Cairn 2e for Foundry VTT
Cairn is a rules-light dark fantasy survival game by Yochai Gal, about adventurers exploring a dangerous, mysterious forest. Characters are fragile, gear matters, and every choice counts. This system brings Cairn Second Edition to Foundry VTT and keeps the bookkeeping for you: the inventory slots, Fatigue, damage spilling into STR, the watches of a journey and the turns of a dungeon.
What it does
A character in five minutes
Pick one of the 20 backgrounds, such as Aurifex, Bonekeeper or Fungal Forager, let the dice pick one, or choose one the Warden wrote for the campaign. The creator walks you through the rest step by step: a name from the background's own list, attributes, starting gear, personality traits, a Bond and an Omen. Anything you leave blank is rolled for you. A character already built on Kettlewright comes in with one click.
The character sheet
Ten inventory slots, where heavy (bulky) items take two and Fatigue fills them up. Fists, claws and anything else that is part of the body cost no slot, and every character starts with their fists. Click STR, DEX or WIL to make a save. Rest, Restore and the Die of Fate are one button each. Armor adds itself up from what you wear. When a character is overloaded or panicking, the sheet shows it.
The Actions menu lets a player type in the damage the table rolled with Take damage, Whisper in character, Barter gear and coin with another player's character, open the one-page Rules Summary or the Calendar, walk into the Stores the Warden has opened, and run the macros the Warden has put there. With Grid Crafter active, the Forge is there too. Drag a sack or a cart onto another sheet you own, such as your mule's, and everything inside goes with it. A companion that comes with a background, like the Raven Familiar, is dragged from its item straight onto the map.
Damage and combat
Roll damage and apply it to the targeted token. Armor soaks what it can, HP goes first, the rest spills into STR, and the chat card offers the critical-damage save when it's due. A fall or a cave-in rolled on the spot applies the same way, and so does damage rolled on the table's own dice, typed in with Take damage. A hit on the wrong token is undone with one click. A hit that leaves a character at exactly 0 HP opens the Scars window on that player's screen, where one button rolls everything the Scar asks for. Scars, Panic, impaired and enhanced attacks, blast, Morale and Reactions are all handled. The combat tracker follows Cairn's rules: sides take turns, with no initiative roll. Select a token and hover another to read how far apart they are, height included. The ruler and a dragged token read in metres too.
Tools for the Warden
- One-click generators for NPCs, hirelings, monsters, whole factions and names for places, realms and forests, all built from the rulebook's own tables.
- A Calendar in the Vald reckoning of the Warden's Guide: watches, seasons, the Reclamation, and notes on any day, starting with the setting's holidays. The Warden sets the time and shows it to everyone, and a scene can darken and lighten with the clock.
- The Journey window, shared with the players, runs the wilderness watch by watch. It rolls weather, getting lost and wilderness events, spends Rations and Fatigue on everyone's sheet, and an encounter can drop its creatures straight onto the map.
- In a dungeon, the combat tracker runs exploration turn by turn. It shows what each character is doing, offers the rulebook's actions with their rules, tracks how far each token moved (with an undo), and says when the rules call for a Dungeon Event. If a fight breaks out, the dungeon picks up again on the same turn once it ends.
- Ten small Stores come ready, from the Weaponsmith to the Tavern. Stock your own by dragging items onto its shelves, open it on every player's screen, or let players walk in from the Actions menu of their own sheet. Players fill a cart, and the store checks both their gold and their free slots before anything changes hands.
- The Treasure window rolls loot from the price bands of the compendiums, crafting materials by kind, or tables and folders of your own. Strike what you don't want and send the rest to the party's Stash.
- The Hazards window holds rulings for falls, drowning, crushing and exposure, which the Cairn books leave to the Warden: one die of STR damage per severity, from d4 to d10, rolled against the targeted tokens, and a save card that whoever is caught rolls for themselves. They are house rules, not Cairn 2e.
- Any item, from a relic to a strange potion, can be unknown gear: it hides behind the name, picture and appearance the Warden gives it, and can't be used until it is revealed.
- A faction sheet lists its agents in rank order and an agenda to tick off, with buttons for faction actions and opposed saves.
- The party sheet shows everyone's HP, attributes and load side by side, plus the followers travelling with them and a Stash for what the group holds and nobody carries.
- Rules written in your notes work:
[[/save WIL]]in a journal becomes a clickable save, and a trap written as[[/damage d6 STR]]rolls its damage against STR instead of HP. - When a character dies, you can promote a hireling to a player character.
What comes in the compendiums
All the game content you need is already inside:
| Backgrounds | all 20, with their name lists, starting gear and tables |
| Equipment | the full Marketplace (gear, weapons, armor), plus carts, horses, mules and wagons |
| Magic | 100 spellbooks, 100 scrolls and 46 relics |
| Bestiary | 84 ready-to-drop monsters, plus 13 hirelings and the 5 companions some backgrounds start with |
| Tables | traits, Bonds, Omens, Scars, Reactions, the Die of Fate, Wilderness and Dungeon Events, the Weather in Vald, the naming tables, and the Warden's generator tables |
| Rules | the Player's Guide (principles, character creation, core rules, procedures and the Marketplace), linked to the items, tables and backgrounds it names |
| Calendar | the Vald calendar's 24 holidays, festivals, solstices and equinoxes |
| Macros | Die of Fate, Rest, Restore Abilities, Roll Morale, Roll Reaction, STR / DEX / WIL saves, Rules Summary, Calendar, Stores, Take Damage, and the Warden's Reset Player Hotbars and Restore Default Stores |
| Homebrew | More Gear (clothing, food, drink, tools, transport, valuables and strange items), Materials for crafting, More Spellbooks, More Scrolls and 17 Potions: extra content, not from the Cairn books, kept in its own folder |
Distances read in metres with the feet the map measures beside them, 12 m (40 ft), and weights in kilograms.
It looks like the books
The ink-on-paper design uses Lora, the typeface the Cairn books are set in. A new world opens on a welcome scene with its own music, and every player finds the saves, the Die of Fate, Rest, Restore Abilities, the Rules Summary, the Calendar, the Stores and Take Damage already on their hotbar. With Dice So Nice installed, you roll a custom 3D Cairn d20.
Installation
In Foundry's setup screen, go to Game Systems → Install System, search for Cairn 2e and click Install. Or paste this into Manifest URL:
https://github.com/brunocalado/cairn2e/releases/latest/download/system.json
Then create a world with the Cairn 2e system. If you want players to build their own characters, open Configure Settings → Permissions and allow Create Actor for players.
Light Sources is required, and Foundry turns it on in every Cairn 2e world. It lights torches, lanterns and candles from the token HUD and spends their uses. A lit torch is the torch itself: remove it from the sheet and it goes out, hand it to another character and it arrives lit, and a module that carries items onto the map, such as Canvas Loot, takes the flame with it. A table that would rather not light anything on the map can still spend a torch's uses by clicking them on the sheet.
Recommended modules, all optional:
- Dice So Nice rolls the 3D Cairn d20, and the other dice in a Cairn Blood Moon theme that each player can change.
- Automated Animations, with JB2A Patreon and PSFX, animates and sounds Cairn's weapons, monster attacks and spells. The system's menu replaces AA's own once, your edits to it are kept, and a world setting turns this off.
- Grid Crafter makes the Marketplace's weapons, armour and gear from materials on a crafting grid, cooks food and brews potions. Some recipes need a tool, such as Smithing Tools or a Sewing Kit, and many things can also be made without one. A weapon, an armour or a piece of gear can be taken apart again for its materials.
- Canvas Harvest puts 38 resources on the map, from ore veins and trees to herb patches, carcasses and monster parts. The party mines, chops, gathers and carves them with the right tool, and gets the raw materials Grid Crafter works. Herbs, hives and game trails grow back by the calendar's clock. It needs Canvas Loot, whose drops and pick-ups read as the system's own chat cards.
Learn more
The user guide covers everything in detail: the character creator, the sheet, rolling in play, every Warden tool, containers, and the API for macro and module authors.
The system is in English. A translation is a separate module: to make one, see Translating Cairn 2e.
Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue. Changes in each version are listed in the changelog.