Introduction

There's a game jam for Cairn going on this month, A Town, a Forest, a Dungeon, and I have decided to enter. Given that I am an incredibly opinionated person, but also prone to distraction and procrastination, I must admit that the impetus for this post is mostly the fact that I want something publicly out there goading me to completion. That way, people can be critical of my work. Fair is fair, after all.

It would be kind of be a useless blog post to end it there, though, wouldn't it? Though I have certainly been sidetracked by several different topics, one of the original, stated goals of this blog was to actually try some of the cool ideas that people put out there for generating content and brainstorming. So here's a post of me trying to use various concepts and techniques from around the Blogosphere to build a foundation for a module that doesn't suck. Hopefully, revealing how the sausage got made won't ruin the flavor.

An Ode to Conceptual Density

I've decided that I am going to take my setting that I originally generated to test out the WIP Cairn 2e Setting Creation Rules and use it for this particular module. It has a town, a forest, and (several) potential dungeons, so it seems like a natural choice. The problem is that I want something a little more conceptually dense if I'm actually going to publish it, instead of just procedurally generating and allowing it to grow more conceptually dense in play as you might with a homebrew setting.

I have mentioned in passing before my desire for things to have Conceptual Density, something I was introduced to by this amazing blog post by Joseph Manola that everyone should read. Essentially, the idea here is that if someone could just improvise a character or setting with a simple prompt, what you have published is not conceptually dense enough. I think some of what I originally came up with during my initial generation of the setting will pass the sniff test, but I think employing some techniques I've collected during my years of lurking in the OSR/NSR will come in handy here.

Technique #1: The Triple Rule

We will start with the most pithy technique on the list, which unsurprisingly comes from Chris McDowall: The Triple Rule.

The Triple Rule

Everything has Three Purposes:

• The Original: What was it originally to be?
• The Current: What is it doing now?
• The Tangent: What is its secondary use?

-Chris McDee

He has lots of variations depending on if you are applying it to places, people, or things, but effectively you're coming up with two entries that represent different parts of history and one thing that is a twist (conceptual density!). So let's apply this to our Town, Forest, and Dungeon for the Jam. I'm going to start with the Forest, since it is effectively the region of my module.

Forest

• The Original: A boreal forest settled by an ancient people who used magic to shape flora and fauna to their benefit.
• The Current: A boreal forest and farmland that has been settled by a people who grew wealthy by exploiting the land's natural (and unnatural) resources.
• The Tangent: Currently recovering from an invasion, which has left an occupying force.

The Current and Original were already present in my original conception of the setting. What I mostly did here was add a layer of history to give me an excuse to populate the module with weird and wonderful flora and fauna.

Town

• The Original: A logging town that also acts as a trading post for various hunters who ply their trade in the forest.
• The Current: Overrun by miners in recent years, who were put out of work after the mine became toxic.
• The Tangent: Currently occupied by the main force of the invaders, who have managed to unite the various native groups against them.

This feels a little redundant when you compare it to what I did with the Forest. Maybe that's okay for thematic coherence purposes? I'm not really sure I'm doing myself any favors by sticking with this invasion idea. I want people going down into the dungeon, and instead they may end up leading a revolution...

Maybe we can have both!

Dungeon

I have several potential candidates for "the Dungeon":

• Pristine, Empty City (5) - I actually think I'm going to keep this one in reserve. I have a Megadungeon concept that never got past the conceptual stage that was going to use this point.

• Ransacked Tomb (8) - Eh. Tombs are so overdone, it would be really hard to stand out from the crowd.

• Sunken Thicket (7) - A lair is too small for our purposes, I think. But it would make a great optional location to explore...

• Forsaken Temple (3) - I actually have a lot of ideas for this one, but it would be a full-on puzzle dungeon and I'm not Arnold K. or directsun so I think I'll hold off on that idea for expansion at a time when I'm not under a massive time crunch.

• Toxic Mine (10) - I think this one is our winner. It has a built-in reason for it being dangerous (somehow it is toxic), there are multiple Factions that would be interested in what is inside (I'm going to say it is the main source of profit and the reason the invasion happened), and I honestly can't think of too many Mine adventures that actually, you know, felt like mines.

• The Original: A mine that was dug after the discovery of a strange mineral resource that has valuable properties (I'm being vague here on purpose)

• The Current: A half-flooded, toxic series of tunnels that have claimed the lives of many.

• The Tangent: The work of the miners accidentally broke through to an ancient structure, which is the source of many of the dangers within the mine (and some that have yet to surface...).

It's a start. I'm not sure it passes the conceptual density sniff test, but at least it isn't a lost Dwarven forge or something...

This has taken me a bit longer than I anticipated, and if I'm not careful I'm going to spend all of my time blogging about this instead of actually doing it. So I'm going to stop here. I will try to do a post-mortem of how my jam went and what I did, assuming I put my money where my mouth is and actually produce something worthy of publication.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet. At myself.

Time will tell.