May 2026 - Fey Mischief
Alas, nettlesome sprites delayed this month's issue, but fear not—for below you'll find new releases, a thoughtful review of a psychedelic Cairn module, and a full forest point crawl adventure—also for Cairn!
Roll to Carouse!
- Lighten your coin purse at the Projects Pavilion.
- Pilfer ideas from the Blog Bazaar.
- Sample the delights of the Gameable Gallery.
- Hear the raving of Reviewers Row.
Projects Pavilion ⤴
Typhoon Sinlaku TTRPG Relief Bundle hosted by Cats Have No Lord
A benefit bundle organized in support of the islands of Saipan and Taipan after they were hit hard by a typhoon. This bundle's got a lot of heat. It's TTRPG focused overall but broadly trends OSR-ish. There are offerings from our own Sprinting Owl, Taylor, and Sandro mixed in with killer stuff from Centaur Games and Luke Gearing. As of this writing, it's hit the fundraising goal of $5000 already, but the nice thing about fundraising is that more is always better! We hope you'll check it out and support the cause.
Defy the Gods by Hectic Electron
This Powered by the Apocalypse game by Chrys Sellers of Hectic Electron invites you to defy how you think about PbtA and queer community building. The game uses playbooks and an in-depth series of prompts to build a world that's oppressive to players framed in ancient Mesopotamian fantasy. Additional prompts guide the party in what happened to the people before humans - the Atlanteans. The group will also create a Pantheon of gods/goddesses who rule this world. What if even the gods were against you?
The book makes it clear to keep the oppression framed by players and their home, not those of stereotypes. It also provides an in-depth guide to Jay Dragon's Palette Grid for safety. I was able to get a session of the game added to my schedule at GenCon which means a review will be coming soon! - Kati B.
Paper Minis Random Adventurers by John Bilodeau
A set of free print-n-cut minis drawn by local phenom Johnny B. The figures are charming, full of character, and foldable so each adventurer has both a front and a back. I love the idea, but I especially love that John made these for an open table game to bide time for newbies until they show up often enough for him to draw a real character for them. We stan an industrious king. - Taylor B.
Grit System Jam hosted by Stillfleet Studio and Anthony Grasso
The Stillfleet Studio, creators of the Grit System, are kicking off a game jam from Mid-May to late August of this year to create games in the Grit System. The system uses two fluctuating dice pools, Health and Grit. The size of the pools are derived from a mix of your 5 stats which range from a d4 to a d12. Any roll above a 6 is a success. If you ever take damage while prone, your character dies. There's a little more to it than that, including Powers derived from your class and species.
The jam includes judges Lauren Bilanko, Kayla Dice, Daniel Kwan, Sam Sorensen, and Arthur Wells. I'm hoping to join the jam after GenCon, so take a gander through the SRD and join me. - Kati B.
Last Hope (crowdfund) by Wendigo Workshop
A Canadian indie creator, Wendigo Workshop, is crowdfunding this awesome looking magical girl ttrpg, using the Caltrop Core SRD. There's a demo available on the backerkit page and some cross collabs to unlock special stuff. - John B.
Prospero's Trust by bakenshake
Freshly released from our very own Kati, this is a pamphlet adventure for Mothership that also takes inspiration from the megagame that traumatized your mutuals, OVER/UNDER. It covers a botanical infection on a traveling bankship that's spiraling out of control. It's got some real juicy body horror (hell yeah) and a chain-smoking CEO who can't help herself from stealing shit (...hell yeah). For only $3, it's worth your time! - Taylor B.
In a Petal Unlimited by giantrobottackler
The latest release from carouser Taylor B., this adventure for WYRM features a vivid twelve-room dungeon full of phantasmagoric lights, nightmarish creatures, and lost, transfigured people. Taylor has a masterful ability to conjure a singular yet cohesive vibe, and this adventure is his most polished and expansive work yet. - Rowan H.
Middle-earth Hexcrawl Dashboard by Mick
The writer behind Advanced Mystery & Manners created an incredible resource for perusing the content of Josh McCrowell's Shire Hexcrawl. It features the sort of presentation I advocated for in "Adventures In HTML"—just way better executed! - Rowan H.
Watchkeeper (crowdfund) by Spilled Ink Studios
An upcoming project for a gritty d100 game about humanity resisting an alien incursion. It's on the crunchier side of the spectrum, which isn't really my bag, but what makes this worth sharing IMO is the mutation mechanic that lets you splice your DNA with alien gunk and lose your mind. It almost feels Darkest Dungeon-y. If heavyweight games are up your alley, give this a follow. - Taylor B.
Blog Bazaar ⤴
Masked Bastionland by My Nerdy Hobby
Just the flavour of post I love: advice for streamlining your game, integrated with some truly unusual world building. - Zak H.
Fullstack Refereeing by elmcat
Another banger from reigning Bloggie champion elmcat. He must be stopped. This post offers a clever framework for understanding the work of a referee—and for diagnosing campaign problems. - Rowan H.
Gameable Gallery ⤴
We Made a Forest
by Markus M., Rowan H., Taylor B., and Zak H.
We wrote a forest point crawl for Cairn 2e using the procedures outlined in the Warden's Guide. It features mischievous sprites, invulnerable rabbits, and a giant garden prowled by an even larger wolf.
Explore the entire forest here.
Reviewers Row ⤴
The Hypergeometric Incursion of Heu: A Reveu
by Taylor B.
Background
There is no canonical version of the saint's legend. But all acknowledge her blindness and kindness. They disagree about how gruesome her fate was.
The Hypergeometric Incursion of Heu is an adventure for Cairn 2e by warenunförmig & dandelionprocessions, released for free under CC-BY-SA. It presents itself as a supplement about weird apparitions plaguing the church of a near-desolate village. This is an understatement.
I stumbled into this on itch the day it released and was hypnotized. The art, a set of psychedelic collages mixed with lightly edited public domain work, is magnetic. The tagline, "a sad village and dimensional weirdness," calls to mind the sort of dour whimsy I loved in works like Northern Journey. Unfortunately I bear a curse that forces me to lend my time towards enjoying any fantasy media with fucked up geometries. Blame it on playing Sword and Sworcery as a kid. Are Heu's angles worth inspection? Let's find out.
What's Inside?
The adventure spills across 32 pages, laid out quite cleanly with the Explorer's Design template. Roughly half of that is devoted to a 21-room dungeon, the Church of Blind Saint Vattika; the rest details the absolute shithole town it resides in alongside a few major NPCs. A timeline near the front lays out the situation: a group of extradimensional academics defaced Saint Vattika's tomb long ago to build a "Transcendence Engine" from her teeth. Now the Engine's broken, warping local space and shunting its builders in and out of our reality at random. Worse, an otherworldly cosmic butterfly has been dispatched to fix the problem like some sort of quantum mechanic, and it's rewriting our world from the atoms up through its own unknowable lens.
It's a compelling setup. The village of Heu is comically pathetic. There's a nice contrast between the unavoidable squalor of the town and the intense, horrific mutation inside the church. Throughout it all the prose stays vivid and imaginative. Some of my favorite bits:
- A wormhole made of literal worms connecting the mill and church across spacetime.
- Twelve naked, mud-covered villagers making a shrine in the woods. If asked about their religion, they lie. The text gives no answers.
- Church pews as tall as oak trees covered in thousands of books.
And that's just from the passive descriptions! There's also a table to describe the Cosmic Butterfly's increasingly brazen alters of reality as it realizes you're interrupting it. The effects range from strange sensory experiences to the cataclysmic line "Millions of butterflies hatch. Everything in Heu turns sentient."
The atmosphere is just. So striking. Dreamlike, even. The hard part of conveying a truly dreamy tone is that, IMO, a core part of the dreamy feel is a lack of control. It's easy (comparitively) to write something strange and surreal; nailing that lack of control in a medium defined by agency is harder. Here the packed-in doomsday table plus a creative reframing of Cairn 2e's environment roll as "dimensional crashes" go a long way towards showing the situation spiraling out of reach while keeping agency in the players' hands. On top of this, the dungeon holds enough grounded, unwarped details that it doesn't end up feeling like an incoherent funhouse. Impressive work.
Worth shouting out too: the character descriptions. They're so bright! Everybody gets a drive, some physical descriptors, some physical quirks (the timbre of their voice, what they do with their hands) and an attitude, all in just two or three sentences. The details paint a sharp picture. I felt I could get inside each character's headspace right from the get. I was a little put off by the placement of drives, though. They're awkwardly hanging out in the margins. It makes sense functionally - you get the character's core belief at a glance - but I wonder if there's a more elegant placement.
I'm also just... so drawn to Blind Saint Vattika, who unwittingly lends both her name to the church and her teeth to the dimensional engine. Her life is unexplained and unimportant in the grand scheme of the adventure, but her presence is felt everywhere, both physically in the dungeon and metatextually in the document itself. Her image is the first and last thing you see in the PDF, her statue provides a hint to one puzzle, and her blurry backstory is equally inscrutable to both GM and players.
I would run this adventure just to figure out her deal tbh. Her death is integral to this place's backstory but nobody can agree on why or even how it happened. It's so funny that her whole sainthood revolves around her eyes, but it's her teeth that are critical to the Transcendence Engine. She feels victim to a farcical series of cosmic accidents. I bet I could fix her.
How Would I Run It?
This adventure is my shit. It's very my shit. To give an idea of how much my shit it is: I put so many incomprehensible dream creatures in my home game that one of my players recently expressed relief when they got to walk into a village and solve some regular human bickering (sorry Aaron ❤️). But is it Cairn? I don't know. Functionally, yes, it's well-presented and easily playable within the 2e ruleset. But, real talk, I think this exists juuust outside the realm of what I personally want with the system. When I bring Cairn to the table (or even when I sell the idea of it to people), the flavor of Unexplainable I'm looking for hews closer to folk mysticism, religion, or fairy tale magic. The psychedelic dimensional stuff at the core of the adventure just doesn't fit my idea of the Cairn fantasy - I'd throw it into Electric Bastionland or even DCC before running it as intended. That's pretty firmly a me problem though. I think if this fits inside the box for you, it's an easy recommend!
Flavor Packet: 1d6 Hypergeometric Hooks
When I review something, I like to write a little mini-expansion to show how crucial the act of being inspired by other's work is for our shared hobby. In terms of content, this adventure is pretty comprehensive. One area I feel is lacking in sauce though is the hooks - they're very understated. "The priest is paying you to get rid of ghosts," "there's a deed to a castle in the church, go explore," that kind of thing. I figure the intent is probably to have the dimensional stuff come completely out of left field, but I prefer a little teasing in my games. So, for my own sake, here are a few more pointed hooks. Enjoy!
- A ragged Heu farmhand stumbles through the square of the nearest village and dies. The next day, a copy of him does the same thing. And the next day. And the next day. The bodies are piling up.
- Archivists in the city are scratching their heads. Every map where Heu is printed exhibits signs of warped reality - glow, altered text, rot.
- A strange affliction crosses the land. Attempting to face any direction other than Heu renders you blind. Following the path of sight has led the party (and a host of hangers-on) to the village.
- At night, the oldest member of the party sleepwalks towards Heu. Attempting to wake them fails - flesh grows over their eyes. It only recedes in sunlight.
- For an hour, the letters "H", "E", and "U" disappeared from our vocabulary. Local scholars hit the books to figure out the cause. The village of Heu is just one guess of many.
- The worms are congregating in an empty pigpen. Little Kafka jumped in the pile and hasn't come back up. Hopping inside transports you to a mudhole on the outskirts of Heu.
Final Thoughts
I rate The Hypergeometric Incursion of Heu 𒀱 out of ten. Good shit. You can download it for free (with a suggested donation of $6.66) here.