Are you ready to return to The Wood?

The Wood surrounds and divides the realm and anyone (or anything) that has not yet sworn fealty. The Wood is not one forest, but all forests. The Root is the realm of mystery and horror underneath, and does not care for the petty divisions overground.

Cairn is the DriveThruRPG Platinum Best Selling adventure game about exploring a dark and mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. Character generation is quick and random, adventures are tense and reward careful exploration, and combat is frantic and deadly. The first edition rules are freely available here, and should be familiar to any fans of Knave and Into the Odd.

The definitive second edition has been freshly revised and developed, and includes an expanded Player’s Guide, a brand new Warden’s Guide, and a new adventure Trouble in Twin Lakes in a robust and lavishly illustrated boxed set packed with useful gaming tools.

If you’re looking for a rules-light, player-forward system for classic fantasy roleplaying, look no further. Cairn 2E includes everything you need to get started with a minimum of setup and zero hassle. A simple 3-stat system and roll-under d20 resolution makes it familiar to old-school gamers and new players alike, marrying the best of the OSR and 5E mechanics.

The first edition of Cairn was a simple, 24-page Player's Guide that provided the basics of character creation and dice mechanics. For the second edition, we've greatly expanded upon and clarified the rules for players, starting with the backgrounds. Each character background now includes its own unique set of equipment, abilities, history, and relation to the world of Cairn. With 20 backgrounds and 36 possible ways to build each, that means over 700 different characters can be made before gameplay even begins.

While Cairn 2E is bigger, bolder, and weirder than its predecessor, it remains as simple and easy to jump into. Character creation is a quick, four-step process:

1) First, roll or choose a background from such creative possibilities as the Beast Handler or Fungal Forager.
2) Now, roll or choose from an array of tables to fill out your specialties, histories, and magical equipment.
3) Roll 3d6 to determine each of your three Attribute Scores—Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower—and 1d6 for your Hit Protection, or HP.
4) Lastly, you'll name your character, determine their age, and array them with a selection of traits and bonds to establish their place in the world.

The Player's Guide is a 5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound softcover of approximately 92 pages.

In addition to the expanded Player's Guide, the Cairn 2E Boxed Set comes with a dedicated Warden’s Guide, which includes everything you’ll need to create, populate, and manage a game in the world of Cairn. Inside you’ll find:

• Advice and guides on designing and running a forestcrawl, pointcrawl, or dungeon delve
• A bestiary of strange and foul creatures your players will encounter in the Wood and the Roots
• Spellbooks and relics, magical artifacts from a bygone age with their own strange powers and personalities
• Rules for character advancement through personalized quests, downtime activities, and relationships with the people and creatures of the world
• The world of Vald, Cairn’s first detailed setting and the perfect place to begin your adventure
• And much more!

With a few rolls of the dice, you can now generate entire sessions worth of content for adventures in the dark forests of The Wood, the stygian depths of the Roots, or even spruce up existing modules for a classic dungeoncrawl. Or perhaps your players would prefer to spend that session in town, following up on leads and training up their skills to better tackle the next leg of their quest. In the Warden’s Guide, you’ll find everything you need to really bring the world of Cairn to life.

The Warden's Guide is a 5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound softcover of approximately 120 pages.

Trouble in Twin Lakes

Two weeks ago, Aldra, the beloved butcher of Isthmus Town, suddenly vanished without a trace. Some days later, a local teen reported seeing a man swallowed up by the earth near Deadmill. Others have also gone missing. Now, the townsfolk are left wondering: Who might be next?

Trouble in Twin Lakes is the first in a brand new series of adventure for Cairn, set in and around the Twin Lakes area.

Trouble in Twin Lakes is a 5.5" x 8.5" saddle stitched zine of approximately 24 pages.

The Adventure Anthology

We've got THREE more adventures in the works as stretch goals. At a certain funding level, these three adventures will be collected and printed together as The Adventure Anthology, and included in each boxed set.

A first for Cairn and exclusive to this boxed set, the Warden's Screen is meant to inspire and inform in equal measure. It features a new, full-size illustration by Bruno Prosaiko on the front and tables galore on the back to help Wardens run their best game of Cairn ever! We're hard at work behind the scenes to determine the most relevant and useful information to put on this board, and our final design will be revealed in a future update.

The Warden's Screen contains five 5.5" x 8.5" panels made of thick gameboard, with art on the outside and reference text and tables on the inside.

The new Cairn 2E Character Sheet Pad feature art by Licopeo and are perfectly designed to show off your character's skills, stats, and assets. Backers at the Cairn 2E Boxed Set tier will get a whole pad of sheets that can be torn off as needed (useful in case of a sudden TPK).