Cairn-ish Content

A collection of blog posts that are quite specifically about Cairn-y topics.

Combat Math

Magic


A Procedure for Settlements, NPCs, and Downtime

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dungeon Room Index: Sewers and Water Rooms

Image
Sewers! And other watery places. At the very beginning of this series I specifically called out water and how I think it can elevate a dungeon. Today, I hope to vindicate that idea. Here are the rooms: ...and this sneaky devil that I missed on my first pass transcribing my rough notes Sewers as a category I  love  sewer dungeons.  I think there are a few broad archetypes for dungeons out there: "cave" , "prison" , "tomb" --many of the room types I've covered so far can readily be expanded into a whole dungeon concept. (Some more readily than others--I'll be impressed if you can make "kitchens" into an entire megadungeon.) For many of those, I think when you pick the broad archetype you can readily come up with actual rooms  to stitch together (even if there are just a lot of rooms with more coffins in them).  I think sewers, on the other hand, are kind of the opposite: I don't really think of a "room" when I think of sewer...
Read more

Dungeon Room Opinions: Mapping at the Table, Part 2 - Abstract Mapping Toolkit

Image
In my last post I established my preference for Abstract Player Mapping. The summary is this: making players draw the map yields lots of fun benefits, and making sure the map they draw is abstract and minimal prevents player mapping from becoming so burdensome as to overwhelm its benefits.  Today I'm going to give you some tips on how to verbally deliver such a map with as few hitches as possible. Classes of detail The first idea I want to acknowledge is that certain details (and levels of precision) are suited to specific needs. As a game master, you should always be tuned into what your players want to accomplish, and by paying careful attention to what level of detail is needed for that purpose you will save time and attention in the long run. For our purposes, there are at least three classes of detail: Visceral.  The aesthetics of a space--what do the players see, hear, smell, etc? These details focus players on the world , and are therefore the most important for immer...
Read more

Dungeon Room Index: Hallways

Image
(I will no longer robotically announce what I did last time; there's a page now; use that!) I'm doing Hallways! Ha! I bet you think those aren't rooms, but my brain caught an itch and I must follow this inspiration. Here's the thing though; hallways are  different enough that I don't know that I can really follow my usual shtick of just dumping the drawings up front. Instead, let's talk a bit about hallways. Hallways as "whitespace" In practice, hallways are often an afterthought. So much so, that the definition of "hallway" in a dungeon could nearly be "everything that's not the rooms; y'know... where actual stuff  is".  Like the whitespace (greyspace?) on this page. You don't generally key hallways when writing your dungeon content. As a result, there are even a lot of dungeon generators out there that elide thinking about hallways into little more than "draw a line between these two rooms". And you know wha...
Read more