Building a Cosmic Horror D&D Point Crawl in Blackwater Citadel

What is a point crawl?

Most DMs and players are familiar with a dungeon crawl, or less commonly, a hex crawl. In either case, the DM presents a map and the players decide how their characters move through the location. A point crawl takes this concept, and abstracts the map further. Instead of measured corridors and rooms or regular wilderness hexes, a point crawl map consists of only points of interest and connections between them.

The supplement “Blackwater Citadel” provides locations and inspiration to create a horror-themed point crawl. In this article, we will be using “Blackwater Citadel” to create a point crawl for a single-session adventure. The forsaken pirate fortress is sure to challenge the characters’ wits, their resolve, and their ability to survive the cosmic horrors that dwell in the citadel.

Overview: Blackwater Citadel

This is an excerpt from “Blackwater Citadel” which describes the general atmosphere of the forsaken pirate fortress.

Jagged ocean cliff tops stick out of an impenetrable mist like the rotten teeth of a dead leviathan. The darkening waves crash against the crumbling walls of an ancient naval fortress. Iron towers and rocky staircases cling to the deadly cliffs. An eerie green light wafts across the sunken stronghold from the eye of a sickening lighthouse overlooking it all. Through the salty air, howls of madness and pain soar from an unknowable source.
Excerpt from “Blackwater Citadel” – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/386504/Blackwater-Citadel

Blackwater Citadel is an ancient nautical fortress built atop jagged cliffs by pirate kings long dead. Ages of greed and pain have twisted the citadel into a labyrinth of shifting crypts, staircases, and towers. Adventurers who dare to explore the fortress often find themselves lost among the warped geography. If the explorers don’t starve, any of the countless deviant dwellers in the citadel are sure to feast on the lost souls.

Quest hook: A fey war chest gone missing

A point crawl, just like a dungeon crawl or a hex crawl, is just an empty ephemera without any motivation for the characters to adventure through the area. So let’s come up with a simple quest hook to draw the player characters into Blackwater Citadel.

Ervias Dustbrush, a brave halfling merchant, has hired the characters to return a prized war chest which supposedly holds the crown jewels of a ruined fey empire. One of his merchant crews was shipping the chest across the sea, when they were attacked near Blackwater Citadel. Now Ervias promises the characters one item of their choice from the war chest if they return it to him.

The Throne of the Drowned King

Within Blackwater Citadel, all beings aspire to sit on the Throne of the Drowned King. NPCs and monsters constantly war over who is the supreme predator of the fortress. The PDF provides a table of possible current occupants of the throne. To begin building the point crawl, it’s useful to know who the leader of the citadel is. We roll the dice, check the table and discover our aberrant lord…

“A hulking leviathan from the deep” sits on the Throne of the Drowned King for our point crawl adventure. Let’s say this ancient leviathan, whom we might call Crypsos the Cruel, crawled out of the depths of the ocean and made his way into Blackwater Citadel to feed on the eldritch energy of the fortress. Over time, he grows into a vile abomination of gluttony and sloth, devouring anyone and anything which comes too close to the citadel.

Choosing point crawl locations within Blackwater Citadel

So now, we have the general idea of the adventure: the characters agree to recover the fey war chest from the clutches of Crypsos the Cruel in Blackwater Citadel, and bring it back to Ervias Dustbrush.

With this in the background, we are ready to build our point crawl. First, we choose about six locations from “Blackwater Citadel,” which we want to feature in our adventure. I picked these six:

The Wretched Docks
Grotto of the Shoremother
Pirate Armory
Map Room of Conquests
Kelp-Covered Prison
Throne Room of the Drowned King

Logically, the throne room is the location the furthest away from the docks. To get to it, the characters must traverse the rest of the citadel. With this in mind, we can throw the six locations on a point crawl map by connecting them with each other:

We can build simple point crawls such as this with graphviz.it. But a piece of paper and a pencil to write down the locations, and connect them works just as well. Solid lines represent visible pathways between locations. A dashed line represents a hidden pathway, such as a tunnel behind a secret door.

In this particular point crawl it makes sense that the characters enter from the docks, which is why I marked it as “Entry – Wretched Docks” above.

When deciding how the locations connect to each other, I simply fiddled with the layout until it looked right. I knew that the throne room was the final location. Everything else followed from what made narrative sense. The map room and the armory would be between the docks and the throne room, while the prison and the mysterious Grotto of the Shoremother are a little more off to the side.

Creating evocative pathways

When the characters move through the point crawl, we can use the material from the “Blackwater Citadel” supplement to describe the individual locations. But due to its flexible design, the PDF does not include any descriptions for connections between the locations.

We can prepare to improvise the tunnels, stairs and hallways that connect the locations of our point crawl by giving each pathway an evocative name. We can let our imagination run wild with eldritch pathways that evoke the cosmic horror atmosphere. Here’s what I came up with:

These short key phrases help us quickly improvise brief descriptions for a pathway as characters crawl through Blackwater in search of the fey war chest.

The monster roster

Instead of building neat encounters for each location, we can create a list of the monstrous inhabitants of Blackwater Citadel. This list becomes another tool for improvising during the flow of the game. When the characters enter a new location, we can either roll randomly on the list or pick a monster appropriate to the environment.

Boss monster: Crypsos the Cruel

When we think about the monster ecology of Blackwater Citadel it’s helpful to think about the top predator currently in the fortress. Our random roll at the start of this process told us that Crypsos the Cruel, a hulking leviathan from the deep sits on the throne.

The kraken is a fitting monster choice to represent Cryptos. The massive beast has crawled into the Throne Room of the Drowned King and feasts on the eldritch energy of Blackwater Citadel. The kraken has

Minions of the kraken

Now that we know the current occupant of the Throne of the Drowned King is a kraken, we can build a roster of monstrous minions that roam Blackwater. These should include creatures who flourish in the company of a kraken, creatures who worship the kraken, and of course ancient mutated pirates of Blackwater Citadel who really hope the kraken will leave soon, so that one of them can sit on the throne again.

Troglodytes and grimlocks (reskinned as mutated pirates)
Flesh golems (reskinned as multiple pirate bodies fused together)
Ghosts of former occupants of the Throne of the Drowned King
Water weirds and water elementals (add poison damage for the defiled waters of Blackwater)
Giant octopus
Black puddings and other oozes
A coven of sea hags (the Shoremother)
Kraken priests, cult fanatics and cultists
A Sahuagin baron, sahuagin priestesses, and sahuagin (carry-on predators of Cryptos)
Marids serve as heralds of Cryptos the Cruel

Running the point crawl

When the characters accept Ervias Dustbrush’s quest to retrieve the war chest of the fey, the point crawl begins. Once they reach Blackwater Citadel they must enter the fortress through the docks. We use the boxed text from the PDF to set the scene, and potentially roll on the monster roster table. The result can set us up for a combat encounter or give us inspiration to drop an NPC in front of the characters.

From the docks, the characters can see two pathways: the bloodied caves, and the hallway of skulls. We briefly describe both options and let the players decide in which direction to proceed.

During the game, we simply repeat this process:

Set the scene by reading the boxed text.
Optional: Roll on the monster roster to generate a combat or roleplaying encounter.
Let characters explore their current location, potentially uncovering secrets and clues.
Describe any visible pathways forward and let the players choose a path.

Inevitably, the characters end up in the Throne Room of the Drowned King where they must face off against Cryptos the Cruel to recover the war chest of the fey which he has hidden in the throne room.

As we can see, point crawls strip the elements we need to run a D&D game down to the basics. Interesting locations are connected by flavorful pathways. We drop encounters, monsters, and rewards into these locations as the characters move through the point crawl.

Supplements like “Blackwater Citadel” can be great sources of inspiration for this purpose: a flexible collection of inspiration to create unique content for our game.

Get Blackwater Citadel on drivethrurpg.com!

Illusory Script presents: “Blackwater Citadel – A Cosmic Horror Adventure Location for Any Game System” – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/386504/Blackwater-Citadel

Links & Resources

Mike Shea: “Pointcrawls for Cities and Overland Travel” – https://slyflourish.com/pointcrawls.html