Cairn 2e: Trad Fantasy Ancestries

I’m spinning up a monthly TTRPG night at my day job. For several players, it’s going to be their first roleplaying experience, but most of them are coming into it with DnD pop culture familiarity and desires. I’m hoping to lean into some of those traditional fantasy aspects while playing an easier game for them to learn and a much more fun game for me to run: Cairn 2e.

Here are some classic fantasy ancestry bonuses I’ve cooked up for Cairn that are taken at character creation, each granting a stat/HP bonus and a unique ability.

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Stranger Stars #03: Building Factions & Creating Planets

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A key part of any setting-focused roleplaying game is… well… actually building that setting. For Stranger Stars, I’m hoping to strike my preferred balance of in-text worldbuilding which is enough to understand and envision a majority of the universe while leaving plenty of voids to be filled in at each table during play (or by the GM during their prep, if desired). Ideally, that will be something a bit more expansive than MÖRK BORG’s world information (12 or so pages in the BAREBONES EDITION) but far more streamlined/focused than a trad game’s setting section (which can easily be hundreds of pages long, if not being entire books unto themselves).

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Table Talk: Mothership's Panic Table

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I’m planning to have unique Panic Tables for all six classes in Stranger Stars, my work-in-progress Mothership total conversion mod, which begs the question: What in the standard Mothership Panic Table is good? What’s bad? Can you write a whole blog post that is just a review of a single table?

That’s right. This is a review of all 20 entries on the Mothership Panic Table.

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Stranger Stars #02: Classes, Trauma Responses, and Abilities

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Characters are the window through which most players view the world of roleplaying games, and they are often where I start when designing a game or writing adventures.

For Stranger Stars, I’ve been building the character classes as a starting point to see what changes I’d like to make to Mothership’s core mechanics and how much of the setting I can hardcode into characters without limiting them in scope or diversity. Let’s dig into where I’m currently at with the 6 character classes and why I’m doing what I’m doing.

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Stranger Stars #01: Putting Canon Back into the Anti-Canon

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One of my background projects for the last few months has been picking away at what I’m calling a “total conversion mod” for Mothership - something akin to Cloud Empress in that it’s Mothership compatible but also so steeped in a particular setting and style as to be functionally its own game, like the total conversion mods of PC gaming yore.

My working title is Stranger Stars and the basic premise is:

99 years after a wormhole gate leads humanity (and its largest corporations) to a new, resource-rich galaxy far across the observable universe, the gate collapses. In the Collapse, all ties with Earth and Milky Way are instantly and entirely severed. A century of chaos, corporate war, religious reawakening, and bitter survival followed.

Some cybernetically-enhanced humans are old enough to remember the original worlds of mankind, even Earth, but their numbers dwindle every day. Thousands more androids of that era, known now as Pregalactics, remain in operation either in their corporeal forms or as cores operating entirely within digital systems. They are the scholars of the Old Worlds.

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