The idea
A roster shared between friends
Cairn is a browser dungeon crawler in the Wizardry lineage, with asynchronous multiplayer built on a roster of characters shared between a small group of friends, not a public release.
The centerpiece is character creation. The dungeon exists to change the characters that come out of it. The plan is that you build a character in a workshop, she lives in a roster the whole group draws from, and a delve takes a party of six: your own character plus up to five borrowed from friends. Characters take real damage, gain real history, and can really die, then come back visibly changed, into their owner's hands.
What's built
A character workshop, nothing more yet
Phase 1a is exactly that: a character workshop that runs with no build step and no dependencies. It draws a character, recolors it, places marks on it, saves it to a local roster, and copies a share link that carries the whole character in the URL fragment.
The dungeon, the party AI and the shared roster across friends are later phases. Right now this is a character workshop page where a character gets made and looked at, and that is the whole game so far.
Art direction
Drawn, not generated
All of Cairn's art is planned as code-drawn SVG line work. None of it is generated.
The idea is that a fresh character reads as thin, clinical scaffolding, and a veteran's line thickens and warms as marks accumulate, so the art itself is meant to carry a character's history.