How We Generate Settings - Pt. 1
Freebie: PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS - Cairn 2e Adventure!
This Missive is pretty late, but I make up for it by overstuffing it with TTRPG goodies: An look at setting generation in Cairn 2e, a video essay about character backstories, a full old-school fantasy adventure, and more. Enjoy! - Christian
In this Missive, I wanted to try something a bit different. I decided to look at procedures aimed at similar goals from two different games—one new and one old—and see how they each pan out. For this first new/old matchup, I chose Cairn 2e which I recently received the wonderful box set of in the mail (and created the Star Fallen background for in last month’s Missive) and Technoir, a cyberpunk roleplaying game from ~2012 that was the first indie RPG I ever ran and one I still have many fond memories of running.
In each game, I’ll be looking at what I’ll widely refer to as their “setting generation” procedures. As the two games differ greatly, the exact shape of those systems varies, but both are aimed at helping you build a setting with factions and struggles with which your players interact. This Missive includes Part 1 - Cairn 2e, with Technoir coming in the next issue. Anyway, let’s get to it!
Region & Faction Building in Cairn 2e
First, I ran through the Cairn 2e Region and Faction generation, as close to “as written” as possible. I did a single small region with 2 factions, 3 biomes, and 5 points of interest. I’ll talk through my takeaways from the experience first, but you can find the full region and faction notes in the “Welcome to BINTARWYE” section below.
First, I rolled up the region’s theme: A culture of inventive wealth with an abundance of horses and a scarcity of livestock. I love the combination of inventive + wealth as it instantly created this idea of their being unusual elements to how this region has cultivated its wealth and power, but the horses/livestock combo didn’t work as well for me. I imagine horses are used for meat in place of traditional livestock here, and it’s a fairly wide region with horseback travel being much more common than the surrounding regions, but I wasn’t immediately inspired to apply this resource element to the future factions I was about to roll.
Next, I created two factions. I blended my first roll of “cultists” and the faction’s primary agent being a “jailor” with the “inventive wealth” theme to create a sort of proto-cargo cult funding its operation through paid imprisonment—accepting prisoners from neighboring regions for payment and this tying into their beliefs that punishing the sinful would bring them closer to attaining heavenly wealth. From this, the BARRED BANKERS OF BINTARWYE were born.
My second faction came together a bit more muddily but ended in an interesting place. A “merchant” faction with a “farmer” agent combined with the “judicious” and “deceptive” traits led me to imagine a dictatorial guild of farmers and merchants, playing off of the region’s wealth of horses to feed a strong network of transport. THEY OF THE IRON LEDGER are—in many ways—the de facto governance of the region, protecting roadways for their members, forcing new farmers, artisans, and merchants to pay into their dues structure, and more.
Faction creation worked well, but ultimately, not all of the agenda prompts were able to combine nicely with others on this small of a scale. I think in a grander campaign setting this would not be an issue, but here—with just two factions—it felt odd to have agenda’s like “revenge, but another faction has the same goal” when the only other faction did not have that goal. Of course, there are ways to remedy this myself - either by adding it to the Barred Bankers agenda list as well or tying it to a future, neighboring region’s faction. But some of these bumps stood out—often because of just how well others blended together.
For example:
The Barred Bankers want to establish a new order but need a relic. They also wish to infiltrate another faction (the Iron Ledger, in this case), but an internal schism (the group attempting to establish the new order) threatens the faction from within. Additionally, the Iron Ledger is collecting artifacts but needs a key piece of information. The relic the internal Barred Bankers faction members need to establish their new order is held—or about to be held—by the Iron Ledger.
With these my two factions created, I dove into the dice drop region map creation. This procedure sees you through a number of drops and rolls to determine the topography (based on where the die lands), landmarks (based on what was rolled), draw rivers and lakes, roll for weather, drop more dice for points of interest, and so on until you’ve gone from determining the broadest environmental characteristics to the individuals paths between dungeons and cities. From there, the book invites you to brainstorm further using all the details you’ve collected.
My region, Bintarwye as I decided to name it, became a strange, ethereal landscape of dells and foothills meeting lava fields, strange artifacts of past ages, shifting buildings, and strange weather. Wyelen, the region’s heart, was a city at the edge of two worlds. One was pastoral and idyllic, full of horse farmers and caravans, while the other was deadly and unknowable, prone to adventurers and expeditioners sure they knew the correct path through the lava flows, that they knew the correct calendar to get inside the crystal spire. This blend of mundane and extremely not mundane elements creates a very interesting (and appropriately fantastical) setting where it feels grounded enough to be far afield of more gonzo settings but much more intriguing as both a GM and a player to explore on its face than more stock standard fantasy settings like Westeros. The procedure created a map filled with possibility, one where I could imagine a campaign going deeply into traversing the fields to unearth lost treasures and another campaign stopping jailors and leveraging trade factions against one another without ever delving deeply into the ancient ruins or shifting lands. This kind of possibility space (while retaining specific, actionable info for us at the table) is great!
There is one small nitpick that’s really more about me being frustrated with our physical reality than with the game, but I often find myself sending dice all across the table and onto the floor when doing dice drop procedures like this. Even from a very low height, it was hard to keep the dice on the page! While the game called for these dice to be set aside and rolled later as additional point of interests (I believe), I just re-dropped them in the moment to help give myself more to build around. If I really stuck to my initial drop, I’d have had only two biomes across the entire map. It’s also worth noting I named everything during this generation, and the book itself did not provide any suggested names in this section (that I saw, anyway).
Overall, I found the region and faction generation provided in the Cairn 2e warden’s guide to be quite strong, if fairly typical in its structure (but varied in its table entries)—and that’s not a bad thing as tried-and-true procedures are often tried-and-true for good reason. It’s also worth mentioning these procedures fall firmly within the avenue of pre-session GM prep. Rolling, writing, thinking, and otherwise generating this region and its factions took over an hour all told. This isn’t something I would do just before, or certainly during, play.
That said, I could now dive into play in this region with a good level of flavor and background to play from—which is certainly a sign of successful procedure.
Welcome to BINTARWYE
(pronounced bin-tar-why)
Heart: Wyelen, The City of Coin (pronounced why-len)
Culture: Inventive Wealth
Resources: + Horses, - Livestock
Weather
Spring: Mild, Sunny
Summer: Hot, Humid
Fall: Chilly Stormy
Winter: Mild, Clear
Special Weather
Siren Stones: Figures moving in your periphery, but nothing is there.
Broken Sundial: Shadows disappear nearby, and animals are wary.
Sinkhole: Days are erratic, sun moves backwards before springing to night.
Faction: THE BARRED BANKERS OF BINTARWYE
Cultists
Agent: Thomas the Generous (Jailor)
Connected & Repressed
Advantages:
Members
Resources
Wealth
Agenda: Establish a new order, but a relic is required.
Agenda: Infiltrate another faction, but internal schisms threaten the faction itself.
Agenda: Spread a belief, but another faction stands in their way.
Faction: THEY OF THE IRON LEDGER
Merchants
Agent: Martha Highwheat (Farmer)
Judicious & Deceptive
Advantages
Information
Force
Agenda: Destroy something, but first an alliance must be brokered.
Agenda: Revenge, but another faction has the same goal.
Agenda: Collect artifacts, but a piece of information must first be discovered.
NEW VIDEO ESSAY
I recently created a short 4-minute video essay about pondering having children, creating TTRPG character backstories, and how hope is changed by experience throughout our lives. Folks have been enjoying it - maybe you will too!
My next essay topic: How Moving to an Island Reshaped How I GM Overland Travel
Freebie: PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS
It came with the rising of the full moon. ECKTA THE MIND MASTER, one of THE FOUR, crawled from thin air and overwhelmed the minds of every man, woman, and child in the remote village of HWEN.
Now, the village is awash with activity, as its citizenry—lost in a twisted dream of their everyday lives—gather the final components for THE PSYCHOGATE, the ultimate instrument of oppression.
Across the region, rumors spread of dark dreams, lost caravans, and an ethereal titan visible only under the light of the moon. None but the bravest adventurers would walk into the danger growing in the heart of Hwen.
Can you free the PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS?
PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS is a 4-page fantasy adventure of illusion and confusion, created for use with Cairn 2e but easily playable with any fantasy game.
Downloads include Page, Spread, and Printer-Friendly PDFs.
Get your copy HERE or grab it FOR FREE over on Itch.io!
MORE COOL STUFF
The pre-launch page for Twisting Unseen, a new Mothership adventure from Chris Airiau that was a part of The Meat Grinder—my short-lived (but very productive) TTRPG writing group—and that I had the privilege of doing some development work on, is up now on Backerkit. This adventure has some really cool board game-style tile placement elements connected to a great in-world premise where the PCs get in on knowing they are building their surroundings, much like their in-real-life player counterparts. It’s cool and pretty unique!
The Star Fallen, my Cairn 2e background and last month’s Missive Freebie, is now available to grab over on Itch.
HOME by Deep Dark Games, a game of Kaiju vs Mech battles that I had the privilege of editing, was recently featured on CNN. I have to admit: that’s not a sentence I ever expected to write! It’s fun (and interesting) to see how the reporter here described roleplaying games for a mass market viewership.
The 2025 ENNIE nominations dropped, and I had a hand in a few of them! The Shrike by Leo Hunt (featuring art from Jantiff Illustration, Meredith Silver, and Glynn Seal) which I had the pleasure of editing was nominated for Best Adventure - Long Form. Very happy to see this one getting some love.
Triangle Agency (by all the fine folks listed above), which I had the pleasure of writing an adventure for in The Vault - the game’s companion adventure book, is up for Best Game, Best Rules, Best Writing, AND Product of the Year.