The Crawling Chaos + complimentary PDF (via online store)
A Roleplaying Game of Weird Demises
The Crawling Chaos is a zero-prep roleplaying game that lets you invent short macabre tales of weird horror in which a lone narrator is drawn into a web of esoteric and obscure mysteries until their curiosity leads them to an eldritch doom. Play with 2-5 players, or by yourself with the included solo rules.
- Story game for 1-5 players, 1-2 hours, zero-prep.
- One Player / Many GMs
- Create tales of weird horror with your friends.
- One player is the Narrator, speaking always in the first person. The others play as Architects, spending points to introduce characters, incidents and threats to which the narrator reacts and responds.
- Solo rules for either spoken or written play.
- Huge host of random tables to keep your imaginations firing.
- A Lovecraftian story game that actually feels like a Lovecraft story.
One Player / Many GMs
The Crawling Chaos inverts the traditional format of roleplaying games. There is but a single player character – the narrator – against whom the other players, acting as the world and the incidental characters, throw incidents, accidents and unpleasantnesses in an attempt to propel them towards an inevitable and grisly doom.
Zero-Prep Lovecraftian Horror
The conversation begins with the Narrator describing their present situation, one Architect takes an Action to disturb that situation with an incident, the narrator reacts to that intrusion, another architect takes an action to drive the story on further, and go on, towards the revelation of The Awful Truth.
The narrator speaks in first-person, and may only react to characters, threats, and incidents. The architects speak in third-person, and may only describe and control elements external to the narrator.
The conversation continues, eroding the narrator’s Pools, until they find themselves at Mortal Risk, and one architect successfully consummates a final Eldritch Doom and speaks the Final Word.
Scholars' Notes
"Mike Hutchinson's THE CRAWLING CHAOS tackles many perennial game design challenges at once — the multiplayer solo game, the Lovecraftian story game that feels like a Lovecraft story, the mechanization of story beats — in a small but powerful package. Players, designers, and Lovecraftians can all find something meaty in this deceptively slim and simple RPG." -- Kenneth Hite, designer of Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, Vampire: the Masquerade (5th ed) and more.
"I am really digging it. Love a one-player, many-GM setup, and it feels like it's giving me a window into someone else's head, which is my fav kind of zine." -- Nathan D. Paoletta, designer of World Wide Wrestling, Imp of the Perverse, and RPG Design Zine.
"Mike Hutchinson is one of the most innovative designers around, and he’s turned his eye on Cthulhu Mythos role playing. This looks like a ton of fun, in which the players don’t investigate the horror, they inflict it." -- Gav Thorpe, designer of Inquisitor, Warhammer 40,000, Judge Dredd, Zeo Genesis and more.
"This game has mechanics that send traditional roleplaying, er, roles, base over apex." -- Tabletop Sentinel
Watch it played solo
Herein lies a demonstration of the solo gameplay of The Crawling Chaos, so that you might see the game mechanics in action. The solo mode shares most of the mechanics with group gameplay, so should give you a good sense of both. Watch it here:
