I picked this up while looking for good flying ship combat systems. Initially hesitant because I saw it lumped in with Powered By The Apocalypse games and thought it was only for those, I finally grabbed it after seeing lots of recommendations for the world-generation tools. I'm glad I did because it is much more useful than just as a PbtA supplement. I was a fan of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies and found a more light-hearted version of flying ships between strange ports here.
Skycrawl with cover art by Laurence Gapaillard
First impression was this was a smaller text than I expected but having gone through it, it is a well distilled, taut book which is spare but not sparse in descriptions and mechanics. Designed for any fantasy RPG - I have brought it to bear for Spelljammer. The system within the book is set up around players make moves and on failures or other conditions DM's make moves to complicate their lives. It formalises things somewhat more than I am used to but you can also look at all of the moves as potential actions within a free-form frame and adapt it to any system that way.
Done by Aaron A. Reed in 2020 I believe the copy I got was print-on-demand from a sale, quality is good, art is mostly open source by Laurence Gapaillard which fits the proto-steampunk tone well.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
Intro - 4 pages on how add this to your game to get endless aerial adventures
The Azure Etern - 4 pages on the flavour, nature and vibe of the setting
Systems - 22 pages of mechanics
Running Skycrawl - 15 pages of guidance to run it
Generators - 26 pages of useful generators
In our table of contents we also get a List of Tables and List of Moves for Player and DM for easy reference.
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Intro - setting out the principles for running this "weird, whimsical, endless sky" and how game masters generate new adventures in the Azure Etern. We get a paragraph each on how it is vast, wild, whimsical and fun. We get a section on how to use the book which is designed as a bolt-on to your RPG system of choice; recommendations in the text being the Black Hack or Fate Accelerated.
The Azure Etern - here we get a steer on what the flavour and vibe of this whimsical endless blue should be and info on the nature of the floating rock islands and the air currents between them. We get talk of gravity, the strange minerals found in the Azure Etern, the Sols - floating suns - and the flora and fauna of the skies.
Systems - we get a neat little mechanics set. The Powered-by-the-Apocalypse inspiration comes through. We have 'tack' as the key meta-resource for sky journeys; it is accrued during adventures, time ashore and downtime effort and then spent to get anywhere during journeys. Systems are split into Lands, Journeys, Ship Combat and Orcery - the last being the alchemical magic of combining different rare minerals to create effects. Each mineral has a property so to get effects you combine the appropriate properties to get the effect you want.
Lands are tracked in a simple 'nearby', 'approaching', 'receding', 'distant' tracker and Journeys navigate around this chart - starting with a score tied to distance, modifying for many factors then making travel rolls per day on a PbtA style success/fail range. We get 5 pages of combat rules which seem a nice balance between the ship being relevant and the players retaining agency. I hope to table test them at some point.
Running Skycrawl covers Starting a campaign, prep, Between sessions, The Chart, Tack, Journeys, GM Travel Moves, Encounters, and Campaign Arcs - much of this good generic advice interlaced with handy generic generators. The Encounters part is good stuff to lift for any game at all - lots of nice ideas in there.
Generators - covers three parts, how to create Folk; the dwellers of any land in the Azure Etern, Ships; the steampunkish vessels and Lands; the floating islands themselves. The Folk and Lands elements are great, OSR-style randomisers to get interesting new people and places to drop into any kind of campaign.
All in all this is a great resource if you want a sky-exploration campaign - you could use it for the Elemental Plane of Air straight up or for the Astral or any other similar 'drifting islands' plane with a little modification. You can use this handily in the core Forgotten Realms campaign - we have Coliar two planets sunward from Toril - a big (Jupiter sized) air-world of floating rocks right there in the canon. I used Skycrawls Encounter, Folk and Land generators at table building Spelljammer adventures and they work well there - you can read more on that in 'The Coliar Run'.
I like the 'tack' and navigation rules, though I have yet to table test them. The Orcery rules are interesting, not quite my cup of tea but could be for others. Lots of bits and pieces in here to either run as a whole piece or to take and add to whatever other campaign you are running.
Other reviews can be found on Plastic Polyhedra, Cannibal Halfling, Geek Native, GROGNARDIA, Dice Monkey, Campaign Mastery and The Retired Adventurer (combined with Downcrawl)
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