You build a crawler in ten steps on the official character sheet. Use a pencil: your numbers change fast on the Tutorial Floors.
- Establish your background. You start with ten Skills: two each from childhood, adolescence, career and hobbies, plus your combat Skills. No picking the same Skill twice.
- Choose your weapon. Human crawlers start with Unarmed Combat at Rank 3 (animal crawlers get Slice Attack). Your second combat Skill comes from the weapon you brought into the dungeon.
- Choose Stats. Either assign 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 to your five Stats, or roll 1d6 for each in order, rerolling 1s. Then note each Stat Mod.
- Determine your Evade. Evade is an Interrupt you can use on other turns. It adds only your Dex.
- Set up your Health Bar. Your Health is Con × 10, split into 10 slots, each holding your Con Mod.
- Record Mana and starting Spells, based on your Intelligence.
- Record Move and Step. Move is 20 feet; every Action also lets you Step 10 feet.
- Record AI Favor and size. Human crawlers start with 1 AI Favor.
- Choose past traumas, loose ends and regrets. These tell your GM which stories you want to tell.
- Determine starting stuff: the clothes you’re wearing, one weapon, one useful item and something weird.
Your crawler name and number
In the dungeon you’re “Crawler” plus your first name, with letters of your last name added if the name is taken. Everyone also gets a crawler number; for simplicity the book suggests one between 500,000 and 12,900,000. Register here and the site assigns yours automatically, skipping numbers used by characters in the books.
Playing an animal
If the GM allows it, one crawler in the group can be an Earth animal instead of a human, at the cost of their starting AI Favor.
Source: Crawlers & Customization, pp. 4–18.