What Do You Create When Everything Wants You to Stop? Anything at All.
FREEBIE: Star Fallen - Cairn 2e Background
It’s been a long, trying two months. In many ways, I’m floating in limbo between the old world and the new, between the old work and the new, between the old country and the new—you get the idea. And floating in limbo is tiring. Days seem too short when it matters and too long when it doesn’t. And things often are so stressful and tiring that the ability to create feels as if it’s been entirely removed from you, even if deep down the will remains.
But it’s worth pushing through. It’s worth taking the weekend trip even though you are so anxious to leave the cats behind. It’s worth pushing your drone a bit too far into the fog even though you could crash. It’s worth overextending the bank account ever so slightly if it means regaining that fire at the center of your soul.
I’m not here with any big takeaways or words of wisdom—not yet anyway—other than to say: I think it is important to make time, even when it seems truly frivolous and even downright foolish to do so, to create. Create something. Anything. Just create.
Maybe it sees the light of day and gets released or maybe it just keeps you company for a few hours after a tough day and spends the rest of its days on a stack of unfinished ideas, but either way, you and the world will have been better after than you were before.
Without further ado, please enjoy my weird little star man player class for Cairn 2e. It brought me a lot of joy in the few hours I could spare to create it!
The Star Fallen - Background (Cairn 2e)
I recently got my Cairn 2e boxset in the mail and was feeling inspired to create a background. I love games that let you hone in on a custom style or vibe of character fairly quickly without also requiring you to spend eons building an entire bespoke kit for this character from levels 1 to 20. It’s was fun in Troika, it’s fun in Mork Borg, and it’s also fun here!
Because I’m me, I made it spacey so the Star Fallen is exactly what it sounds like with a few curveballs thrown in. You are a being of strange, mostly unknown—even to yourself—origin, cast out as a babe from some distant star, and you have likely lived much of your life in Vald (or whatever planet your table is playing) as an outsider. The star from which you fell determines a special proclivity you’ve had since birth and being in this unnatural (to you) world you now find yourself in has summoned a sense in you your fellow adventurers don’t seem to possess—sometimes useful, sometimes not.
The Star Fallen’s art is by Perplexing Ruins, who offers a slew of great royalty-free art via Patreon AND just recently went full-time with art and TTRPG creation—so go and show him some support!
Roll up a Star Fallen and tell me what strange little guy you got. Or—even better—if you take this to the table, I’d love to hear about how it went!
More Cool Stuff
Stories from the Slip Vol. 1 for Cloud Empress is live for less than 48 more hours! This is a cool zine campaign limited to 1,000 physical copies. While I’ve had a hand in Cloud Empress development in the past (including the upcoming Life and Death expansions), I wasn’t involved in these zines which makes me more excited than ever to explore them alongside everyone else. I particularly love watt’s monthly newsletter expansions and the almanacs bringing them to print.
My two action kits, Slasher Horror and Fantasy Crafting, are now available for OddFolk, Maxwell Lander’s modular RPG! And if that’s not enough, there are also kits from Aaron King and Kaitlin Tremblay (and the game is pay-what-you-want)!
Idraluna-Archives continues to put out huge, extremely cool hexmaps on Itch. My personal favorite so far is the terraformed lunar surface (seen above). I’d love to build an entire game world around this one day. There’s also an entire 6-mile hex map collection for the entire Earth, an ice-less Antartica, and a fantasy Martian map.
Greenhorns, Spicy Tuna RPG’s weird space RPG, is now out digitally! The rulebook includes The Mad Mystic, a bounty hunt mission I wrote featuring my take on a Destiny villain. Here’s my short pitch: A witch long beyond her time. A land of ancient traditions. A people yearning for a place in the ever-growing universe. A planet hijacked by resentment and envy.
Fellow St. John’s local and noted TTRPG recommender Mint-Rabbit (aka There’s a TTRPG For That) is currently running a Canadian creator game jam all about Canadian inspirations. I’d love to get something together for this, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to - either way though, I’m excited to see what the northern folk cook up!
There’s a massive version of The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station coming to Gen Con this year thanks to Cameron from The Panic Table. 30+ players will all be playing in the same mega-sized arena of Wren Sinclair’s infamous Bloodfields at the same time! I’m so sad I won’t be in attendance this year, but I’m DYING for all the play reports I can get!
Prismatic Wasteland recently dropped a blogpost all about divine magic in fantasy TTRPGs, and it has a ton of cool ideas in it! My ideal twist on some of these ideas are clerics focused entirely on prayers and rituals, the vast majority of which should not even be miraculous or with immediately known pay off. They may shift rolls slightly, widen crit windows, give dreamlike visions of info, things of that nature.
Golden Achiever recently released Issue #2 of The International Player’s Review, their “magazine for gamesmasters, players, and anyone who spends more time drawing dungeons than doing homework.” It includes a lot of great stuff and cool old-school era appropriate advertisements of modern stuff - like Tacticians of Ahm!
Perplexing Ruins recently started a blog and the first post digs into solo gaming structure. How much is too much? And how much isn’t enough?
Lastly, please enjoy this weird system-free TTRPG weapon I created off a quick prompt from RA Creedon over on Bluesky:
Dead Man's Hand: A bog-preserved hand of a forgotten gunslinger. Pointing at a target & squeezing the hand kills the target's father on their 29th birthday. If the target was not born at that point in time, they vanish. A finger falls from the hand w/ each use. When none remain, the hand rots away.
See you on the next one! Stay safe, stay strong, and take time to play whenever you can. - Christian
Care to give advice on what motivations get you through the hump And. Just. Create?
And of these successes, which are sustainable over more than a day or three. This has been my struggle and I have yet to break through.
Dig the motivational talk! The character class is rad too!