Messy Review (And Interview) - Crush Depth Apparition
Messy Reviews are my attempt to bring the spirit of the Year of the Zungeon into review blogging against my busy schedule. I'm writing these quickly and getting them out there before it's too late. There may be mistakes, but let me know and I'll always be open to corrections.
Rating: 🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈
Crush Depth Apparition is a 56-page adventure with it's own lightweight rules built in by Amanda Lee Franck. The adventure sticks players into an experimental submarine at the turn of the century, each with their own job on the vessel and with rules for managing sub resources (fuel and battery charge) for the vessel and repairing problems that may arise during test dives or from bad weather or other encounters (e.g., icebergs). Along the way, there is also a progression of paranormal occurrences that should gradually turn the focus away from the mundane aspects of operating the submarine and into pure survival horror in an extra-dimensional labyrinth composed of rooms from a dozen past and future submarines.
To put all my cards on the table up front, I think this work is a masterpiece. I loved it when I read it and I loved it even more when I ran it as a one-shot.
With that out of the way, let's talk about what makes this so good. I'm going to split this into sections based on the adventure organization and how it progressed for us as we ran it and mix in a bit of a play report along with the review. Amanda was also kind enough to answer a few interview questions about the adventure by email, which I'll work in as they touch on aspects of the review. Questions and answers are edited for length and shuffled around to fit this format.
1 - Let's Operate A Submarine!
The premise and player-facing rules of the game are straightforward. It's 1902 and you're on the crew of an experimental submarine running trials for the Royal Navy. You need to manage your speed, fuel, and battery charge to get the sub back to Britain while also conducting test dives and deal with any repairs that may be needed along the way. Repairs will almost certainly be needed based on the very flavorful and potentially catastrophic Weather/Random Encounter and Damage tables you roll on while underway. Players are each trained on a specific aspect of operating the sub, and the rules are simple d20 roll with a bonus for rolling to work on something in your area of training.
Players are provided with tracking sheets for managing sub resources and damage, which I combined as below into a big image to slap in a virtual tabletop for players to draw on top of.
This aspect of the adventure is, surprisingly to me, seemingly one of the most controversial parts. Brad and Yochai spend quite a while discussing the logistics of it in their Between Two Cairns review, and Joseph Krausz has also done an excellent write up of how the game can become derailed with too much focus on the details of sub operation and how to avoid that.
While I won’t deny the possibility that the game can get tied up in the details of submarine operation, I think that’s missing the point of what this is doing in the adventure, which is twofold.
For one, part of what makes really good survival horror stories is protagonists getting in over their heads with stuff they’re not prepared to deal with and succumbing to or overcoming those challenges. While this adventure does that in-character with the horrors the player characters will ultimately face juxtaposed against their past experience as sailors, it amplifies this out-of-character with the fact that basically none of what’s on the character sheet or in the player-facing rules matters once the horrors start. My players commented on this after we played, noting how much more horrific it all get when they as players felt like they didn’t have the right tools to deal with the problems they were facing.
This isn’t to say this part of the game isn’t important at all. The early game when there’s a bit of a cascade of mundane problems starting to get mixed in with paranormal problems is interesting for sure, but it’s just a prelude to the true horror to come.
While it didn’t come up much in our game due to pushing through more quickly as a one-shot, there are some characteristically richly described NPCs (Amanda really shines with NPCs in all her work) on the crew with interesting connections between them and a juicy rumors table that I think would work great in a longer form play of this.
Reginald Bacon, Royal Navy, inspecting captain ofsubmarines—“the British captain”.
”It’s a new position, yes, ha ha. Not very many submarines to inspect just yet. The rear admirals think it’s a farce, but I’m going to drag those sodden relics into the 20th century if I die in the attempt. Ha ha. Now tell me, what does this wheel do?”
I asked Amanda a few questions about this since I think it’s one of the most brilliant and also misunderstood parts of the adventure:
Q: How big a part of the game is operating and repairing the submarine intended to be and what was it like in playtesting?
A: I was hoping to create a kind of awful spiral of problems, where players are fighting both real world and supernatural perils at the same time. I set the game during the earliest days of submarines so that the way they work would be easier to grasp, & so players would feel like they could use practical knowledge to problem solve. Submarines are really complex & dangerous so that part of the game ended up needing lots of information, even though I didn't intend it to be the main focus.
Q: For us, we found that the fact that all the player facing rules were about operating the sub, when the bulk of the game was these characters being way over their heads dealing with this horror, really enhanced the horror of the game, as the players themselves were also kind of shocked by the shift from this sub-simualator game into pure horror. Was that intended to work that way, or how do you see the juxtaposition of the more mundane aspects against the horror?
A: Yeah that's exactly what I was hoping for! There's definitely an influence from horror films like The Descent where the situation is already crazy dangerous & exciting before any monsters show up. I think that one of the things that I love in a horror story is the journey from being shocked that these things are happening at all to being able somehow to deal with them & maybe just barely survive. I basically feel like regular life is terrifying & the ground is always shifting underfoot, and in a horror story that fact isn't hidden anymore- but you've actually got a slim little chance to do something about it. Even if everyone dies at the end it feels kind of empowering to me.
Something Weird is Going On
The meat of the adventure starts in the first dive the players make. Within 10 minutes a new corridor with an open bulkhead door appears on a wall that should be leading out into the ocean. At the same time you roll for a haunting on a table with items ranging from strange tapping on the outside of the submarine to all the text inside the sub being replaced with snippets of a long rambling letter with hints about what’s really going on here, and a range of other creepy stuff in between.
Music is coming from the engine, though you have to turn your head just right to hear it. Sometimes it sounds like the voice of a woman singing, sometimes like an orchestra. it fades back into the noise of the motors at times but then returns.
New Hauntings get added over time and others escalate the longer nothing is done about the corridor. Players can enter the corridor and see some strange stuff through a periscope and a closed bulkhead door at the other end. If they open this other door a new phase of the haunting begins, otherwise if they surface first this corridor disappears.
We jumped more or less directly into this part when I ran it because I was doing a one-shot. I started with the captain warning the player characters to look out for strange things on the next dive, and then hit them with a bad event from the weather table to force a dive quickly that also created some problems. We quickly ended up in the spiral Amanda described with fires and equipment malfunctions happening in one part of the sun while other players poked around this strange new corridor or dealt with the paranormal events. This part was amazingly chaotic in play.
On this point, I asked Amanda about how much we missed by jumping straight into that chaos.
**Q: How many session is it meant to last, or how many did it for you in playtesting? I could see it being interesting as more of a slow burn with more of some sessions focused just on operating the sub. **
A: Yeah, you could absolutely start the game earlier if you wanted it to run through more sessions! During my first playtest, things went really slowly and the players were super cautious about exploring the labyrinth (understandably!). After that playtest I added a bunch of stuff (like the captain telling the players they are in charge of investigating the haunting) that aimed to ramp things up super quick & push the players to take risks, so that you are pretty much dealing with the scary stuff as soon as you sit down to play. But I think you could also open the game with, for example, the player characters tasked with giving a tour of the sub to the British captain, meeting a bunch of NPCs (who share rumors about the haunting they've noticed & so on).
I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About this Place
The second phase starts when players open the door into the labyrinth, an extradimensional dungeon space composed of rooms from different submarines past and future. At this same time anything else going on in the submarine continues, so players will still be dealing with mundane sub repairs and ongoing Hauntings while exploring this.
The labyrinth is a surreal 12-room dungeon. You can move from a diving bell with a view down to the transatlantic telegraph cable in one space to two upside down canoes or a Soviet submarine in nuclear meltdown in others. There is a bone shark and drowned people wandering around as the main threats. Each room gives some hints about what’s going on and many also offer ways to “solve” the haunting and end the labyrinth appearing.
The walls are wood covered in dark leather and slick with oil. They curve like the inside of an egg. The air is cold and fresh. The handles of wooden oars emerge from the walls, each moving gently on its own. Glass droplets hang from the ceiling and the oars by hair-thin tails. If a tail is snapped, the droplet explodes with a sound like ice cracking in water, into a dust of invisible, needle-sharp glass splinters in a 3-foot radius. The floor glitters with glass dust. The room sways with every incautious footstep, the oars shift, and the droplets sway and tinkle.
As someone with an academic background in maritime archaeology and history, I also adore the level of research that clearly went into picking out the various historical references throughout this dungeon. There’s so many rabbit holes to go down if you start looking into what’s going on in these rooms.
While it’s intentionally vague, it seems the labyrinth was created by a man pining for his lost love and it is tied up in the transatlantic cable in strange ways. But knowing the exactly details isn’t important, it’s creepy as fuck and expertly described. Nobody is doing this better than Amanda right now. I seriously had to stop reading my first time through because the descriptions of the drowned people hit me too hard.
They died in submarines and in the ships that submarines sank. They have been dragged here and trapped in their own broken bodies. They are angry, or confused, or desperate. If they can talk, what they say makes no sense. Some of them are violent. They are not afraid of being hurt. They want this to stop happening to them. They believe that if every submarine that sinks beneath the waves is haunted and destroyed, the living will stop sending more people down here to drown.
If players don’t deal with the labyrinth quickly, which they likely won’t, it begins to appear in new combinations in and around the other rooms of the submarine to make things even more confusing.
This second phase of the haunting ends when players take something out of the dungeon.
My players ultimately got to that point pretty quickly after exploring three rooms of it and having some tough fights with the drowned people and deciding to leave. But one of them saw something they wanted in the diving bell and took it, pushing us to the final phase.
I asked Amanda about the Labyrinth and how she intended it to work with the rest of the adventure.
Q: How much do you hope for players to explore the labyrinth, or how much did your players in playtesting? For mine, they really only saw 2 or 3 rooms before they were scared out of there, and they were able to solve it in the first room they'd visited. But, reading through the whole thing I can see all the different possibilities laid out for how things could play out if players explored more.
A: I figured that players wouldn't see the whole thing- it's not meant to be like a dungeon crawl where you explore every room & get a complete understanding of what's going on. Someone reviewed it on itch & said after they finished playing the game everyone sat around for an hour discussing what they thought it all meant and that's like, exactly what I was hoping for. There's no real answers, the best you can do is make peace with that and try your best to save everyone you can.
No Way Out
The third phase of the adventure sees players surface to a circle of eerie divers standing on the water with a storm oncoming and a lighthouse in the distance as the only safe spot nearby. Going to the lighthouse triggers an attack by the drowned, and there’s a door inside that leads back into the labyrinth for one last chance to end it all.
This was honestly the one part where I felt my players bristle against the confines of the adventure. They wanted to find any other way out of it apart from going to the lighthouse and seemed to feel railroaded a bit. In the context of this kind of story it makes sense, but in the context of a roleplaying game it goes against some players expectations. I think this can be remedied by getting buy in prior to playing for the type of game it’s going to be, with no real good chances of survival, but some players just won’t like it regardless.
A similar issue is expressed in the labyrinth, where even the “solutions” lead to more danger. For example, my players latched onto the transatlantic cable, which is obviously important when you see it glowing in pulses of Morse code with tendrils reaching out to the labyrinth, and ultimately swam down and cut it. This triggered a mad dash to get out as the labyrinth collapsed around them. Between a fight with the drowned earlier, attacks by sharks around the cable, and that race back out, only one of the five player characters survived, only to realize she was trapped alone on the lighthouse. She ultimately burned it down and waited to die; a fitting ending for a horror story, but possibly not what every player is looking for.
Other solutions are similarly grim, either destroying the labyrinth and forcing characters to race back out, exposing them to deadly levels of radiation, or in the case of a mysterious door, letting them go home only to be haunted again:
This door leads to the home of whoever opened it: to the place they most think of as home. Everyone can walk through it and be safe. But if you go through before ending the haunting it will follow you, and doors to the labyrinth will soon begin to appear l again: in your house, in the doorways of your city, everywhere you go.
To be clear, I personally love what Amanda is doing here. It is a perfectly executed survival horror adventure that will guarantee the right tone of story no matter which elements in particular the players interact with. I’m just drawing this part out because I saw how my players reacted to it and I think some tables would really reject it all together. Like all good art, it just won’t be for everyone.
One More Thing
Since it doesn’t fit in anywhere else, I’m dropping this last question at the end since I think it’s interesting.
Q: What inspired you to write this? My background is in maritime archaeology, so I was 100% in the moment I saw the concept, but I'm curious what led you down the path of writing it.
A: The Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago has a world war 2 U-boat that you can go on board & walk around. The cramped space & smell & the huge machinery & the way your footsteps sound as you walk around the metal floor made a huge impression on me as a kid. I also saw the film Das Boot when I was really young & loved it: the awful desperation & the way that a small problem can quickly spiral into a life & death situation, where you realize the room where you were just having dinner & joking around with your friends is not safe & never was. I have a lot of anxiety so I guess that stuff really speaks to me.