Well written, thoroughly researched, excellently edited. Pictures, diagrams, notes - all informative, top-notch. This is not just a history of text games, but also a history of technology, and a look at how the society has progressed in the past 50 years.

Great for anyone who needs some inspiration for a cave-based/underground/underdark-themed adventure! If you need a bit more structure or are having trouble generating ideas for a cave-centered adventure, get this RIGHT NOW! These 10 idea-seeds are full of people, places and things that can fit into ANY campaign, but are meant to be a compliment to Downcrawl. Each one is deliciously compelling; so much so that I want to spend DAYS exploring each page basking in the inspiration held within.

One of the most original, inspiring and easily-playable RPG systems I have ever encountered. I have played quick one-shot games with Downcrawl, I have also played sweeping campaigns that have lasted for months with the same players. The game is easily customizable, endlessly inspiring and gives an amount of agency to both GM and players in a way that's rare these days! Downcrawl gives you room to explore, if you want to. It also gives you extremely solid foundations to build off of when you don't. 10/10

Weird and wonderful settings & prompts to stimulate your imagination. Particularaly enjoyed the open ended 'seeds' which are fun ideas you can dop into any game. Nicely laid out: not too dense; easy to digest; and couldn't put it down until I had read the whole thing.

I'm absolutely blown away. 10 pages in I could tell this book was going to be something special. Now I'm in the closing pages and I'm stunned by the sheer creativity on display here. I'm itching to roll on these tables and see what kind of wild and evocative scenarios come out in a real game! Practically every page is dripping with good advice or entrancing flavor. This book feels like a must for anyone wanting to run an Underdark adventure.

I love this - this is one of those things that you enjoy. But when I realized that I was returning with fond memories to my sessions playing this much more often than usual, I knew I had to make a review. There's the right amount of crunch and interesting stuff for travel, here, with a fascinating fantasy setting that really makes the world feel full of adventure and every journey truly perilous and consequential. Five stars.

As a GM, this has been an invaluable resource to simultaneously: 1) Plug holes in the campaign when I'm too fatigued to be extra creative myself 2) Insert bits of someone who is not myself or my players in the campaign to make it feel more rich 3) Just generally look for inspiration 4) To feel a little bit less alone in the wide open story-telling, game-running skyscape

As a resource for GMs, this book is both detailed enough to provide all of the above, and open-ended enough to provide material for a wide variety of settings and systems. The original source material (Sky Crawl) is incredibly enjoyable, and this just makes it much easier to run with less mental overhead or prep (or frees you up to focus on whatever else in your campaign you want to focus on).

Would happily buy Another Ten Ports in an Infinite Sky and Yet More Ports in an Infinite Sky. =)

This product is amazing. It's extremely evocative, full of fascinating ideas and well designed random tables that allow you to truly build a near-infinite open sky setting.

No product is for everybody, and if want you are looking for in a setting is something well defined and fully populated, look elsewhere. But if you want the seeds and tools to make your own wild, whimsical, and adventurous setting - Skycrawl is it.

It's a build-your-setting book more than a game, but it does include some useful mechanics in a couple of areas. First, there are extensive PBTA-inspired "moves" around traveling - what to do when you get lost, or how your character can spend a 'drift day.' These are written in a way that lets them easily be adapted to your system of choice (with some specific guidance given for adapting to d20, Fate, and PBTA / 2d6 games) - and they're well designed, so they really make the game adventurous.

The other somewhat mechanical bit is the introduction of Orcery, which is a kind of alchemy concerned with Heavy Elements that are part of this setting. This gives a lot of flavor, allows for PCs to create some useful (but limited in number of uses) magic, and gives additional reasons to go exploring. (Plus Orcery can only be done away from Lands - so it gives something for the detailed-magic-inclined PC to do on those long journeys.)

This product includes extensive charts for creating Folk and Lands either randomly or by design. And as part of that, the BEST guidance I have ever seen for how to come up with names for those Folk and Lands - something few RPG products provide.

I came across this while looking for new hexcrawl games. The idea of a hexcrawl through the sky sounded unique and interesting. Skycrawl certainly delivers on that!

Most hexcrawls use a map that allows players to plan their journeys. In Skycrawl, you use a Chart of lands near and far. The Chart chages every time you travel between lands and this can make the next step on your journey more or less difficult. While the relative positions of lands may make a journey more or less difficult, it rarely makes them impossible. The travel mechanics also reward players who spend time gathering information about a new land before setting off.

Journeys between lands can be difficult but not necessarily deadly.

Skycrawl in intended to be used with any RPG system, not just DnD, so outside of the travel mechanics and Orcery, things are left rules-light. I don't consider this a bad thing as it provides fodder for roleplaying. There is a simple system for ship combat in case your regular rules system doesn't have one.

The creature and ship generators are simple and rules-light for roleplaying but I love the land generator most. It opens up so many possibilities for locations to visit. A GM could sink hours if not days into generating interesting locations for their players to visit.

All in all, I'm very happy with what I found in Skycrawl and look forward to many adventures through the Azure.

A great kickstart of fun Volumes for any Downcrawl lover! For me, seeing a number of good examples gets my brain spinning much better to come up with my own, and makes it so I have a nice mix of things from my head and things from someone else's to choose from in populating my world. Highly recommended!

A fantastic system for making travel in the underdark/deep down/underworld interesting and difficult at any level! The second arc of my current 5e campaign is focused on the "World Below," and my players said they still wanted travel/navigation to be interesting/difficult, but that can be really hard in a campaign going from 10th level on. So the lack of teleportation magic and the instrinsic difficulty of navigating shifting cave systems is a perfect match to make things interesting but not too complicated for them. Plus the no long rests while travelling rule! They were so nervous and excited when I told them about it!

Beyond the systems, the tables for making fun, weird, interesting folk and places to fill the world with are absolutely worth it by themselves. I've spent several days during breaks just spinning up extra interesting places and people for them to end up, and tieing it all to my pre-established factions. So much fun!

Magical. Genius. Inventive. I really enjoyed reading thorugh this book and look forward to integrating it into a campaign.

A really lovely game, about beeing deep time explorers setting out to catalogue, and possible help, whoever you encounter.

There's no FTL, but the scope is still interstellar. It's not military sci-fi, which is always a plus, and while the fundamental structure of the game is to hurl rapidly through moral crises that will change and possibly break your characters, it's still hopeful and optimistic.

Usually freeform play is very daunting to me, but the goals of scenes and the intended loop of play, session by session, is well-structured and clealry-described.

This is a great resource for anyone wanting to add some exploration to their games. Even without the travel mechanics, the tables for creating regions and denizens are incredibly useful!

"The mechanics are simple and straightforward, and really do link up very well with different dice systems. Orcery is fantastically creative and a really cool new thing for players to fiddle around with. The various tables, from Atmospheres to Situations to Lands to Folk, provide a ton of variety that you're going to have to work pretty hard to exhaust. The overview at the start of the book says that the Azure Etern should be vast, wild, whimsical, and fun, and if you think of them as goals I absolutely think Skycrawl has managed to attain them." - Seamus Conneely

Read the full in-depth CHG review here: http://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2021/01/15/skycrawl-review-serendipitous-adventures-in-strange-skies/