I am a big fan of Cairn, a mash-up of Into the Odd and Knave written by Yochai Gal that is designed to let people play old school modules using a more modern, minimal ruleset. Anyone in the NSR (New School Revolution) community, assuming they don't live under a rock (or several!), has likely heard that Cairn is coming out with a 2nd edition.

Before anyone starts grumbling about edition changes, the core rules are staying (mostly) intact. The purpose of the 2nd edition is to provide a complete package that you could hand to someone who has never played a roleplaying game before, and they could use it to play a kick-ass, old school-inspired campaign.

One of the "killer apps", so to speak, of this new expanded edition will be Setting Creation. The idea is that you will be able to follow the method laid out to not only produce a Pointcrawl for your game, but terrain, points of interest, and even factions. I've been testing this procedure out today, and was so inspired by it that I decided to make this post.

Disclaimer: I'm a resident loudmouth on both the Cairn and NSR Discords, and I have provided extensive feedback on a lot of the Cairn 2e procedures that are currently work-in-progress. I don't profit or anything, though. I'm just a huge systems nerd. But hey, full disclosure and all.

That out of the way, my goal for this post is to walk you through the process that I used and my overall thoughts. This probably won't make sense to you if you don't at least skim over the procedure first, so start here (keep in mind it may be altered from my example by the time you click the link. You can't stop progress).

Technically, I should come up with some basic truths of the setting. I have, but I don't want to waste too much space on them. I want to get to the good stuff. So, in brief:

• Northern European fantasy setting
• Magic exists
• people believe in Gods and religions are mostly organized around Mystery Cults
• guns may exist but they aren't commonplace

Step 1: Creating a Province

The Pointcrawl creation procedure is surprisingly straightforward. Essentially, you place a dot in the center of a paper (or drawing app of choice), make a triangle out of dots surrounding that initial dot, draw some connecting paths, make another triangle (or other shape) oriented differently than the first, and draw some more paths.

You end up with something like this.

Full disclosure, I did deviate slightly from the rules as written. I didn't decide what was a river, trail, tunnel, etc. because I wanted to see what terrain I generated for each point. Still, pretty neat, isn't it? If you pay attention to the numbers, you can see that I used two varieties of triangles. It looks a little artificial at the moment because I'm using Miro and everything is straight lines, but it is hard to see the triangles unless you know they are there.

Step 2: Adding Terrain

With this step, you roll on three different tables: one for your central point (currently called Heart), one for Near Terrain (2 or less points away from the Heart), and one for Far Terrain (3 or more). The terrain possibilities are the same on each table, but the odds are different. At a casual glance, you are more likely to get more wild terrain (forests and mountains and such) on Near Terrain, and things that can potentially end your crawl in that direction (the sea, deserts, wastelands) on the Far Terrain table. This makes a lot of sense if you want to produce a setting that has the potential for wilderness exploration.

Here's what I got:

Now, the thing that I really liked about this process is that each result has three possible, related terrain types listed. The trick is to choose the type that best fits what you have done so far. I started with Forests as my Heart (1), which made it easy to go with Hills for 10, Forest for 4 and 5, etc. I worked my way South to North, using the appropriate tables as I went. Farmlands was an easy choice for 3 (people have to eat), Caverns for 9 was the most exciting option (potential lair or dungeon!), and with 6 and 8 I went with the safe choice of Wasteland (very open for interpretation). Finally, with 2 I waffled on Beaches or Cliffs before finally settling on Cliffs.

So we get the picture of this setting that has this pocket of civilization close to the center. A settlement that is located in and around a forest that seems to go on for some distance to the South. A small farming area that is relatively close to wastelands on one side and access to some caverns on the other. It's really starting to take shape.

Step 3: Adding Details

This was my favorite step in the process. Well, maybe Factions (we'll get to that another time), but this part was really inspirational. The process is as follows: determine Detail Type (settlement, lair, ruin, hazard, etc.), roll on a table for that Detail Type that provides a specific example, and then interpret that information with the Terrain information you have already determined.

Hearts are obviously always a type of settlement. I rolled Town, which was completely in keeping with what I was already envisioning. Though part of me wishes I would have rolled something unorthodox like a prison, just for the challenge of incorporating it. However, I did roll Factionally Divided as a Settlement Feature, so that's a great little wrinkle for a starting town.

From here, things get really interesting. I rolled a Hazard (Toxic Mine) for 10, which gives me both an additional industry for the town and a potential source of adventure and conflict. For 4, I rolled Special (Trees that move). No wonder the inhabitants haven't moved further South: Treebeard and his friends are there to heavily discourage your logging industry.

For 7, I rolled Lair (Sunken Thicket). Some sort of nasty forest creature is likely hidden there. 5 is the best result yet: Special (Pristine, Empty City). An ancient civilization? What is keeping people from looting it? Damn, but if that isn't some fuel for the imagination!

It's when I made it to the Northern portion of the map that the background of this Province really started to take shape. I rolled Ruins (Forsaken Temple) for 3, which is just a weird thing for a Farmland area to have. Then I rolled Special (Enormous Footprint) for 9, Ruins (Dilapidated cottage) for 6, and Ruins (Ransacked Tomb) for 8.

From these disparate results, a story began to form in my mind. Invaders came from the North, sacking a settlement at 6 (who is the person who lives in the last home standing? Not someone you want to mess with, I imagine), despoiling a tomb (one of the founders?) at 8, and razing fields of crops at 3. The farmers fled to the temple for sanctuary, where the acolytes ushered them through secret tunnels to the Caverns at 9, which are used for shelter in times of need. These Caverns have an above-ground entrance as well, a large sinkhole in the vague shape of an enormous foot, said to be left by their God in times of old. Bullshit? Maybe, but it's still a site of pilgrimage as a result.

My results for 2 initially stumped me. I rolled Hazard (Permanent Fog). Which, you know, is a bizarre result. Perhaps the invaders used magic to conjure a fog to conceal their ships. Now the fog refuses to dissipate. Do they really have such great magic, or did some other power claim the conjuration for themselves?

Step 4: Finishing Touches

Because I can't follow even basic directions, I'm going to do some things that technically I should have already done if I was following the procedure completely faithfully.

Check it out.

Here's what I did:

• Named the province (not my best work, but it will do)
• Moved 7 a bit further South so it would be more isolated
• Changed 2 to Beaches and 6 to Sea (these were both potential choices on that same result, I just think the changes fit my scenario of a sea raid better
• Changed some of the paths to trails, some to tunnels, and some to rivers as seemed appropriate
• My biggest change here was that, since I decided that the path from 5 to 10 is a river, I extended it past the road and made an additional Detail (Forest, Stronghold, Seat of Government)

I'm going to dwell on this last point a bit. I'm imagining that there are mountains to the East, due to the presence of the hills in that direction. I'm not shooting for Rob Conley level of detail here, but I want the geography to at least pass the sniff test.

The last minute settlement I generated here provoked incredibly interesting questions. Why is the Stronghold not the Heart of this Province? Why is it mostly isolated from the rest of the settlements? Food for thought.

There you have it. One Pointcrawl filled with fascinating points of interest to explore. Not a single fudged roll. The only thing it is missing is Factions.

I'm actually most of the way through the Faction Creation process, but I think this is enough for today. Trust me when I say that if you thought Step 3: Adding Details was cool, you are going to love how the Factions turned out.