Discover Top Posts Tagged with #adventure26

2026-02-16: Stat Block - Possum

It's tumblr's favorite trash goblin! Although Americans simply call them possums, they are actually opossums which is a completely different animal that what is called a possum elsewhere in the world.

Possum

3 HP, 3 STR, 13 DEX, 6 WIL, bite (d6)

Equally at home in wilderness burrows and human settlements, opossums have a knack for showing up in unexpected places.

Opossums have a prehensile tail and excellent climbing ability.

Play Dead: If an opossum fails a WIL save, it goes catatonic for several hours and releases a foul smell as though dead.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #stat block #animal #possum #opossum #bestiary

2026-02-17: Stat Block - Skunk

Mississippi is home to two species of skunk: the striped skunk and the eastern spotted skunk. However, only the striped skunk is regularly seen in the Delta.

Skunk

3 HP, 3 STR, 10 DEX, 6 WIL, bite (d6)

About the size of a housecat, but with more attitude and bigger stink.

Their black and white pelts are soft and durable. Some tanners will buy quality pelts for coats.

Noxious Spray: When a skunk is surrounded, it releases a foul-smelling spray affecting all creatures in the same movement zone. DEX save to avoid falling to 0 HP and retching.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #stat block #animal #skunk #bestiary

2026-04-29: Random Table - NPC - Railroad Passenger (d20)

A random table for when you need to roll up a random passenger on the train to talk to.

Railroad Passenger (d20)

Charline Augustonelli (36F) - Boarded a few stops ago to sell homemade food before riding back home.

Egbert Corliss (48M) - Insurance adjuster riding north to attend a conference

Cleveland “Ned” Bobb (15M) - Runaway looking for work near Memphis

Katie Sledge (50F) - Rootworker and grandmother traveling to help her daughter give birth

Reuben Switzer (34M) - Evicted sharecropper skipping town on his debts

Boland Chung (35M) - Preacher traveling to meet his new church community at a Chinese Baptist church.

Gilbert Hyde (24M) - Professional gambler. Semi-professional loser.

Kimball Lamastus (22M) - Accountant and eligible bachelor.

Filomena Hood (29F) - Disillusioned secretary returning from a vacation meant to help her nerves

Warren Kelso (14M) - Aggressive newsboy who intends to sell a paper to every passenger on the train.

Odee Matthews (20M) - Recently released from the penitentiary at Parchman just in time to attend a funeral.

Lucinda Hawn (44F) - Exhausted mother of six rowdy children (Carlyle, Monroe, Emelia, Lovie, Ephraim, and Dean)

Edith Marsalis (32F) - Physician making an unpleasant trip to see some estranged relatives

Irene Honey (37F) - Court reporter on the way to be trained to use a new stenotype machine for transcription.

Elvira Canonici (31F) - Schoolteacher chaperoning a school field trip.

Mac Naron (36M) - Trophy hunter returning from a successful trip in Louisiana.

Hope Kamien (33F) - Temperance activist and prison reformer

Leonidas Menel (24M) - Newly-minted soldier coming home from boot camp

Reese Jaco (17M) - Chatty shoe shiner

Jonah Fuller (28M) - Levee crew captain

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #shadows in the cotton #hexcrawl #strawberry special #train #steam engine #npc

2026-04-12: Game Materials - Character Sheet

An important milestone has been achieved! I've made a draft of the character sheet for Shadows in the Cotton that I'm pretty happy with. Since Tumblr doesn't like PDFs, here's an image of it instead. It's made to be printed on a US Letter (8.5x11in) size sheet of paper, but the individual character sheet is smaller than that. It's designed so that one sheet of paper printed front and back will give you four small character sheets (the "additional information on rear" in this case just means the bottom half of the image in this case).

I might make a bigger sheet, but I really liked the idea of structuring it as an in-world identification document that would have been roughly the size of some actual documents. The smaller form factor required some interesting considerations, one of the big ones being character name vs player name. In order to preserver verisimilitude, character name goes in "Name" while the player's name is listed under "Chancery Clerk" because they are some of the folks who would be recording and filing legal documents, which I think is a kinda neat compromise.

Lastly, Martin Sennet Conner was the real-life governor of Mississippi in 1934. This is something I want to point out because the character sheet also contains a copy of his real signature. I managed to track down a copy of his signature from some old documents and did some fancy image editing to vectorize it and get it cleaned up. I did have to squash it a little bit to make it fit the scale of page, so it's not a perfect copy, but it's still pretty close. Soon I'll have the Player's Guide published on Itch.io and hopefully DriveThruRPG, but that will probably take me a few days since there are still quite a few lingering pieces to fit together.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #undead #shadows in the cotton #character sheet

2026-01-16: NPCs - Given Names (Female)

Every TTRPG world needs people to inhabit it and fill it with life. These tables strive to allow wardens to quickly generate NPCs that are grounded in the recorded history of the Delta. This is another of a series of tables that involve rolling all 7 dice in the standard polyhedral set to come up with an NPC.

Delta NPC Female Names (d12)

The names on this table are historically accurate, having been taken from church directories, census records, school enrollment records, newspapers, and books about the history of various towns in the Delta. Efforts were made to find more names that verifiably belonged to non-white individuals, but the nature of records available disproportionately represent white people (my ballpark guess is at about a ratio of 3-to-1).

Now this list has way more names than the section heading would suggest because I'm going to eventually be splitting this table out into a series of smaller tables in the player's guide and I didn't want to spam everyone with a 60ish smaller tables. But since this is a really big table and I don't want to recreate the "Do you love the color of the sky?" meme with an endless list of names, I'll hide it behind the "Keep Reading" button.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #random encounters #5e #random table #random tables #table25 #20table5 #adventure26 #npc #delta people #random names #names #first names #given names

2026-03-26: Stat Block - Doñas de fuera

Another one of the few Italian derived legends I found throughout my research! This one is more specifically Sicilian, but it is plausible that such a legend made it to the Delta via the Italian migration. The Doñas de Fuera name means "Ladies from Outside" and they are analogous to the fairies of English lore.

Despite the name, there were both males and females in the groups. And another quirk with the name is that it is Spanish because the Spanish viceroys ruled Sicily at the time.

Doñas de Fuera

5 HP, 7 STR, 13 DEX, 16 WIL, claws (d6)

Beautiful people who travel in groups five or seven, almost always with a guitarist playing music while they walk. They are kind and generous unless offended, but there are many inscrutable ways to offend them. Discussion of religion in their presence is especially offensive to them.

They can shapeshift into the form of a housecat at will to cause minor mischief, and their fingertips in human form retain catlike claws.

Ayodon Form: When especially offended, they shift into a form resembling a panther with red fur and the horns of a goat. Attacks from the Doñas de Fuera are Enhanced while in this form.

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Header image background is Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen by Johann Heinrich Füssli

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #stat block #monster #human #donas de fuera #Doñas de fuera #fairy #bestiary

2026-03-11: Stat Block - Mulberry Witch

Contrary to name, the Mulberry Witch is not actually a witch but a spirit inhabiting a tree. This is a really obscure bit of folklore, which I only found out about from a single reference in Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (top of page 115 in the PDF) and the footnote of which mentioned an appearance in Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes.

From what I can gather, the Mulberry Witch is generally a playful spirit that is bound to a specific mulberry tree, and it can rustle tree leaves and laugh. The text concerning the Mulberry Witch in Talley also mentions its fruit making people sick. That's all I can find so far.

Mulberry Witch

12 HP, 4 STR, 2 DEX, 10 WIL

An intelligent but immobile red mulberry tree. It can understand human speech and can communicate by rustling its leaves. Its leaves can approximate breathy human speech when the wind blows. It bleeds pink sap if cut.

Charming Fruit: Unripe berries are hurled at a target, causing them to protect the tree as though it were their own child.

Ripe fruit carries potent magic, but those who try to steal from the Mulberry Witch often find themselves permanently stained.

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Header image background is by Douglas Goldman.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #stat block #monster #hag #tree #mulberry tree #folklore #mulberry witch #bestiary

2026-02-25: Stat Block - Child of Teche, The Great Snake

Way back around this time in 2024, I wrote up a piece about the children of Teche but didn't actually stat it up (and even if I did make the stats, they would have been for 5E at the time I was writing this and not Cairn like I'm using now). The summary version is that Teche is a mythological snake that was miles long and carved out a twisting bayou with its death throes, and the children of Teche are snakes that are smaller and more common than Teche (but still huge at 16-20 feet long). I am still undecided if I want to base the coloration of these snakes on the Southern Watersnake (Nerodia fasciata, pictured above) or the Black-Masked Racer (Coluber constrictor) that I originally used.

Child of Teche, The Great Snake

8 HP, 12 STR, 14 DEX, 6 WIL, bite (d8)

Fiercely territorial, these massive snakes live completely solitary lives except to mate and lay eggs. They need so much food that the land can only support one adult every 100 square miles.

Easily burrows through mud and can sense the vibrations of any creature walking or swimming nearby.

Critical Damage: The target is squeezed tightly, breaking several bones.

#fishdavidson #dungeons and dragons #cairn #adventure26 #stat block #animal #monster #snake #teche #bestiary

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