The following list of details and discoveries from “The Paths of Ateşkazé” by Jeremy Strandberg in Perilous Almanacs remain my favorite caving adventure.

Details

  • Vast tubes curving through the earth
  • Smooth walls, ribbed walls, knobby walls
  • Dripping with shark-tooth stalactites
  • Smaller tubes branching at all angles
  • Massive chambers, like bubbles in the rock
  • Echoes that carry for miles
  • Rumbling beneath you, all around
  • Crunch of porous stone underfoot
  • More damn tunnels

Discoveries

1d12 – Obstruction

The passage you are following ends abruptly with (choose or roll):

  • 1: a cave-in; maybe you can dig through?
  • 2-3: a contraction, only a few feet wide; maybe you can squeeze?
  • 4: a sheer rock face, as if the earth just shifted
  • 5-6: a precipitous drop; into what?
  • 7: a vast chasm, a rift in the earth, your passage continuing on the far side; maybe there’s a bridge?
  • 8-9: a chimney, going up/down well beyond your light
  • 10: a flooded chamber; maybe there’s an exit underwater?
  • 11: a brittle crust of hardened magma, still pulsing with heat
  • 12: a pocket of foul (dangerous?) air

Copyright 2015 by Jeremy Strandberg. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Shockingly minimalist, yet richly rewarding play, as I’ve described elsewhere:

Two of my PCs swam through a flooded tunnel in the Labyrinth under Gordin’s Delve—using Jeremy’s Drowning move from Drowning & Falling—and discovered Orman Magara, the forested cavern. They explored tunnels looking for an unflooded passage to return.

The “Obstacle – Difficult Passage” table, rolled with a d12, lists nine passages. When the players rolled a number they had rolled before, I just read the next unused item from the table.

After exploring 6 passages they found a chimney which they climbed upward to find the tunnel the rest of the party were waiting in. Two of my players (a married couple) are cavers, and they absolutely loved the descriptions of passages—they said it felt very realistic, so much so that a couple times they had to stop and tell us a story out of character about their caving.

I tried to recapture a bit of this verisimilitude with my Colossal Cave Adventure Template but honestly these two tables work great.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash of New Zealand’s Waipu Caves.