The World: Seattle, Under the Sound
System AI: “Welcome to Seattle, Crawlers. The rain is real, the coffee is strong, and as of this morning the waterfront is a dungeon. Please keep your hands, arms and tentacles inside the floor at all times.”
The crawl opens on the Seattle waterfront the moment the System arrives. The ground under Pier 59 folds into a dungeon that runs beneath Puget Sound, under the neighborhoods and out to Tacoma and Bellevue. This page is the setting guide: the places, the living things, the opponents, and how the game treats the cultures of the region.
Whose land this is
Seattle sits on the homelands of Coast Salish peoples, including the Duwamish, whose people are still here. The Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Tulalip, Snoqualmie and other Salish Sea nations live and govern all around the Sound. The game names the region’s Indigenous traditions where they matter, and credits them. It never borrows their sacred forms for play:
- No sacred ceremony in play. Winter Spirit Dancing in the smokehouse is spiritual practice, private to the families and communities who hold it. It never appears in the game, as a mechanic or as scenery.
- No imitation art. Formline (Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Gitxsan) and Coast Salish design (circles, crescents, trigons, purposeful negative space) are living art systems with their own protocols and their own artists. The game’s gear, glyphs and loot are not drawn in those styles. If you want them in your world, commission a Native artist and credit them.
- Credit what inspired the rules. Dance as public display of law, lineage and strength has deep roots in Northwest Coast potlatch protocol, and the competitive dance-off as a tie-breaker comes from the modern powwow circuit. Powwow culture came to Seattle with Plains and Great Basin families during the relocation era of 1952 to 1972. The crawl’s dance-off borrows that one structural idea, the drum that speeds up until someone misses the final beat, and says so. The Crawlers dance their own styles, never Indigenous ones.
- Go learn from the source. The Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park, and the Burke Museum share these histories in the words of the people they belong to.
The dungeon floors
Each dungeon floor is a real Puget Sound habitat that the System has dragged underground, lit with bioluminescence and filled with opponents.
| Dungeon floor | Biome | What grows and lives there | What the System does with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Pier 59 Collapse | The Seattle Aquarium and the waterfront, folded into tide pools | Sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca) sheeting the logs and rocks, anemones, the aquarium’s shattered tanks | The opening scramble: Cordula breaches the Ocean Pavilion glass and walks out with Barnaby |
| 2. The Eelgrass Nursery | Shallow mud and sand flats under a few feet of water | Native eelgrass (Zostera marina) meadows sheltering Dungeness crabs, herring eggs and young salmon | A stealth floor: dance-offs are loud, and loud wakes the crabs |
| 3. The Bull Kelp Cathedral | A towering underwater forest | Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) holdfasts gripping the rocks, hollow floating bulbs on stipes up to 100 feet long, sugar kelp (Laminaria saccharina) crinkled in the sheltered corners | A vertical floor: climb the stipes, dance on the bulbs, try not to pop one |
| 4. The Ship Canal | Ballard, Fremont and Lake Union, flooded at the locks | Floating homes on cedar log floats, the Ballard brewery district, Craftsman bungalows with deep porches | Taprooms become potion shops; houseboats become platforms that sway off the beat |
| 5. The Estuary | Salt marsh where a river meets the Sound | Pickleweed (Salicornia virginica) whose salt-filled joints turn red in autumn, Pacific silverweed (Argentina pacifica) with yellow flowers and silver-backed leaves, dense meadows of Lyngby’s sedge (Carex lyngbyei) hiding young fish | Half the floor floods with every tide: the dance floor is there, then it is not |
| 6. The Underground | Pioneer Square’s buried storefronts and the space under the Aurora Bridge | Dripping brick, old sidewalk prisms, and the Fremont Troll, a 1990 public sculpture the System has opinions about | A maze of dead-end storefronts; the Troll judges every dance-off held in its shadow |
| 7. The Bluffs | Steep shoreline cliffs just above the high-tide line | Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii) with twisting trunks and peeling red-orange bark, wind-bent shore pine (Pinus contorta), Hooker’s willow (Salix hookeriana) at the water’s edge, Nootka rose (Rosa nutkana) and snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) holding the slopes, Puget Sound gumweed (Grindelia integrifolia) with sticky yellow flowers on the rocky beaches | A cliff floor: the roots hold the bluff together, and anything that tears them out starts a landslide |
| 8. Bellevue and the Narrows | Glass towers across Lake Washington, and the shipyards of Tacoma | Polished marble lobbies, laser-grid security, brick warehouses on Commencement Bay, the Tacoma Narrows where the giant octopus legend lives | The corporate floor: the final bosses wear lanyards |
The habitats are why the leads win. Barnaby hunts eelgrass meadows and kelp forests for a living, and Cordula has spent years of weekends patrolling these shorelines in a kayak.
The cities
| City | What it is in the crawl |
|---|---|
| Seattle | The maritime core: the waterfront, the ferries, the Ballard brewery district, Lake Union’s floating homes, the Space Needle visible through every breach in the ceiling |
| Tacoma | Grit City on Commencement Bay: shipyards, brick warehouses, and the Tacoma Narrows, home of the giant octopus legend Barnaby refuses to confirm or deny |
| Bellevue | Across the floating bridges: glass towers, corporate plazas, marble floors, laser traps, and the opponents with the best health insurance |
Architecture follows the region. Northwest Regional buildings bring heavy glulam Douglas fir beams, red cedar siding, basalt foundations and floor-to-ceiling glass for the grey winter light. Safe Rooms are built in that style: a fire, cedar walls, and rain on big windows.
The opponents
The dungeon does not throw monsters at the Crawlers. It throws professionals. Every opponent wants to win a dance-off, and none of them wants to hurt anyone; they want to be right, on time and billable.
| Opponent | Where | How they dance | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterly Close Accountant | Floor 1 and up | Precise, slow, perfectly on the count, accrual basis | Improvisation: they cannot dance to a beat they did not reconcile |
| Bonus-Season Investment Banker | Bellevue | Leverages every move, borrows the Crawler’s own choreography | Overextension: they bet the whole round on the big finish |
| Developer Advocate Swarm | Ship Canal and up | Enthusiastic, always mid-demo, never stops offering a free tier | Live demos: the move works perfectly until someone is watching |
| Pitch-Deck Founder | The Underground | Every move is a pivot | Questions: ask about the business model and they freeze |
| Ferry-Line Commuter Horde | The waterfront | Shuffling, patient, unstoppable in a crowd | Schedules: they leave the floor the moment the boat docks |
| Rain-Shell Tourist Pod | Pier 59 | Synchronized pointing, umbrella choreography | Locals: one “it’s not even raining” breaks their rhythm |
The bosses: the Regional Managing Director of Bellevue, the Quarterly Earnings Call (a boss that is a meeting), and the Keynote, which dances for forty-five minutes and never takes questions.
One boss is not a person at work. Monty, a reticulated python someone released into the Underground, guards the Floor 0 stairwell. Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world, and Monty’s geometric camouflage makes him look like whatever Python is already on your PATH. Nobody fights him: the party beats him by knowing which Python they are running, and the System rehomes him to a licensed reptile rescue. Barnaby, a constrictor himself, keeps his distance anyway.
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Local flavor
- The Ballard brewery district. Fresh-hop season, maritime-industrial taprooms, and potions brewed on the premises. Loot uses invented brews, never real breweries’ names: Ballard Fresh-Hop Haze (+20% Mana regeneration; anyone who sips it mid-round sways off the beat), Ship Canal Lager (cures Soggy), Locks Porter (heavy, slow, +2 Constitution for one floor).
- Ferries. Ferry Tokens are the crawl’s currency. Every Seattle native already knows they will never have enough.
- The rain. Wet terrain is the default. Cordula and Barnaby move better on it than anyone the System has ever broadcast.
Sources
The flora and fauna come from Puget Sound shoreline field notes shared by the project; the cultural history comes from the project’s own research notes on Coast Salish and Northwest Coast dance traditions and the arrival of powwow culture in urban Seattle. Verify anything you publish against the institutions above.
View this file on GitHub commit 4018746, edited in the workshop repository only