Quick & Easy Climbcrawl

for the Wall, and for my good friend archon who I love very much

Hexermap has been treating me well. Set Water to Landlocked in the Advanced Settings. Smaller maps tend to be more mixed.

• Plains are contiguous tin plating. On clear days, the sun's reflection is blinding, reducing visibility as you move into these sections.
• Grassland is also tin, but jagged and rusty. Any mishap carries a risk of infection (of you, or of your metal tools).
• Forest is metal scaffolding. Horizontal ledges mean you don't need to roll to move side to side.
• Dense Forest is damage from the last war (d6): melted metal; bristling spears; foreign banners; gouged-out craters (balcony); unexploded artillery; foxhole (dungeon entrance).
• Lakes are where roots break thru the wall (dungeon entrance).
• Rivers follow the roots themselves. Animals and Braids are surefooted when walking on roots. 
• Swamp is dense foliage, vines, fungi. Dangerous fauna and flora are more likely to hide here. (+1 climbing die size, random encounters on 6+)
• Hills are exposed concrete and stone. Moving upwards out of these sections means navigating an overhang. (particularly dangerous!)
• Mountains are sacred sites: vertical shrines festooned with gargoyles. (potential dungeon entrance) Any mishap risks a curse.
• Desert is a particularly hazardous section (d6): burning plating; electrified grille; caustic chemifall; dismembering machines; gravitational anomaly; a gap.
• Tundra is iced over by shivers. Cascades thick fog in poor weather.
• Roads are salmon-trails left by other climbers: ropes and pitons and clear indicators.

overhangs, potential routes, in-the-wall routes

These are very Cath-specific but hopefully illustrative. (I didn't even add the big plastic slide that takes you down a level for free.)

Short Campaign Pitch: The Wall

The High Tin Wall is 333 stories tall. Beyond it, Heaven.

You are... (d6)

1. a young psychopomp.
2. a fallen angel.
3. a questing knight. 
4. a pilgrim. 
5. an Orpheus-type bloke. 
6. a demon in disguise! >:D

There are two ways up the wall.

1. You can scale the face. Rusted plating and spiraling roots make firm hand-and-footholds, and climbing equipment is scattered about: remains of climbers before you, or spoils of an ancient invading force. (Long "salmon-trails" mark known paths up the wall; they all peter out before the summit.)
2. You can enter the wall. There is no place in the City where someone has not lived; peel back the plating and you'll find abandoned rooms, seeping tombs, and...! stairs!

The latter is a standard dungeoncrawl. The former is a loooooooong climb.

Climbing Rules
(stolen from Archon's Court: he previously called these rules a "complete waste of time", and now uses these rules instead. I just think they're neat)

A climb is divided into three-story sections. Roll a d6 for each. (Skilled climbers roll d8; disadvantaged climbers roll d4.) 

d6	Omen	Mishap
1	No holds in reach. Turn back or fall.	Sudden collapse. Save or fall.
2	A handhold slips out from under you and clatters below.	Minor collapse. Everyone below you (including your belayer) must run away or take 1d6.
3	Your hands catch on your clothes.	Your hand catches in a hold. You're stuck.
4	Your gear loosens.	Drop a random item.
5	Your head swims.	You look down. +1 Exhaustion.
6	Random encounter spoor.	Random encounter.

If you've already rolled that omen today (doubles), you get a mishap instead.

If you've already rolled that mishap today (triples), you fall instead.

Falling deals 1d6 damage per story fallen (not per section). A rope, piton, and belayer can reduce the distance you fall. (A three-story rope will, at most, deal 6d6. That's almost survivable! if you're lucky!)

i dont know anything about climbing btw

 

Before you climb, you may force your long-suffering gm to create a full and proper hexmap of the climb ahead by surveying the route. This may include alternate routes, as well as high- and low- risk sections like overhangs, balconies, electrified walls, gaps, chimneys, unexploded artillery shells, etc etc

Smth I random rolled off Hexermap. Off the top of my head: the road is a well-marked salmon-trail (+ die size); the water is slick with chemical spill (- die size); the forest is horizontal ledges (no roll to move side to side); ivymere is an abandoned hanging village, anvilwood is a harpy nest, and granitepit is an entrance into the wall.

a 36 story climb

Inventory limits are much stricter than usual, so this would be a counting-rations-type game (perhaps even an eating-monsters-type game). Still deciding how gear-focused it should be.

Ideally, the dungeons break up the climbing, and the climbing paces out the dungeons.

The Table of Circumstances (for Dogs)

this image contains WARRIOR CATS SPOILERS

When you roll up a Doggerlands PC, you must roll on the Table of Circumstances.

1. You are betrothed.
2. You have a child.
3. You are disinherited.
4. You are inbred. 

 

Betrothal means a looming arranged marriage. Brides are bought and sold by their parents, sometimes at very young ages, sometimes even before conception; scions of lesser houses are very often born into bridedebt. (Thus, the overwhelming demand for fertility drugs, and the tyrannical parenting practices that safeguard against defaults.)

Betrothal can carry significant stigma-

• To a second- or third-cousin: you're upright and traditional. Dogs prefer to marry within their capital-H Houses.
• To a member of another House: you're transgressive and modern. These sorts of affairs were forbidden until recently by laws prohibiting miscegenation.
• To a twin: you're very important, mysterious, possibly a wizard. Self-marriages are rituals reserved for those with very high CHA, but some find the practice confusing or strange. (It's a bit like being an elf; people will think differently of you.)
• To a foreigner: you're deficient in some way, or else your family is in a lot of debt. Either way, they were pretty desperate to marry you off.
• To a fairy or spirit: you make people veeeeeery nervous. Nobody wants to touch a spirit's property. (Betrothals are not recorded in the laws of men, but in the ancient language of Contracts, to which even fairies are beholden.)

The betrothed rarely meet until their wedding day, except in dreams, which they share from the day of betrothal.

(An arranged marriage date can demarcate a hard stop to a game, which is always useful.)

A child is a valuable resource (and Dogs are not shy about terming it such). Betrothal sweetens any deal, entrenches any alliance. It is (sometimes literally) a get-out-of-jail-free card in Doggish society.

Better kids make better deals, so make sure yours is as close to the breed standard as possible: for Norburys, fat and tattooed; for Devinsens, tall and skeletally pale. (This is approximated by your child's natural CHA. Nothing a little make-up can't fix.)

Most parents aspire to join a kennel club: a high society organization dedicated to maximizing the genetic potential of their children.

(And it is known that betrothing one who is healthy to one who is sick can invigorate the latter. Young and old, rich and poor: this ancient folk magic is well known to the Dogs.)

Traditionally, legal inheritance passes by simulgeniture, to the child who most closely resembles the parent in all miens.

The proper legal method (when a will and testament cannot be found) is to directly compare their ability scores. Dogs have 8 ability scores, while foreigners only have 6. (Bastards sometimes have 7; especially inbred children can be born with as many as 10.)

The Houses typically eschew these rickety legalisms in favor of a written will and testament, which is to be politicized and weaponized against one's children as one sees fit. Being disinherited is a very big deal; a life of (relative) squalor awaits the failscion. (Many families have a parasite uncle or aunt, to whom much seething and scheming is attributed.)

 

Inbred PCs start with at least one mutation (I like this list). Gawking is impolite, but you're also at fault for not covering it up. The higher you climb in society, the more inbred people tend to be.

Dogs consider inbreeding a "strong, albeit eccentric, parenting decision"; they'll judge you for it, but won't argue with results.

THE GUEST STARS

For GLÅUGUST 2026, I asked 128 gloggers to write one room each for a community dungeon: no prompt, no theme, no rules. Of those initial 128, a whopping 82!!!!!! submitted rooms.

Thank you all so much for your submissions, and for your patience.

click here ^^^^^^^ for the dungeon

(the links may not jump you around unless you download the pdf) 

 

09/01/26 - Fixes to names and attributions, placeholder room references filled in. (if I messed up your name, let me know and I'll get it fixed asap)

No Stupid Names

bandwagon

First of all, throw out the common knowledge.

• False cognates are good. "Herpys" is an excellent elf name. Glancing at my list, I have "Odd" and "Snorri" on it; you best BELIEVE those bastards will be strange and sleepy respectively.
• Alphabet soup is good; the less vowels in a name, the better. I like how leaving out vowels forces you to fill in the gaps in mental pronunciation. (This is a setting-dependent theme.)
• Unintended cross-linguistic double entendres are good; use Google translate to seed more of them. The Spear Mountain, why, that must be Ben Gae, the gayest mountain on the continent.

"Don't do this, don't do that" Just DO!!!!!

Common wisdom says reusing an NPC is better than inventing a new one, since old NPCs come with baggage. Baggage is more fun than a blank! there's lots of straps and hooks to latch on to, lots of context to consider. Unspoken context matters because without it the only thing players have to riff on is what the gm tells them.

Using familiar words as names has the same effect: it loads up the character with preexisting connotations and expectations, it colors in the gaps. The alternative to a name that means something (like Herpys) is a name that means nothing. (This is also why it's good to use famous names, like Rhianna, and Jesus.)

[i mentioned themes earlier. What I'm really talking about is patterns. A name like Hdrf means nothing; two characters named Hdrf and Mdrf, are clearly brothers.]

All this to say, I don't believe in dumb mistakes, just dumb decisions, which we should all be making at industrial scale and speed.

What I Actually Do

Here's the Cath name list and the Doggerlands name list. (i do my own stunts)

They're mostly real historical names with some fake ass bullshit mixed in. Cath features a Nwnvyr, demonymic of the ambiguously pronounced realm of Nwn. The dogs sometimes get names like Nefermoor and MacHotep because they have a little egyptian in the mix. Mostly real, a little silly. 

For the 6 manors characters, I moved much faster. Bridget fixes the bridge. Cardwin gambles. Summers Daley is a gloomy freak. Sargasso-- you get the idea. (It's easier when you tell yourself they're just placeholders.) Once the easy ones were done, I filled in the rest based on the first letter of their closest relative's name.

I roll once on a list if I don't have a pun locked and loaded; twice and combine if I want the name to feel twice as important. (Celd names tend to agglutinate.)

I also make up arbitrary naming rules for certain character types to create the illusion of consistency.

• If I need a demon name, I say the name without closing my lips and transcribe whatever sound comes out. (because they have big tusks)
• My wizards are named after colors.
• My royals are named after their virtues, like Harmoneigh and Awesome Force.

Having a fairy rule and a demon rule and a princess rule leads naturally into having a rule for this and that kingdom or culture. Layering those rules on top of my existing lists helps keep things connected.

Otherwise I just do what Ro does so go read that

rudimentary insights memetically phrased

• Curate a list of real names/words. Use it aggressively.
• Make up arbitrary rules and follow them.
• Use names that make you smile, even if they're stupid.