Natural 7

designing pale white crown

Back in September I published my entry to RedMageGM's Mystic Woods OSR Jam, titled Pale White Crown. It turned out that RedMageGM really liked my adventure, ranking it among the top 10 entries!

To begin with, let me just say that I love this adventure. Pale White Crown turned into exactly what I wanted it to be, and satisfied all the weird little goals I was aiming for while writing it. Does that mean it's a perfect adventure? No!

game jam theme

The theme for the jam was to design a magical forest with old-school vibes which also satisfied these requirements:

Magical forests are my jam, I love creating them and designing weird things inside them. Writing a location with a sense of replayability isn't too challenging as long as you include appropriate depth to the region, and I decided to tackle that with two specific strategies:

On the other side of things, including an element of arbitrary randomness really tripped me up. I was excited to write up some random encounters, but those don't really count for the theme. How was I going to randomize this forest in a way that still felt like the players had agency? In the end, I feel like the randomness came through with how you navigate to and from some of the forest locations, and how the party can decide to interact with the factions.

I've mentioned factions twice now, so they must be pretty important for this adventure, huh? Yeah, I dedicated three whole pages to describing the factions in the Lurching Wood (the setting of Pale White Crown). I tried to include enough detail for the factions to be playable right at the table, with suggestions for what they are trying to accomplish, how they plan to get what they want, and what can happen if the players interact with their group. I actually had even more information I wanted to put on the page, but I ran out of space on the page.

I'll talk more about this in the next section, but as soon as I had the idea for Pale White Crown, the "hard to reach treasure" was obviously a city full of loot at the bottom of a lake. If any group is able to collect all of that treasure on their first visit to the Lurching Wood, I would be shocked, surprised, and in awe (flabbergasted).

Randomized travel comes in two locations of the forest where following a given path takes the party to a random location. I don't like maximizing random travel because I think it eliminates agency, but if the group knows that they're just following a random path of drag marks into the forest, then I think it works.

drafting

When I was organizing my ideas for the adventure I was caught between moments of extreme jubilation, great confidence, and utter despair.

I resonated strongly with the idea of a forest adventure, but I have no experience with designing completely random events that are also fun. In my head I was wondering how to include something like a Curse in Mythic Bastionland in the adventure, but also make player choices still have an impact? My brain went in circles over and over trying to figure this out.

It helped that I was really excited to write an adventure called Pale White Crown. The name popped into my head at dinner one night, and I knew it would be what I used for the adventure. I could already imagine what the cover would look like (dark watery background, lowercase white Blackletter title, massive text). I knew there would be factions trying to get the crown and it was on a statue in a lake and blah blah blah. But how was I going to add fun randomness?

This back and forth slowed me down in the first week of design (we only had two weeks; I would have preferred a month for something that could be up to 12 pages).

When I actually was able to focus my brain to put words on the page, I wrote the introduction, the history of the dead city, and the factions all in one sitting. It was clear to me who was here, why they were here, and what was here before they got there.

And then I had to write the locations.

Ugh.

generating location ideas

So there's a pale white crown at the center of a forest, but what about the adventure? Where do players get to explore? What do they get to interact with? Where are the factions hiding? Creating these locations took me down a couple paths.

The first idea I had was to use the Cairn 2e Warden's Guide for creating forest seeds. I've tried using this generator in the past, but it's never really turned into a complete project. When I rolled up my entries for Pale White Crown, I landed on a few interesting results:

Why? I think the random distribution of locations was helpful as an inspiration, but when they aren't placed in relation to each other it felt superficial. I had a bunch of weird landmarks that I was struggling to connect with weird paths. So I scrapped that map and started scavenging the locations for ideas.

The result became the following: a set of ruins scattered around a lake, lots of twisting vine walls, and tunnels underneath the forest. This was around the time that I wrote the introduction and decided on the dead city and Mortaja and so on.

I kept some of the landmarks, or at least the ideas of those landmarks, throughout my revisions and edits. A few had to be completely scrapped and replaced as I began to draw a new map and figure out the positioning of everything. The mud river played a large role in placing landmarks, because I wanted it to be possible to follow it (or fall into the water). Once I had a good idea of where my landmarks would be, I started really thinking about their descriptions and contents.

locations make me mad

I'm getting better at writing locations for other GMs to run. I'm a lot better at writing locations in my weekly campaign notes because I know I'm just going to improvise half the content. What do I need to provide someone who doesn't want that much weight on their shoulders?

I've been learning a lot about how to write locations by listening to Between Two Cairns, reading the Designing Dungeons Course, skimming through pages of Empty Room Designs, reading other people's dungeons, and so on.

What it comes down to is this. Good locations have some mashup of:

I think I'm really good at the first three. I find that my players are very excited to talk to my NPCs & Monsters, and examine fragments of Lore for hints towards their adventure goals.

It's that last point that's hard for me. I'm still learning how to create fun elements of the world for players to mess around with. Things like traps to trigger and disarm, puzzles to work out, secrets to uncover, machines to operate, and so on. I also plan to write a post that encapsulates why I think these "machines" are valuable in adventure design.

I'm happy with how some of the Interactable Objects came out in Pale White Crown. For example, I like the tangled wall of vines around the lake and the crystal obelisks of petrified ghosts. I wish I had added more locations that could be returned to over time, things with uses beyond just a first exploratory poke or prod.

Trying to write the perfect location is impossible and yet it still makes me mad that I can't do it. I'm working on getting over that and just focusing on writing fun, entertaining content that works at the table. For now that means lots of fun NPCs, Monsters, and bits of Lore. In the future it will mean weird machines to poke, prod, or pull the levers on.

designing the locations

I mentioned that I rolled up locations with Cairn first, then adapted the landmarks to better fit the region as it came together as a point-crawl. Some of those rolls really helped inspire the locations that ended up in the finished adventure.

I rolled lots of places that seemed like ruins, so I scattered those around the lake as remnants of the dead city. I figured I could put a dragon-like creature in one of them, too. The rest would be good hints towards the place's history.

I also rolled a prompt about killer bees and burying. That inspired the tunnels beneath the forest, though the bees didn't survive the drafting process. I replaced them with the Reliable Reprisal Syndicate instead. Having tunnels gives the players lots of opportunities to shake up a regular point crawl with a more randomized method of travel, one that also crosses huge distances quickly.

As I said before, I knew exactly what the Lake and the Statue and the Crown would be as soon as I had the adventure name, so those came easily. It isn't actually difficult to get the crown, which is on purpose, so I just focused on making it difficult to reach the lake. If someone wanted the adventure to be more difficult or deadly, they could make Dwylv's stats closer to that of a red dragon and/or add him to the random encounter table (and have him periodically fly around the forest hunting trespassers).

The muddy river was a lot of fun. I think I rolled something like "jagged ford" for my inspiration, and so I put in a river that became a muddy river lined with cairns. I figured the mud made it hard to swim in, and since the forest hates people, the river sweeps anyone who falls in away to other locations (and potentially off the walking island).

With the wall of vines around the lake, I originally only had one idea of how to get through: assimilate oneself with the forest. This was added to the adventure rumors table and I forgot about it. Later on I realized that having only one possible solution kind of sucked, so I needed more: this meant making Dwylv the only thing that could burn through the vines and adding a thin section by the mud river. Also, it meant figuring out how to assimilate oneself into the forest.

Becoming the Voice is a super fun idea, and it's inspired by the Raven Boys trilogy where there is a magic forest that takes somebody as its warden. I wanted the same effect here, so I decided the woods had drained one of the ghost-crystals to make a "slot" that someone could slip into to merge their soul with the forest. It kind of makes sense?

layout, layout, layout...

I use Affinity for my layout tool of choice and I like it a lot. I've been using it since the beginning of 2026 and now I feel like I know a little bit about what I'm doing. The layout guides from Clayton at Explorer's Design help. Also, watching Fari RPGs as they worked through Boundless has helped. Reading other people's work and examining their own layout decisions has been even more helpful. I think the entries for the Appendix N Jam have some really inspiring layout examples.

The cover is very simple. I found a texture with cracked soil, inverted the colors, added some weird level balances, then modified how it affected a grey background until it looked nice. Playing with filters is really fun and really confusing. I took a graphics course, so I know a lot of the underlying mechanisms happening, and yet I still don't know what I'm doing.

I did the same thing with the speckle texture that covers all the pages. Adding the grayish tone with bits of ink splatter really pulls this thing together, I think. Makes it look like an artifact and gives it Tephrotic Nightmares vibes.

Here's something silly: we had a 12 page limit for our adventures. No page size given. Obviously I could have stuck to US letter paper because that's what I work with normally. Except I'm interested in those tiny zines everybody is making, so of course I'm going to cram this into 12 A5 pages (A5 is close to half US letter sized).

On one hand, I love how it looks. On the other hand, I couldn't fit enough spacing between my location headers before the jam was over, so the writing felt cramped. As of writing this post, I was able to cut a couple words and resize the header paragraph leading so that there would be more white space.

I prefer to take inspiration from layout artists like Johan Nohr when I can, and I think Into the Odd was my main reference for this project. I also looked to Rise of the Blood Olms and Yochai's advice for writing Cairn modules when it came to presenting information for the adventure. It's pretty standard stuff, but some of it was new to me.

All in all, I'm really happy with how the adventure looks. It fit my expectations perfectly, and I think it delivers on the weird, grim vibes of a forest walking on a hundred thousand dirty little feet.

Also, the singular internal illustration was an absolute last minute addition that I think really pulls the spread together. Whitespace bedamned!

final thoughts

I was smiling when I finished Pale White Crown and I love a lot about the adventure. I wish I was better at some things, but that will come with time. Practice makes perfect, after all.

Honestly, I can't wait for RedMageGM to launch another jam. I really like their adventure reviews; it helped me find creators I wouldn't otherwise have noticed, like Nikoline.

Things on my radar: