RogueCairn is an opensource random generator of small worlds designed to be explored following Yochai Gal's Cairn adventure game. Cairn is a game about exploring a dark and mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. Generated worlds can be used as a basis for preparing a one-shot, as inspiration for your narratives, or as an emergency adventure to print and play.
The world is generated rolling on multiple manually tagged and interconnected data tables (items, monsters, places, etc.) following some rules to keep some things coherent and balanced in a roguelike fashion.
This way RogueCairn vaguely explains the what of a small generated world. It's up to you as the Warden and your fellow adventuring party to create a fitting lore explaining the how and why - in advance or as you go.
But, as for many other RPG tools, you can do anything you want with them: create backstories, prepare one-shots, roll a character and explore them by yourself, or just feed your imagination.
RogueCairn wants you as a Warden and your adventuring party to play with its vagueness and randomness:
- It decides the what but guessing the rest is up to you: in a dungeon, a Mimic is looking for a Speakstick... but why? Get inspired by the descriptions of the items and beasts and the place's name to create an interesting backstory! Why a malicious shape shifter in a dungeon wants to know the unfinished business of a ghost? Maybe it is a fake chest looking for its content stolen by a dead adventurer hoarding its home?
- It also intentionally uses vague terms for some items. Is that container a shiny treasure chest or an anonymous wooden box? Is that hideout a statue of a Goddess with a scale in hand or just a tiny hole in a wall? Are those fragments the parts of an amulet or two twin statues? Be creative!
- Each world region has a short description, a set of bosses and mid-bosses living there, an exploration table, and an events list. Feel free to use them as you want: you may read the description and roll on the exploration table, pick a boss or an event as the adventuring party reach a region, or ignore these tools entirely.
- Beasts with a sparkles icon ✨ are thematically related with one of the region biomes and beasts with a star emoji ⭐ are related to both region biomes! Use this information to create leaders, natives, etc.
In my 20s I spent my evenings coding, playing video games, drinking a good beer, crying, and rolling dice with friends playing Dungeons & Dragons.
A long time has passed and I've lost track of most of them. One day Matteo wanted to drag a bunch of us again to the table and play a one-shot to bring that good times back.
In these years I've managed to keep my interest on RPGs - mostly design-wise - so he suggested me as a master. The party wanted a classic fantasy settings as we used to play but now we all have jobs and some of us have children too, so no one had time to study any rulebook of any size.
Some time ago I've studied Yochai Gal's Cairn and it fitted like a glove: it distills the core mechanics and rituals of classic RPG in a few solid rules that can be explained in minutes even as you play.
The material I've prepared for my The Ritual of The Three one-shot: a hexcrawl of the quest area (1), a few sheets with bullet-point lists of possible key story events and characters (2), a simple encounter table for each zone (3), randomized character recaps to hand down to the players - I've shared them with the players by chat some days before (4), a sample filled character sheet for them to copy (5), and some once-empty character sheets (6). In the photo, the half-elf Ethex Harkness character sheet by Alberto.
I prepared a one-shot called The Ritual of the Three inspired by the Massive Randomness lore, following multiple suggestions I've found around the internet (using names and character rolling tools, planning small hexcrawls to set locations, preparing simple rolling tables for each area, etc.) and from the Cairn manual.
It has been a fun experience and I've learned a lot. Then, something went horribly wrong.
In that adventure, a forgotten noble managed to infiltrate the party and sacrifice 3 heroes' lives to wake the Faceless, the Old Red One, and the Cube during a ritual hidden in the Cairn woods.
The traitor's name had its past glory back... but now Cairn has been tainted by the Massive Randomness corrupting Entropy. You can use RogueCairn to see it with your eyes.
RogueCairn uses both ad-hoc data and data coming from multiple data sources:
- Cairn manual
- Cairn manual More Relics page
- Includes data from Glass Bird Games
- Includes data from Ialath
- Includes data from The NSR Discord
- Cairn manual Monsters page
- Cairn manual More Equipment page (crediting Oskar Swida)
- Cairn manual More Relics page
- The Kettlewright tool sources
- Cairn manual Italian translation
- The 2e backgrounds Italian translation by Sbax
Thanks to Bianca (Lisabeth Glass, the rat-shifting druid), Matteo (Ygwal Abernathy, the jingling minstrel), Enea (Mannog Tolmen, the forgotten halfling noble), Alberto (Ethex Harkness, the half-elf of the pact), and Elena (Emrys Swinney, the rich adventuring ranger) for their bravery.