A new game: A Gathering Storm for Cairn
I guess it’s been a while. I finished the Kickstarter a month ago or so, and now it's available in the following places:
My itch store and Drivethru store (pdf only)
The Cairn store (ships from the US)
Third Kingdom games (ships from the US)
And soon, Ratti Incantati (ships from Canada)
The cover and an example page:
Little free projects
I’ve been playing with an idea for character retirement mechanics in games like Cairn, as described in this blog post.
I wrote up a short piece of writing/worldbuilding about cities. I haven’t done much with cities yet, but this gives an idea of the direction I might go if I do.
I’ve been playing with Perchance generators. I made a character name generator which creates words that hopefully sound like they are from the same language. I also made an NPC generator, and a traveling merchant generator, which is approximately Cairn compatible.
Upcoming work
For the Cairn jam, I’m making a little adventure that serves as an introduction to playing solo games with Cairn. I plan to make at least a plaintext version PWYW, so I’ve decided to just post drafts publicly here. Relatedly, I’ve been playing a solo game of Cairn which I posted on my blog.
As alluded to in the blog, I have some little things I’m working on for Cairn, which will eventually end up in Extra Stones, and maybe I’ll publish some printable pamphlet bestiaries I’ve been working on.
Other people’s books
I’ve been very slowly working my way through A Collection of Improving Exercises. I’ve been posting about it, with marked spoilers, on Mastodon.
I recently got Spindlewheel. I’ve only used the base deck as an oracle deck so far, but I’ve been really impressed. It’s really hard to make a lot of really distinct and usable random entries for an oracle deck or table. Not only are there a huge number of cards, but they’re pretty good, too.
I also read The Ink That Bleeds, a book reflecting on solo journaling games as a medium. The author has a totally different attitude to solo games than I do, which made it even more interesting to read than I expected. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.