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The Gate: A Cairn Campaign
Great evil has taken root in the land of Vald, and dark, dangerous creatures are creeping from the depths.
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
$5.00
/ Session
Details
Bi-weekly / Tuesday - 2:00 AM UTC
Dec 9 / Session 4
Session Duration / 2.5–3 hours
5 / 5 Seats Filled
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Schedule
Meet your party members
5/5
About the adventure
Great evil has taken root in the land of Vald, and dark, dangerous creatures are creeping from the depths. They come by night from the Roots, all manner of terrifying beasts: meat-eating stags, spiders the size of houses, two-headed monsters that feast on the flesh of the living. They frighten, they corrupt, they kill, driven by the evil that awakened them to gnaw the very bones of the land and conquer it. The region of Sylfaen can't hope to stand long against them. Your home, a town like any other town, has been overrun in the night. Loved ones have been spirited away. Crops have been gnawed back to the stones. Livestock lay dead and bloating in the pastures. You must defend this place. You must defend your home, before all in this region fall like yours did. End the darkness, before it's too late. This is a mid-length campaign for Cairn 2e. It takes place in the default setting of Varn, in a custom-built region called Sylfaen. Cairn is an OSR-type, classless, levelless game. It is a narrative-forward, character-driven system that encourages role play, efficient exploration, and smart combat. Cairn is an easy game to learn. If you're looking for a more grounded, rules-lite version of D&D 5e, Cairn is one of the many systems like this. The rules are written in plain language that's easy to understand while still leaving tremendous room for a fiction-forward approach, and you don't have to know anything at all to get started. Character sheets are about as simple as they come; in 15 minutes or less, you can have a fully fleshed-out, functional Cairn character. Cairn is very beginner friendly. If you're new to ttrpgs but are afraid of thick rule sets, or you want to learn something new without spending hours parsing player's guides, or if it just sounds interesting, this is the game for you.
Game style
Roleplay Heavy
Organized Play
Rule of Cool (RoC)
Sandbox / Open World
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(9)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
9 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Storytelling, Rule of Cool
Average response time: 4 hours
Response rate: 100%
About me
I have always loved to tell stories! In fact, it's what I went to school for. I was a film major and an English minor, with emphasis on screen writing and creative writing. When my husband, then my boyfriend, introduced me to ttrpgs, it was a Starfinder 1e game--clunky, not super great for total beginners, but what a blast! Then D&D 5e came to town, and that was the main game for us, until recently, when we've started branching out. That was almost 7 years ago. Since then, I've DMd two full D&D 5e campaigns, and my homebrew campaign is currently on a hiatus so I can write the next chapter. I'm also prepping two Call of Cthulhu published campaigns. Recently, I discovered Cairn, and in just one game, which I wrote, geared toward total newcomers to the system, both of my home groups have fallen in love and asked for more. I love creating stories for characters to inhabit--it literally makes me happier than almost anything in the world. Writing and storytelling is my passion, and ttrpgs feel like home.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
We will create characters together during session 0. We will create characters by the book, and spend a lot of time making sure the party is cohesive and well-rounded so that you are best suited to face the dangers ahead!
Regroup After Barnaby and Woozy struggle to harvest lumber for rebuilding the town from nearby Golden Glade, it's time to regroup with Isolde and discuss the next steps to solving the mystery of the Gate and closing it for good. And what's up with the goats?
What to expect
Preparing for the session
You will need a (free) Discord acocunt and a (free) Quest Portal account. Discord will be our voice/video platform, and Quest Portal will host our maps and visuals. It is possible that we will be utilizing the Cairn-specific app, Kettlewright, to host our character sheets. That will be up to a party vote during session 0. In case we go ahead and use that tool, Kettlewright is free as well. Making an account is quick and easy; there is no need to make a Kettlewright account until we determine whether or not we will use it. Links to all, including Kettlewright, will be avialable upon joining.
What Amanda brings to the table
I love ambient sounds and mapmaking. Luckily, Quest Portal has a great built-in music player that allows me to use a good variety of royalty-free music from their music library. We will be making full use of this capability. I also will be providing all maps, created by me. I truly enjoy making battlemaps, or even maps to provide visual aid. All of this will be provided, custom, by me as well. And of course, while the campaign takes place in the Cairn setting of Vald, the region we will be playing in is custom-created for this campaign, from the overworld map on down to each and every town you could encounter there.
Homebrew rules
We will start with Rules as Written. Once we're all comfortable with each other and the game, we can explore some hacks if anyone is interested, but we will start off RAW.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Pen & Paper
Platforms used
Safety
How Amanda creates a safe table
My goal is to make this a PG or PG-13 game. That's what I'm most comfortable running, and I think that's what a good portion of players are most comfortable playing. That said, there will still be safety tools in place, along with a session 0, and I will utilize these tools regularly and seriously to make sure we stay in that rating range. Remember, too, as you read through the content warnings, that many PG and PG-13 films and shows contain these elements, but they don't fixate on it to an extreme degree or make them a central, hyper-described theme. For example, in the PG animated film "Mulan", mass death (one of my content warnings) occurs at the hands of the Huns. It's one of the motivations to defeat them. But that mass death is veiled. Tragedy inspires heroic tales, but tragedy can be handled tastefully, and that's what I plan to do here.
Content warnings
Safety tools used