Aaron A. Reed’s DownCrawl, like his other book SkyCrawl, is a sort of plug-in or cap for other RPGs.  Where SkyCrawl was all about flying ships and weird, fantastical realms floating in a somewhat magical space, DownCrawl is all about getting into the depths of a world and finding all the bizarre things that lurk there.

Much of what I said in my review of SkyCrawl translates pretty directly to this book.  It has similar systems, but applied to a different theme.  It too uses elements of Powered by the Apocalypse, but does not require you to be using that system for whatever game you plug this into.

Mushrooms play a large part in this, including in currency and in the making of potions and such.  It has a system for creating realms, handled in a similarly abstract way to SkyCrawl, as well as for making the people who live in those realms.  

While I am less inclined to run a game that consists of this sort of infinite dungeon crawl than I would be of the infinite sky, I can certainly see a lot of the toolkits that appear in this book being super helpful in fleshing out and expanding some of the various underground modules I’ve got.  No doubt, it will be seeing some use in the future. 

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