Goosecrawling

A while back, I took part in Foul Play’s Location Jam 2024, and the way that Foul Play designer Hendrik ten Napel delineates the fictional space in his game is really simple, and nicely tactile - post-it notes.

Why is it good? It’s a point-crawl system that works visually; when I look at a Foul Play location, I can imagine scribbling down areas on post-it notes for my group in-person. Unlike manually drawing out a battlemap, precision doesn’t matter; as long as everything is basically in the right places, then it’ll give the correct fictional positioning to my players. Then, something I think is super important - they can interact with the board. They can add their own post-it notes, they can remove them if they’ve obsoleted them; it’s a dynamic way to design a map that combines all the benefits of a point-crawl system with the tactility of physical mapmaking.

The major difference between what I’m going to call goosecrawling and point crawling is scale. Point Crawls are commonly used as an alternative to hex crawls, where the party painstakingly searches hex to hex to find locations of interest. That’s nice in simulationist systems, where the process of travel matters and has interesting decisions attached to it, but it’s less functional in more fiction-first systems. There, pointcrawls, where you go from interesting point to interesting point with a vague, fictionally determined travel in between, which could be a physical travel, or it could be an investigative travel or anything else.

Generally though, both point- and hex-crawling are outdoor activities; they are cross-country travel. Goosecrawling, on the other hand, applies the same concept to interiors, just like GUMSHOE applies it to investigations. In a simulationist game, interiors are set down, generally with some sort of battlemap, whether that’s on a VTT or in person. In a fiction-first game, it generally feels like, as a GM, you just make it up, and I’ve personally found that pretty hard to keep in my head. So, why not apply goosecrawling to my fiction-first game of choice, Blades in the Dark?

Goosecrawling in the Dark

Normally, Blades doesn’t really care about places on a gritty level; it’s only during scores that that becomes important; that’s when we zoom down into the character’s perspectives and engage with them at ground level. Ordinarily, when I plan a score, I plan out a few lists. 

• A list of factions and other interested parties

• A list of reasonable obstacles to their objective

• A list of potential clocks and other constraints

• A scattering of items and other tools I can use to set the vibe and describe the scene

What the objective is is generally set; the way my sessions are set up, they decide on the score at the end of a session; and so I have the maximum amount of information to work with. How do they get that objective? I generally set two win conditions. 

One if they’ve ‘won’; if they’ve hit all the points, overcome all the objectives, and are generally in such complete control over the scenario that it wouldn’t make sense for them to win. This one’s easy to adjudicate, and for simple scores with clear success criteria, it’s fine and it works.

Second if they deserve it; if they’ve gotten bruised, battered, beaten, and yet are still in the fight, still making moves, and still enjoying it. Even if they aren’t necessarily in the fictional position I wanted them to be in to get the objective, if it’s still salvageable, and they’re willing to burn themselves to get it, I’ll move things around to make it possible. This is harder to adjudicate, and moreover it’s hard to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a pity win for the players. The upside is that, when done right, their victory really feels earned; like they’ve crawled through barbed wire for this.

My problem, at the moment, is that my prep is uninteresting to me, and, with so many things to come up with and manage during play, keeping the fictional space between parts of the score, and maintaining just enough realism to keep engagement up, actually running the score can get pretty hard. Especially in option two, when I’m moving things around on the fly, but often in option one, it’s still hard to know when they’re ‘done’ without having a clear idea of what there was to ‘do’!

So, how can goosecrawling improve this? Well, if you look at the template, it’s actually got all of the things that are in my lists anyway. Instead of ‘Victims and Rivals’ we can have Interested or Involved Parties. Instead of targets, we can have Clocks. Our three prizes? One of them can be our objective, but now we’ve got impetus to come up with two other cool things in the location. These could be things that the players have been saying that they want, it could be plot hooks for further in the game, or it could even be things that other factions want, drawing the players deeper into the faction game.

Even the locations, or obstacles, are made more interesting; some of them are connected to each other, and that prompts some interesting questions - how are they connected - what does that mean? And them all being on post-it notes means that I can just lay them down in front of the players, letting them help direct the action, just like Blades wants them to do.

Working my lists into the template forces me to come up with cool things in advance; and while that can make things feel static in theory, I’d probably make the same choices in the moment, and I’m still free to change them if I need to. The obstacles make up a playground, not a dungeon, and that encourages emergent gameplay in a way that, at least for me, theatre of the mind doesn’t.

Goosecrawling for Real

So, to put my money where my mouth is, I’ve templated out one of my recent scores, The Sparkwork Mansion, in this style:

The Sparkwork Mansion; a haunted house with a steampunk twist

I started with my basic concept; a seemingly abandoned mansion, patrolled by sparkwork automata. Inside, the place is haunted, and the security system has gone haywire. Belongs to a missing noble, who the players are looking for.

Forcing myself to include six interested parties made me come up with a connection to the Path of Echoes, which now forms the climax of the score; finding a secret ritual room, and a group of starving cultists locked in a vault. Then, thinking about their objectives, one of those cultists became the missing noble they were looking for. For my other two objectives, I set up a future plotline about malevolent sparkcraft soldiers roaming the wastelands, and gave a library of information about prosthetic weapons to the PC looking to invent an integrated arm cannon.

Running it, I found it worked really well. The score ended up taking about twice as long as I intended it to, which I’d usually consider a problem, but really it just meant that the players ended up really getting to know the place. The multiple objectives meant that the players lingered in the scenes, exposing themselves to more danger. One of the PCs even died, torn apart by clockwork spiders.

To sum it up, would I prep my scores like this again? It was definitely more work than just scribbling down a few lists and finding some pictures on pinterest, but it didn’t feel restrictive. If you’re very opposed to prep, it’s not worth it, but I found it much easier to refer back to this template than I usually do looking at my notes. At the end of the day, the prep is still lite, and I think that there’s a lot I can do with this format, and, most of all, my players love it, which seals it for me.

If you go goosecrawling, let me know! How well did it work? What did you use it for?