds with the high level of detail included about the ship.
This trend towards lightness continues with the introduction to the potential player characters-- instead of stat blocks, it simply lists a name and a role on the ship, followed by a paragraph of prose written in the voice of the character. From this, my players were able to glean a sense of personality and how to portray the PC, and I thought it was a very interesting way to handle it.
Next we get some more useful tables for running the adventure, namely the "Weather and Random Encounters" table and the "Damage Report" table. These two tables, when used in conjunction, will drive forward the escalation of the haunting and sap resources-- many of the weather events risk damage, which can impact how long the ship will stay underwater or whether it can rise again. I think that they would definitely work better if the adventure were played out over several sessions and the resources and the functioning of the ship were more in the forefront-- as it was in my one-shot, the ship never got damaged and the weather table didn't give us any hazards to contend with.
After these introductory sections, we get to the meat of the adventure-- what happens when you dive. There is an escalation sequence for the haunting, increasing in intensity as certain events take place in response to the lower levels of severity. One potential flaw here is that escalation requires one particular action by the PCs-- they need to open the hatch at the end of the corridor that appears in a level one haunting. If this action is not taken, the hauntings will not get stronger and there will never be an opportunity for the PCs to discover what's behind it and potentially "solve" the mystery. Thus, it is entirely possible for the adventure to proceed as a relatively normal sea voyage where strange things happen occasionally, and then the ship reaches port and it's the end of the adventure. Unless you've got players who are brave and willing enough to press the Big Red Button, the adventure won't progress as written. My group was definitely starting out on the cautious side, continually closing the door that appeared and not venturing into it and engaging with the haunting, but rather trying to find ways to prevent it from escalating. At one point, I came right out and said "you know, in the context of a one-shot, another option would be to just do the thing." This is a mentality that I often struggle with in mystery or horror games where the PCs are meant to be "regular" people. If you're trying to maintain player agency in an adventure like this, at a certain point, your players need to do an ostensibly foolish thing to advance the plot.
Once we got past that hurdle and started to escalate the haunting, things started humming along much better. The players got to explore the labyrinth of incongruous rooms extending out into the void beyond the walls of the Electra, and even did the thing that would escalate the haunting to level 3 without any prompting from me! Finally, they found an alternate solution to the haunting through a creative interpretation of the clues-- more on that in the next section.
What Worked?
- Flexible solution. While the adventure does call out three specific solutions to the haunting (plus one partial solution-- you can escape the labyrinth through the "Home" exit, but the haunting will follow you if you didn't end it), it also points out that it will end if the players come up with a plausible alternative theory and carry out a successful plan based on that. The really brilliant bit of writing that enabled that is the text from the journal and fragments from other hauntings-- it contains a jumble of evocative language that can be interpreted in a number of different ways, and has verbal clues that lead to each of the three solutions presented. As my players discovered, it also led them to a fourth conclusion which was still solidly alluded to in the text. This rules.
- Great hauntings! Very creepy, A+.
What Didn't Work?
- I think that the only thing that tripped me up was the focus on the simulation of operating a submarine of this era. There was so much space devoted to tracking the resources and time and details that simply did not come up during play, it could easily be a confusing introduction to someone wanting to run the adventure. Personally I found that using the mundane aspects of the submarine as the backdrop to the horror was more effective-- the important fact was that the players were isolated and stuck in one place with the haunting effects. Perhaps a game spread over more sessions would have necessitated more digging into the specifics of fuel and battery life, but I also don't feel that anything was lost by not focusing on them.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is one of the most unique adventures I have ever run. Once I got a handle on how the hauntings proceeded (and my players were willing to suspend their "how my character would actually behave" and just roll with it), the pacing was excellent and there was a growing sense of horror as things got worse, until finally they came up with an interpretation of the clues that would give them a solution.
You can get Crush Depth Apparition at Amanda's itch page. Thanks for reading!