cliffcrawl 2nd play report

28 Aug, 2026

I had 4 players this time:

• Boris, ex- (free?)mason
• Bennett, extreme sports enthusiast
• Borg, miner
• Angela, Reform councillor

It's been a week since the first expedition up Mass 2 ended in disaster. Since then security has been tightened up massively, with robotic police sentries and stationed officers keeping a close eye. these fucking things

Angela, however, has a grand plan to claim Mass 2 for England, and has been at work all week pulling strings. It all makes sense to her, although the logical leaps are incomprehensible to any outside observer. Nevertheless, her hired team drive through the abandoned tower block's chainlink gates in a black BMW, unharassed. They start at 5am, just as gaps start to form in the thundery skies overhead and sunlight filters in.

Having recovered the first group's topo, they know to use their grapple straight away. Boris is first to sink his hook in and squirms up the rope; he fixes the rope some distance away from the heavily gushing waterfall and swings it across to the other climbers.

Borg, having a deep-seated inferiority complex¹, volunteers to lead multiple pitches in a row, but quickly starts to flag. They fire up the slightly detached pillar, making use of the ice screws left in by the previous party. It's not long before they're at the point where the last guys tried to traverse across, just before the death of their Army officer. The enclosed parallel walls of ice are unappealing to Boris, who is claustrophobic; he instead intends to keep questing up to the top of the pillar, traversing from there with a grappling hook to the main mass. Feeling confident, the party rally behind him.

But they start to realise they're not alone. Bennett spots an unmoving pair of what seem to be green boots poking out of a crevice several hundred metres lateral to their position. And Borg, while climbing, hears movement far up above; maybe even a shift of shadow, slightly too large to be a seagull or pigeon.

As they climb, a blanket of heat settles over london. It's 9 in the morning now, and a crowd has gathered once again, their silhouttes wavering through the heat far below. Excited gasps and shouts drift up to the climbers as Borg takes the first fall of the trip, just 10 meters from the top of the pillar. An ominous thundering creak peals out as the pillar sways, but it stays attached to Mass 2 for now.

Boris claims first ascent, naming their route the Glorious Shaft of Masonry of Greater London. The party gather at the top, take selfies, and prepare to grapnel over to the main mass.

There's definitely something over there. They can see the corpses of numerous birds.

Bennett takes the next big fall; a full rope-length whipperas he tries to make his way up a small system of ledges. He will be covered in bruises for weeks to follow. Angela, meanwhile, manages to forge up the ledge system, coming to a stance just 20 metres from the top.

As she poses for a photo, two yellow eyes appear in the shadows behind her. They blink slowly.

Angela wastes no time. She sinks in one of her last ice screws and flings herself back from the ledge as a snow leopard paces towards her. As she slips over the edge she hurls her water bottle at it. A feline yowl echoes over the rooftops of London as she swings a few metres below the ledge. A few seconds later, her water bottle is seen tinkling and rattling down a crevasse on the far side of the ledge, dropping away eventually into a fading speck among the streets below.

A few minutes pass. Silence. She crawls back up over the ledge to find the leopard gone.

At long last, the party make the final push for the summit. They pull themselves onto the top of Mass 2, and Angela names their route Farage's Montage. As they celebrate, a sleek black chopper comes alongside to ferry them back to the ground.

updated topo. This session's route in blue

notes on the session

It's definitely swingy. A string of good rolls can make it feel super easy; one bad one makes it feel impossible.

A couple of rules changes:

• Death & Injury is a 2D6 table, far reducing odds of instant death. I didn't get to test it out as no one fell under 0 stamina.
• When you roll to climb, one die is a Stamina die and one is a Cool die. If you roll a 1 on either, that stat decrements by 1, even if you succeed the climb. I'm not sure if this felt all that great at the table, because you're essentially being punished for climbing for no reason.
• I threw in some very simple 'loadouts' of equipment to give players a running start.

I'm having a wobble about this game. Feedback I've gotten twice now is that it feels more like a board game than a roleplaying game. What I'm trying to figure out is whether that's a problem with the scenario, the rules, or the person running it(me).

Thinking about ODND, there's nothing in the rules that really compels you to roleplay. But there seem to be gaps in the right places to allow roleplaying to bloom. It's certainly true that at the moment, cliffcrawl is too punctuated with constant climbing rolls and saving throws, which I think is certainly hindering roleplay opportunities.

But another advantage ODND has is a long culture of play and dungeon design. People have been figuring out how to design and play in compelling dungeons for decades, and that has nothing to do with the contents of the LBBs. One thing I noticed about climbing Mass 2 is that the players feel compelled to basically just fire up in as straight a line as possible. It doesn't matter if I've populated the breadth of the cliff with crazy cool shit; movement is too costly to go looking for those things.

Compare this to D&D, where movement by itself tends to incur minimal attrition; the main pressure being time and encounters. The potential of treasure and cool shit often outweighs the percieved cost of more time in the dungeon. In cliffcrawl, every square of movement represents a possible fall, a possible 1D6 of damage taken. Questing across the cliff for a potential gain seems less worth it.

There's two options that come immediately to mind. The first is to make movement less costly; allow players to roam around the cliff a little more freely. The other is to zoom out massively. Instead of rolling 12 times to climb a route, roll just once or twice. This would mean players could go up and down a cliff multiple times in one session, putting up new lines and discovering new things with much higher frequency.

I'm interested in the latter option for now, in a bid to see how different the game can feel if I just change my refereeing style and procedures.