About

I am a brewer by trade who has been playing and running TTRPGs for the last 25 or so years. This blog's focus will be reflecting on my experiences with tabletop roleplaying, and specifically with a West Marches campaign that I am running using Cairn 2e. 


West Marches

If you want to learn more about West Marches Campaigns I highly recommend you start by reading Ben Robbins' Blog, specifically the entries he wrote about the game he ran. While this style of play has been around for a long time, he is the creator of the campaign format as we know it today. 


Cairn

If you want to learn more about Cairn 2e I highly recommend you start by checking out Yochai Gal's Blog and the Cairn RPG website. Yochai is the creator of Cairn and his blog has the latest information about the second edition of the game, which is currently in playtest.

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Strotherhine, West Marches or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cairn 2e

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The town of Strotherhine  Introduction I have been running a West Marches campaign using the Cairn 2e Playtest since September. There are currently 8 players and 1 warden and we have played a total of 8 game sessions. The entire campaign is organized on a discord server which is also what I have been using to run the games. We use a bot for dice rolling. There is a joint Inkarnate account that is used for mapping the world (the image is the current map the players have created) and we use a discord whiteboard "activity" as a place to make quick drawings for clarification (this activity has recently added the ability to save work so it has become very helpful). When I am running the game I also occasionally use screen share and a lot of screen snips that I post in the discord chat. My players really only need discord open + character information and notes during the game. I really look forward to character keeper, because right now I am hopping between a lot of Google docs in ...
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Diegetic Growth In Strotherhine

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When I was still in the planning stages for my current campaign I was concerned that some of my players wouldn’t be satisfied with how Cairn approaches character growth. Many of the folks I play tabletop games with seem to relish mapping out a character’s level progression. They enjoy theorycrafting, tinkering with different builds, and min/maxing those choices. I have long found this kind of play tiresome, but in recent years have grown to realize that there isn’t anything wrong with that kind of game, but it's not why I got into TTRPGs. Nonetheless I was worried about how I retain those players' interests, in a game that doesn’t have a rigid structure for growth.  Cairn’s approach to growth is entirely narratively driven. It encourages growth as the result of how the events of the game impacts, shapes, and changes those who experience those events. This is more akin to how a character might change over the course of a book or film. This means that characters are routinely gro...
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At Our Table: Town Projects

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When I started planning my West Marches campaign I had initially been concerned that the death of a character might result in a player losing interest in the game. So I knew I wanted to set up as many incentives as possible to get players invested in the setting and world. One way I sought to do this was to make sure that characters had as much agency to shape the world as possible. This would hopefully mean that even if a character died, there would still be a meaningful impact from their existence and a sort of legacy or mark left by them.  Finding ways to allow that to happen is relatively easy in a game like Cairn, it has agency and player choice literally written into the rules, but I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted players, not just characters, to feel like they were working toward something that could improve and grow. West Marches games generally have things like lore collecting and collective map making to help facilitate this but I double downed on the concept ...
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