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

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Dungeon Room Index: Sewers and Water Rooms

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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...
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The Relationship-crawl: Part 1, In search of a citycrawl

I recently read an  interesting blog series  about city-crawls and why they don't really work. The basic argument, as I understand it, is that cities are rarely suitable for spatial exploration mechanics. As cities are generally safe, and the activities that take place there are typically supplemental to the more exciting activities of delving dungeons and exploring wildernesses, it's just not generally desirable to employ a procedure for walking two blocks and hooking a left down an alley to be assailed by thugs on your way to buy extra rope. This argument really piqued my interest and got me thinking though: if a city is not suitable for exploring in terms of it's spatial qualities, might there be some other  sense in which a city can be generically "crawled"? Can you crawl a settlement in a less physical sense?  The epiphany: can you crawl  a social network ? And would that even be fun ? Crawling through graphs I have to take a moment to reinforce the basic i...
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Dungeon Room Index: Tombs

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Last time I did Shrines. Today I'm doing tombs. Graves, crypts, mausoleums, so on. Places where dead things are laid to rest. (Or in games like this, to guard their earthly spoils from would be grave robbers. It doesn't sound that restful to me...) This is a classic staple, I think. Here are the rooms:
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