Playtest - The First Cairn of Rána

Making
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I’ve put together a playetest copy of the First Cairn of Rána, dungeon adventure. It is the introductory or opening dungeon adventure of my setting Rána, which I have been working on and playing for a year and a half now with my group. I’ve enjoyed making them and so decided to put it out there, just to give it a go. It is the first dungeon I’ve ever made public like this before. This release is meant to be played with OSR / NSR games – Cairn 2e, Knave 2e, Old School Essentials, Swords and Wizardry and others. I have played this dungeon with several groups using OSE and S&W, as well as in Dragonbane, ranging from absolute beginners to experienced players.

All the work on this dungeon is mine so far – hence the lack of illustrations or proper layout. Any support, advice or help is much appreciated.

Link to the dungeon on Itch.

I hope you enjoy it, have a good time and please do give feedback. Thank you

I wrote a few articles about the setting before - one on the Black Oil foe and another on the Magical Materials and their mechanics

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I did a quick skim. my first thought is that it would be nice to have some sort of worksheet for the black oil infection mechanics. maybe even something for the players to track? (like player and GM versions?) I like the mechanic, and I don’t think it takes up too much, uh, game space. But help is always nice. I also find that everyone loves handouts; so getting infected and getting handed a piece of paper might be nice.

in a dream world, it would be a scratch off lotto card type handout! but in a practical world, I think it would just be something where the players track their number, and the GM shares the effects. (I wonder if there is some simple FOLDING type thing that would work for that).

side note, i’ve always wanted one of these as an RPG mechanic. undefined

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Thanks for the feedback and the idea. People do love handouts and perhaps it could be something along the lines of the phrases you would get when you leveled up in Morrowind or Oblivion - but with fitting text and describing the effects.

A counter where you track it also comes to mind - I just got a set of black stones to use as tokens.

I do like the idea of folding, but I really am not good with such things (cant even make a paper airplane) so I do not know the design techinques. But it could be interesting. Something you uncover step by steps. Here an advent calendar comes to mind. But I might be going off in a weird direction :smiley:

I also got feedback to consider making a chaos index (like in Fever dreaming Marlinko) for the whole campaign, it is something I’m looking into to weird it up.