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Issue 6 announced! Cairn 2e! Vampires!

Well, four months after our last “weekly” newsletter I’ve finally summoned up the energy to crawl out from my hole and try to get things here back on track as our sixth issue, and the final one in our first volume, is finally slouching like some rough beast towards its birth.

We’re looking at a (hopefully early) June release date and we’ll have a pre-order link and more details for you next week. As ever its packed full of great stuff including a lovely feature on one of my favourite RPGs of the past few years Mausritter and I get to enjoy some quality time with the incredibly nice Dan Abnett, who recently concluded the epic 50+ Warhammer 40,0000 Horus Heresy book series.

Eurgh… Warhammer, I’d planned to talk about the latest series of tantrums that assorted culture war grifters and people for whom grass is an entirely abstract concept have been throwing but it’s getting late and frankly it’s all very depressing, so let’s park that for now and get on with the rest of the newsletter.

Speaking of which this week’s is very much a last minute job as I’d wanted to shout out Cairn for ages and only just saw that the campaign ends tomorrow, hence this hitting your inboxes now, but bear with us and we’ll be back up to speed with a full service next time complete with a rather tasty giveaway.

Till then though thanks for subscribing and see you next week.

John x

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What’s looking good in the world of crowdfunding this week…

Cairn Second Edition

"After Altamira, all is decadence," Pablo Picasso was alleged to have said in 1934, after gazing upon the then recently discovered, nearly 40,000-year-old Altamira cave paintings. A sentiment that many of us have no doubt echoed after playing 1981’s B/X edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Still, whilst there’s a fairly decent argument to be made that we don’t really need any more OSR systems, it’s one that ultimately gets short shrift here. Moldvay, Cook and Marsh’s stop-gap system may have been endlessly refined, revisited and remixed over the years but 40 years on its “sweet spot between simplicity and complexity” continues to provide game designers with fertile ground to develop new ideas.

All of which brings us to Yochai Gal’s Cairn, a “rules-light, player-forward system for classic fantasy roleplaying” directly inspired by OSR classics Into The Odd and Knave. Originally published back in 2020, Cairn may have not made quite the instant neon splash as say MÖRK BORG but it has steadily built both a name and a passionate community for and around itself.

Now, four years on, the game gets its first big refresh for its second edition.

The original Player’s Guide has been expanded, though the game still retains its quick and easy to get going vibe and accompanying that is a brand new Warden’s Guide, with rules for advancement, a bestiary, tips for running the game and for the first time a guide to The Wald, the game’s sylvan setting.

Finally, thanks to the most recently unlocked stretch goal, there’s an Adventure Anthology featuring 4 scenarios to get you going, and in the best gaming tradition you can get the entire lot packed up - along with a Warden screen and pad of character sheets - in a rather fine looking box.

There are as I type the just 20 hours left to go on the campaign, so if there’s room on your shelf for another rules light fantasy adventure game, and you enjoy exploring magical, dark fairy tale-like forests in the shoes of, thankfully, easily replaced adventurers then check it out now.

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Blood Borg

Sticking with the incestuous world of the OSR we have Blood Borg, which as you’ve no doubt already guessed carries on the proud tradition of interesting looking if terribly named MÖRK BORG spinoffs.

We can easily forgive the title though as the chief miscreant behind it all is none other than World Champ Game Co.’s Adam Vass, a game designer who even when pursuing their most obscurantist agenda is never less than incredibly interesting.

For Blood Borg they’ve teamed up with artist Mitchell Van Dyke, and at first glance it at least appears that this will be one of Vass’s more straightforward, if no less enjoyable for that, games.

Unlike say the wonderfully inventive Necronautilus, which left my head spinning but dice sadly unrolled, Blood Borg actually looks like something you’ll be able to easily get to the table without having to suffer though the confused expressions of your regular gaming group.

Moreover this does seem like a natural pairing of system and setting. MÖRK BORG derivatives always seem to work best when they pile their miseries high enough that everything tips over into bathos and with its gutter-punk, post-apocalyptic stage and cast of dumpster diving vampire wretches that appears to definitely be the case here.

Sleazy, squalid and, if we’re honest, right up our street.

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Over the last couple of months Wyrd Science has started appearing in a few, very lovely shops, so we just wanted to give them a shout out and point you in their direction as they all stock loads of other great stuff you might fancy grabbing too. Go on, you deserve it…

In the UK a few very discerning games stores including Beyond Cataclysm, DungeonLand, Leisure Games and Ancient Robot Games have all recently added the last few issues to their well appointed shelves. And as someone who obviously has a dangerous infatuation with print media I’m delighted to say we’re now being carried by a few of our absolute favourite specialist magazine shops too such as Rare Mags, magCulture and Pics & Ink.

Even if you do have the last few issues please do check them all out as i’m sure you’ll find something unexpected and wonderful there to brighten up your day.

Finally we’ve also had a fair few people email us recently about getting hold of older issues, and whilst we’re completely out of them ourselves we did just discover this week that Exalted Funeral in the US, and Fenris Games in the UK have a few copies left of issue 2. Grab a copy before we do as the way our bank account looks it’s unlikely to get a reprint any time soon…

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Finally some things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, found down the back of the internet’s sofa…

• Magic: The Gathering and D&D Employees Down, Stonks Up in Q1 - BoardGameWire dig into the gaming giants first figures for the year.
  

• Build Worlds - Part I & Part II - Sci-fi/Fantasy author John French has some interesting thoughts on the subject of worldbuilding.
  

• Implied Setting and Building a Line - Mothership’s Sean McCoy chats with Cloud Empress creator Watt about building up your game beyond its core rules.
  

• On the Grim Reality of "YouTube Face" - Obviously I’m biased but one of the main reasons we make a print magazine, with all the attendant stress and frankly punishing results to our bank account, is that I fundamentally believe that big tech & social media companies have and continue to fundamentally damage, probably irrevocably, our culture and this is my small, almost certainly pyrrhic, act of petty defiance. Anyway, this is well worth a read.
  

• The Start of it All - Speaking of magazines game designer Chris McDowell looks back at one that kickstarted his love affair with tabletop games, White Dwarf 187.
  

• Voyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space - Great news from the far reaches of our solar system as Voyager blinks back into life.
  

• The Best of The Soloist - Patrick Buechner celebrates one year of his newsletter looking at solo games with a look back at some of his favourite articles.
  

• Killing Good Games with Bad Titles - Clayton Notestine looks at the impact, good & bad, that the name of your game can have.
  

• Identity, blood, and the gone people - An interesting article here by TTRPG creator John Hodgson, who is currently working on a new game, Maskwitches set in the now sunken Neolithic Doggerland. It perhaps suffers a bit from the modern curse of having to weigh down your thoughts with endless caveats lest you’re misunderstood but still I love to read about how artists engage with their work on this level.
  

• ‘We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists’: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on - As someone who was a very out of their depth teenager at the infamous Hyde Park protest this makes me feel incredibly old but that aside it’s an interesting glimpse of a time when the UK was in flux.
  

• Northants guide dog and robot best friends after date - Oh bless her.