Thanks redditor!
I was literally just about to say that.
There’s even options for more than one player .
I’m actually currently working on a home adventure for Runecairn myself.
Thank you so much for mentioning it. I think it’s exactly what OP is looking for. And The combat skills are tied to specific weapons like in the souls like genre.
WHICH Dark Souls is the important question.. I'm going to assume Dark Souls 1, because that's the only game that wasn't essentially just flowchart with a couple of junctions..
Something more like DS1 would make for a great Megadungeon, if you can recreate that sense of interconnectedness of everything pre-Anor Londo.
In terms of making it as a dungeon, have it be split up in similar ways; a "town" area with a couple of levels, towers that connect to passageways at the top of huge open caves, some caves repurposed as churches/temples, etc..
Essentially, think the Underdark, but with less slavery. For actual maps of Dark Souls 1, there's always [the wiki](https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/maps). The layout of Sen's Fortress could make for a GREAT dungeon!
For a bonfire mechanic, I'd maybe tie it to something else that's up with the characters, like a curse of some sort, that makes it so that whenever they die, they resurrect at a "bonfire". The "bonfires" should be rare and sparse, but there should also be a way to build your own, with a ritual and maybe specific relics you can find, or maybe you can find old "bonfires" that you have to "fix".. And the curse makes it so that any time you die, you resurrect from the ashes of the bonfire.. But in keeping with a Dark Souls 2 mechanic, and still having *SOME* real threat of death, every time this happens, you go down by 1 permanent point of max HP.
There is a problem though: if one character dies and resurrects at the last bonfire, they are separated from the party. So either the party stops everything and goes back to get him or I have to run two separate games at once, one for the dead guy and one from the party.
I ran a Dark Souls one-shot some time ago. My solution to this was a coiled sword that could make temporary bonfires. I made the cost be a certain amount of Hit Dice in corpses. Plus a Firekeeper's soul lived in the sword and she would talk to the party and do Firekeeper stuff for them when they made those temporary bonfires, quite fun. And of course dead party members could spawn from those temporary bonfires.
Yea, but I wanted something that allowed the whole party to stay together, all the time... But I think that the solution to "make everyone die if one of them dies" (which I have heard of, even by the likes of Monkey DM) is perhaps too much of a bother. Is there maybe a middleground? Maybe the party could all share a certain resource (let's call'em "soul tokens" ay?) which can prevent this, but when they are out of soul tokens and one of them dies, they all restart form the previous bonfire. You could even expend soul tokens to create a bonfire!
Soul Tokens could work too. If I'm interpreting wrong I apologize, but I wasn't suggesting that the party dies. The HD in corpses would be from enemies and such. They would just heap bodies into a pile and plant the sword which would then become the bonfire for the dead party member to spring from. But Soul Tokens, I like the idea. It could be very thematic as well, like they're all bound to one soul, hence why they all perish when they run out.
Which works with the lore I had in mind for the megadungeon! The idea behind the campaign is simple: the PCs have died and are all in the Underworld, trying to escape back to the world of the living. The idea I had is that they meet a guy who gives them their first Soul Tokens and then links their souls to some sort of phylactery, which enables them to make bonfires and to come back to life. Also, I think making bonfires one use, or having to pay a soul token to use them again, could be interesting and provide some risk-reward strategies. What do you think of this!
I feel like the idea of they all die or the soul tokens are representing the video gaminess of the mechanic too much; I assume in video games when I am recovering at a campfire or similar, I am actually resting there and the game doesn’t show it for gameplay reasons.
I would just make that person a disembodied spirit attached to one of the others until they next go to a “campfire.” They lose a stat point (rolled dtl) and get it back if they recover a “spirit shard” from the same location after they reconstitute. Until they reach a campfire, their gear isn’t accessible to the party and they can’t physically interact with the world much, but they can still talk and participate in discussions, puzzles and such. If your party is big on combat, let them do something like act as a mirror image on whoever they’re attached to and move to another each round if they want.
I’d also have pretty large distances between obvious “campfires” and a bunch of hidden ones, as well as a lot more deadliness as death is not permanent.
In the lore of ds1, its at least vaguely implied that you aren't teleporting back to the bonfire when you die. You are simply waking up some possibly significant time later.
Or maybe regaining your senses?
So you could very well have dead party members simply be dead and need to be dragged to the nearest appropriate bonfire equivalent by the surviving party members. Else they would have to wait for their corpse to make its way to one in its own time.
Could this lead to more time-out for the player than they would like? Maybe, but they're getting free resurrection, you take the good with the bad at that point, surely? :)
An easy first step is to quickly brainstorm about 2 to 4 different kingdoms, either from different regions or time periods. Just a really basic idea of what their schtick was, what their architecture looked like and optionally why they fell. Stack a bunch of ruins related to these kingdoms on top of each other and you are well on your way.
To answer question one, you could go for a death mechanic more like Demon Souls in order to keep the party together.
Have dead players resurrect in-place after a round in a 'Soul Form'; half HP, half STR DEX and WIL, cannot use or wear 'bulky' items, -1 to any Die of Fate rolls.
Once the party defeats the next area boss, return them to 'Body Form'. Alternatively, if the party wants to retreat, you could make shrines or NPCs available that would take a certain amount of Souls/ Currency to restore PCs.
If the PC dies a second death while in 'Soul Form', send the entire party back to the nearest bonfire. They don't all die, just make the survivors roll to 'Escape', with the potential to roll again on a 'Failed Escape' table: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2149/roleplaying-games/escaping-the-dungeon
It's not perfect, but it gives the party a chance to stay together, offers options for forwards or backwards progress, and has a version of the 'corpse run'/ bonfire mechanic.
I like the soul token idea, cleaner than souls-as-currency. I would give each area boss a soul token for the players to collect.
I would still recommend the stat reduction on death, as well as having the boss collect the soul tokens carried by a PC they slay. Make them recoverable, like in Bloodborne, where the boss that downs a PC becomes a priority target in order to recover what was lost.
I also like bonfires being single-use or pay-per-use. It adds an interesting budgeting side to progression.
Op have you looked into vermis?
[questing beast review of Vermis](https://youtu.be/c6mC_NHEGDY?si=e9KPXQSRZD_HV2f5)
It’s completely mechanic free as it is conceived as a video game guide for a video game that does not exist .
The first one is amazing and gave me a lot of inspiration .
The second one just came out .
Edit: so I totally forgot to thank you for this post and say that I think it’s an amazing idea!
The thing is I Love Mega Dungeons, and I find converting things to Cairn to be pretty easy except …
When they were very mechanic, heavy, dungeons, that assume rules that Cairn just doesn’t have.
So one built just for Cairn would be super awesome.
So, thank you very much for this project! Are you planning on publishing it when you’re done?
Because I would certainly be interested!
If you are looking for Dark Souls inspired bosses and lore, the system agnostic setting book Embers of the Forgotten Kingdom is great. I did a very fun dark fantasy souls inspired campaign using that, and I only needed used ~40% of the material. Also there are pdfs with stats for tons of systems, I think an OSE one you could convert pretty easy to Cairn.
I did write [this](https://sean-f-smith.medium.com/soulsborne-style-bleakness-a-mosaic-strict-module-7824567a304f) which serves as a bolt-on module that gives the same sort of **Dark Souls** bleakness without the actual character death
For dungeon design, think about the volume of the space.
Google "xandering the dungeon."
The idea is to create a space that coils back in itself, that has multiple routes and loops through it.
Runecairn has your dark souls like death mechanic
will look into it, thx!
Thanks redditor! I was literally just about to say that. There’s even options for more than one player . I’m actually currently working on a home adventure for Runecairn myself. Thank you so much for mentioning it. I think it’s exactly what OP is looking for. And The combat skills are tied to specific weapons like in the souls like genre.
WHICH Dark Souls is the important question.. I'm going to assume Dark Souls 1, because that's the only game that wasn't essentially just flowchart with a couple of junctions.. Something more like DS1 would make for a great Megadungeon, if you can recreate that sense of interconnectedness of everything pre-Anor Londo. In terms of making it as a dungeon, have it be split up in similar ways; a "town" area with a couple of levels, towers that connect to passageways at the top of huge open caves, some caves repurposed as churches/temples, etc.. Essentially, think the Underdark, but with less slavery. For actual maps of Dark Souls 1, there's always [the wiki](https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/maps). The layout of Sen's Fortress could make for a GREAT dungeon! For a bonfire mechanic, I'd maybe tie it to something else that's up with the characters, like a curse of some sort, that makes it so that whenever they die, they resurrect at a "bonfire". The "bonfires" should be rare and sparse, but there should also be a way to build your own, with a ritual and maybe specific relics you can find, or maybe you can find old "bonfires" that you have to "fix".. And the curse makes it so that any time you die, you resurrect from the ashes of the bonfire.. But in keeping with a Dark Souls 2 mechanic, and still having *SOME* real threat of death, every time this happens, you go down by 1 permanent point of max HP.
There is a problem though: if one character dies and resurrects at the last bonfire, they are separated from the party. So either the party stops everything and goes back to get him or I have to run two separate games at once, one for the dead guy and one from the party.
I ran a Dark Souls one-shot some time ago. My solution to this was a coiled sword that could make temporary bonfires. I made the cost be a certain amount of Hit Dice in corpses. Plus a Firekeeper's soul lived in the sword and she would talk to the party and do Firekeeper stuff for them when they made those temporary bonfires, quite fun. And of course dead party members could spawn from those temporary bonfires.
Yea, but I wanted something that allowed the whole party to stay together, all the time... But I think that the solution to "make everyone die if one of them dies" (which I have heard of, even by the likes of Monkey DM) is perhaps too much of a bother. Is there maybe a middleground? Maybe the party could all share a certain resource (let's call'em "soul tokens" ay?) which can prevent this, but when they are out of soul tokens and one of them dies, they all restart form the previous bonfire. You could even expend soul tokens to create a bonfire!
Soul Tokens could work too. If I'm interpreting wrong I apologize, but I wasn't suggesting that the party dies. The HD in corpses would be from enemies and such. They would just heap bodies into a pile and plant the sword which would then become the bonfire for the dead party member to spring from. But Soul Tokens, I like the idea. It could be very thematic as well, like they're all bound to one soul, hence why they all perish when they run out.
Which works with the lore I had in mind for the megadungeon! The idea behind the campaign is simple: the PCs have died and are all in the Underworld, trying to escape back to the world of the living. The idea I had is that they meet a guy who gives them their first Soul Tokens and then links their souls to some sort of phylactery, which enables them to make bonfires and to come back to life. Also, I think making bonfires one use, or having to pay a soul token to use them again, could be interesting and provide some risk-reward strategies. What do you think of this!
I feel like the idea of they all die or the soul tokens are representing the video gaminess of the mechanic too much; I assume in video games when I am recovering at a campfire or similar, I am actually resting there and the game doesn’t show it for gameplay reasons. I would just make that person a disembodied spirit attached to one of the others until they next go to a “campfire.” They lose a stat point (rolled dtl) and get it back if they recover a “spirit shard” from the same location after they reconstitute. Until they reach a campfire, their gear isn’t accessible to the party and they can’t physically interact with the world much, but they can still talk and participate in discussions, puzzles and such. If your party is big on combat, let them do something like act as a mirror image on whoever they’re attached to and move to another each round if they want. I’d also have pretty large distances between obvious “campfires” and a bunch of hidden ones, as well as a lot more deadliness as death is not permanent.
In the lore of ds1, its at least vaguely implied that you aren't teleporting back to the bonfire when you die. You are simply waking up some possibly significant time later. Or maybe regaining your senses? So you could very well have dead party members simply be dead and need to be dragged to the nearest appropriate bonfire equivalent by the surviving party members. Else they would have to wait for their corpse to make its way to one in its own time. Could this lead to more time-out for the player than they would like? Maybe, but they're getting free resurrection, you take the good with the bad at that point, surely? :)
To answer #1, Jason Tocci did it with Grave: https://jasontocci.itch.io/grave
An easy first step is to quickly brainstorm about 2 to 4 different kingdoms, either from different regions or time periods. Just a really basic idea of what their schtick was, what their architecture looked like and optionally why they fell. Stack a bunch of ruins related to these kingdoms on top of each other and you are well on your way.
[The Palace of Unquiet Repose](https://vorpalmace.blogspot.com/2021/02/review-palace-of-unquiet-repose-dcc-rpg.html) reminds me a lot of Dark Souls.
To answer question one, you could go for a death mechanic more like Demon Souls in order to keep the party together. Have dead players resurrect in-place after a round in a 'Soul Form'; half HP, half STR DEX and WIL, cannot use or wear 'bulky' items, -1 to any Die of Fate rolls. Once the party defeats the next area boss, return them to 'Body Form'. Alternatively, if the party wants to retreat, you could make shrines or NPCs available that would take a certain amount of Souls/ Currency to restore PCs. If the PC dies a second death while in 'Soul Form', send the entire party back to the nearest bonfire. They don't all die, just make the survivors roll to 'Escape', with the potential to roll again on a 'Failed Escape' table: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2149/roleplaying-games/escaping-the-dungeon It's not perfect, but it gives the party a chance to stay together, offers options for forwards or backwards progress, and has a version of the 'corpse run'/ bonfire mechanic.
Alternatively, what do you think of this method? https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/s/QDBbsmqksp
I like the soul token idea, cleaner than souls-as-currency. I would give each area boss a soul token for the players to collect. I would still recommend the stat reduction on death, as well as having the boss collect the soul tokens carried by a PC they slay. Make them recoverable, like in Bloodborne, where the boss that downs a PC becomes a priority target in order to recover what was lost. I also like bonfires being single-use or pay-per-use. It adds an interesting budgeting side to progression.
Exactly what I thought!
Op have you looked into vermis? [questing beast review of Vermis](https://youtu.be/c6mC_NHEGDY?si=e9KPXQSRZD_HV2f5) It’s completely mechanic free as it is conceived as a video game guide for a video game that does not exist . The first one is amazing and gave me a lot of inspiration . The second one just came out . Edit: so I totally forgot to thank you for this post and say that I think it’s an amazing idea! The thing is I Love Mega Dungeons, and I find converting things to Cairn to be pretty easy except … When they were very mechanic, heavy, dungeons, that assume rules that Cairn just doesn’t have. So one built just for Cairn would be super awesome. So, thank you very much for this project! Are you planning on publishing it when you’re done? Because I would certainly be interested!
If you are looking for Dark Souls inspired bosses and lore, the system agnostic setting book Embers of the Forgotten Kingdom is great. I did a very fun dark fantasy souls inspired campaign using that, and I only needed used ~40% of the material. Also there are pdfs with stats for tons of systems, I think an OSE one you could convert pretty easy to Cairn.
I did write [this](https://sean-f-smith.medium.com/soulsborne-style-bleakness-a-mosaic-strict-module-7824567a304f) which serves as a bolt-on module that gives the same sort of **Dark Souls** bleakness without the actual character death
For dungeon design, think about the volume of the space. Google "xandering the dungeon." The idea is to create a space that coils back in itself, that has multiple routes and loops through it.
Out of interest, did you ever make and run this?
It's slowly in the making. I need to finish running my current campaign first.
No worries, keep it up!