A couple years ago, I worked through the Storytelling Collective’s “Write your First Adventure” course. I failed to complete it to the stated end-goal of “Get a completed adventure on the Dungeon Master’s Guild” but I learned a lot about how to format and pace adventures. I’ve tried to bring that into my own homebrew campaigns, though I haven’t always succeeded in curbing my desire to go big and awesome and epic immediately.
Like that time I had my Pathfinder players deal with an entire town being overrun by undead and immediately having to run after a stolen artifact like there wouldn’t be anyone in town equipped to do so. And then pretty quickly threw them an airship because airships are cool.
All that to take the long scenic route to the fact that writing out an adventure and dungeon has kept coming up to mind over and over. I did a couple weeks of Dungeon23 at the start of this year, but a Megadungeon didn’t really fit with the playstyle I generally play with. I like more contained and narrative things with a hook, stuff to do in the middle, and a satisfying conclusion in a few sessions. So I was intrigued when I saw the “Town, Forest, Dungeon” Jam on itch for Cairn.
Cairn is a game that I saw a recommendation for sometime last year. You can get a PDF copy for free from the website, along with some free adventures to go with it. It’s based on Into the Odd and Knave, games from the experimental indie side of the OSR movement, sometimes called NSR. Cairn uses three stats: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower. These are generated by rolling 3d6 in order, and they are tested by rolling a d20 and aiming to roll equal to or under the stat. That is 90% of the game mechanics.
The rules are light, but as I discovered with Electric Bastionland, letting players just ask to do things leads some interesting places. So I’ve been reading through a lot of stuff made for Cairn and other OSR games to get a feel for how you allow for that sort of play in your adventure. How do you make the puzzle that the players can come up with a clever solution to without requiring a game to stop for an hour while players you’ve never met try to read how you would solve a situation?
Which brings me back again to finding the upcoming Cairn Jam themed as “A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon”. It strips the adventure (or setting) you write down to three components: a town, a forest, and a dungeon. Which was concise enough a prompt to get my wheels turning so much more than any time I’d thought “I want to write an adventure about X” before.
And this is how I ended up with an Obsidian vault on my computer drawing inspiration from Wizards of the Coast working with the Pinkertons to write an adventure about a town being harassed by Pink Cloaked Mercenaries at the behest of some wizards in a tower in the forest over there.
I’m excited to write some more about my town and the owlbears in the forest soon. Because of course there are owlbears. Owlbears are cool.
Featured Image is Gloomy Forest by gorchakov.artem used under the terms of CC-BY 2.0.
Leave a Reply