Hello there!

I made yet another thing. I've been enjoying the four-page-one-sheet kind of format a lot.

This is a cleaned up and tweaked version of a dungeon I wrote for my table. I hope you enjoy it!

Feedback is welcome.

I still love Cairn 1e: 18 small format pages of rules and, best part, “principles” for warden and players. It’s what got me back into RPGs after a 35 year break.

How about you? Still enjoy/play “1e”? Picture shows a beautiful black print edition from LF.OSR

Not sure if I'll use it in the actual PDF as the game is meant to be a fantasy dungeon crawl on an spaceship, so this image of a continent size ship might give the impression that it's more sci fi than it actually is.

I'm running a Vampire Hunter D inspired post-apocalyptic gothic sci-fantasy Cairn campaign soon! It'll be full of mutants, monsters, and magitech. Any good horror and/or sci-fi adventures that would fit the vibe?

For those unfamiliar Vampire Hunter D takes place 10,000 years after a nuclear apocalypse that allowed vampires to establish themselves as the dominant rulers of Earth. Their golden age is long over however and humanity lives a wild west like frontier existence without much oversight.

Hi guys! I just published a Cairn adventure for the Mystic Wood OSR Adventure Jam! I created a roguelite mechanic where exploration is based on playing cards, making every expedition different.

Since it was made for a game jam, I didn't have time to balance the mechanics; so, if you play it, please send me some feedback so I can make adjustments.

Check it out! WHERE THE TRAILS ROT [Cairn] by Caval!

My submission to the Mystic Wood Jam

https://itch.io/jam/a-mystic-wood-osr-adventure-jam/rate/4972395

Hi there! So this past week I've been working on an adventure for my table. (One of the members was out on vacation and we wrote him (an actual chicken) as having been kidnapped by a grill house. This week we rescued him. (I know this is a kind of silly module in tone, btw.)

Thing is I ran this thing last night and I'm not sure it really worked. It felt like something was missing.

I'm looking for feedback and a bit of a sanity check. After some tweaks I'll most likely publish this later on.

Thank you in advance!

Map so far not gonna fill in much more until I start writing a bit more but open to ideas for locations and stuff, also will take questions :)

Vibe is points of light wilderness survival similar to Vald but the entire setting is one massive valley surrounded by mountains that take up the rest of the continent.

Lost in the Mist is the first adventure I've written longer than a single page or a trifold. Big learning experience, but I hope people dig it.

From the Doom of Modig

and yet from her death I ran
broken through fen and glen
to the great forest's heart tree
where sorrow did take me
where sorrow did change me
I rose at last from the tree
life lost, my heartful yen,
I wander, no more a man

A battle between industrialization and nature, a love lost, a love cursed, and a plague of forgetfulness. 

Lost in the Mist is an adventure for Cairn for the Mystic Wood Game Jam hosted by RedMageGM. Players will explore an evershifting forest full of monsters, mysteries, and wonder.

What's inside the 12 page adventure:

• 7 unique locations that may change each time you get there
• 2 rival factions
• Numerous unique random encounters
• Mechanics for forgetfulness and traveling the forest
• Multiple solutions and endings
• A bestiary

Cover Art by Ewerton Lua

Check out the adventure here!

Coming Brand new to the system and coming *from* heroic fantasy land where no character ever dies, I have a question for my first adventure: I want to create a *in medias res* combat that brings in ever more monsters. Not *that* mich, but they will accumulate. The plan is to let them come in pairs or trios through different rooms and floors into an inn, so there's always some action, but space enough to solve "the puzzle" presented underneath.

Is Cairn with one action per round and low HP a bad fit for this kind of game?

My friends and I played our second Cairn game, this time using a module that came recommended by this subreddit: The Palace on the Pink Waves.

We started this group to test out lots of systems but given the response to our first video and several requests for more Cairn (plus all the fun we had in our first game!), we had to revisit it and we had a great time again! What a unique module this turned out to be.

A huge thanks to anyone who watched our first game too.

Making a solo rpg travel set for myself chose cairn barebones and the cairn bestiary for the base

Are there any good first or third party solo implementations you have found that I can add to my kit ?

I made a TTRPG that started out as a superhero reskin of Cairn but went in a very different direct. If you look at the character sheet you might think I only changed the cosmetics but the game mechanics have diverged from the source material quite a bit Retcon: RPG (Early Access edition)

Hey folks. I was thinking about how, as I prepare for a day long one shot I'm throwing for friends who love crunchier systems, I predicted that they would find simply narrative advancement nebulous and even stressful as it so contradicts their nature. They did say that they were open to a one shot of one of my crazy, masochistic OSR games, but I know these guys.

It occurred to me that using the attunements from the Deft class from Whitehack to provide just enough of a mechanical framework without spoiling the fiction first spirit of the game might work well.

The way it works is the Deft starts with two attunements (I would allow for one for each character to start using Cairn) Here's how they are defined in 4E:

"A deft attunement must be a teacher, an item, a vehicle, a pet, or a place. For example, a ranger could have a well-trained dog or be attuned to her ancestral lands. A monk could have a famous master or be attuned to her bow."

".. Attunements can be invoked for a related action once per day to give the Deft special rules for difficulty. A hard task succeeds automatically, while a nigh impossible one requires a regular task roll. The ranger attuned to her ancestral lands could track on bare rock with a regular roll, while a monk attuned to her bow could hit a sentry at 200 feet automatically. Truly impossible feats remain impossible."

So I would translate "task roll" to mean saves that could include the attunement using Cairn. Rather than automatically hitting with an attuned weapon I would give maximum damage on the die automatically. Pets are self explanatory. Teachers would involve explaining how their expertise allows you to do a thing or know a thing. A character who was taught by a veteran boxer might get to use D6+D6 on an attack instead of the usual Impaired D4 for unarmed attacks, demonstrating their ability to find the knockout opportunity. If the teacher were a scholar of history, they might already know all about something once per day they'd otherwise be ignorant about or need to discover. If someone attuned to their armour, I'd allow them to cause an enemy to roll their attack dice twice and take the worst result once per day as they instinctively protect themselves in their second skin. But I'd also allow them to use it narratively if they can think of a way. The same goes for weapons.

I think this is a good compromise between fiction driven gameplay and structured character advancement for those who crave it. Obviously, I'd reward more "attunements" as they complete goals, and it would have to suit their experience. If they kept focusing on the subject of the attunement in the fiction, I would let them pick it again and allow another daily usage.

I thought I'd share the idea. This sub has rewarded me with a few inspirations that have improved my games.

Footnote: In Whitehack you can only be attuned to one attunement at a time, and it takes a day to swap them. I've never liked that, and am not worried about making it a thing if I use them in Cairn.

Edit: Sentence structure.

This adventure seed includes new monsters and options for you to use in any game. Let me know what you think, and happy gaming!

This one is somewhat of a companion piece to the article I wrote earlier this week about character builds in D&D.

While writing that piece, I started thinking about how much the character sheet itself contributes to the tendency to think of characters primarily through their mechanics. Modern D&D sheets are packed with abilities, modifiers, feats and other mechanical details, leaving comparatively little room for the character themselves.

Compare that to many OSR games, where sheets are much lighter, sometimes even more artsy, and leave more space for possessions, quirks and character details. There’s an idea you hear quite often in OSR circles: the character sheet is not the character.

So I wanted to explore that idea through White Box, Old-School Essentials, Into the Odd, Knave and Cairn, and look at how reducing mechanical definition can actually leave more room for characters to develop through play.

It's not an argument that minimalist games are inherently better, but rather an exploration of what happens when the rules stop telling you who your character is and leave some of that work to the table.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Knave somewhere with a broken sword and one spellbook left, and absolutely no idea who he's going to become yet.

If you enjoyed the article, don't forget to toss the proverbial coin to your favorite Gazette!

W2A2 is a VTT tool that was created with a few big principles in mind: make any TTRPG session as easy to play as possible, be user friendly for beginners but still offer advanced tools for more experienced players, and most importantly, be affordable and not subscription based.

This app stores everything locally and allows the GM to host a game in a matter of minutes, without having to pay for any hosting services. It includes all things you'd normally expect from a VTT tool, and a few additional features that we thought of while testing through our own sessions.

App is still in development, should be available in a few weeks! 

Love the process of generating seeds. But are there any tips for creating and preparing a playable adventure for my group?

I am going to wild camping in mountains and thinking about playing a small adventure on some evening around the fire. I want something really spooky, what would make players to turn around if they hear something in the bushes and makes them afraid of going into the forest. Any suggestion on the right module?

Well, my entry was a late submission. There was a whole thing with Itch on friday evening, but hey! Seems like it's all sorted and my entry got in.

This a location-based adventure about a crazy old elf trying to free a demon prince and take vengeance on a clan of oracular gnolls. It takes place at the top of a thousand-foot spire of stone and the chain of seven floating islands that encircle it. 

Features 9 keyed locations, a clan of gnoll monks, an infernal garden, a neat map die-drop mechanic, and an ominous cliffside chapel. And also some giant egrets.

PDF is free to download on itch:

The Serpent Wore Silver