Battles
Game expansions opening new campaigns and conflicts across the Great Steppe.
An open world
DAIRN — The Great Steppe Universe
An open universe of interactive stories inspired by the history, myths, and living memory of the Great Steppe.
Journeys
A tabletop role-playing game based on expanded Cairn 2e rules.
Chronicles
A library of books and interactive stories with branching narratives.
Why DAIRN
The word cairn refers to a human-made pile of stones used as a landmark, memorial, or marker of an ancient burial site. It comes from the Scottish Gaelic word càrn — “a heap of stones.”
The Great Steppe Universe (in Kazakh, Ұлы Дала), built on the Cairn 2e rules, is called DAIRN: a world assembled from stories, decisions, and memory, just as a cairn is assembled from individual stones.
Origins and localization
DAIRN is based on a simplified adaptation of the Russian translation of Cairn 2e. The Kazakh translation is developed using a shared glossary that aligns English and Russian terminology. As DAIRN evolves, its Russian and English rules are revised and simplified to better express the ideas and themes of the emerging Great Steppe Universe.
About the author
Andrey Svininykh is an author from Kazakhstan and the creator of the DAIRN Universe. He previously contributed to the development of Openbravo POS and created NORD POS, NORD KASSA, and KAZNA. He is currently working on the localization of Etendo ERP, the successor to the community edition of Openbravo ERP.
For more than 25 years, he has been passionate about collectible tabletop games and a fan of the Warhammer, Fallout, and Magic: The Gathering universes. He imagines the tabletop incarnation of DAIRN as Carcassonne and Dune meeting at the same gaming table—with dice, a game master, and a story born from the players’ decisions.
As the author of DAIRN, Andrey sets the direction of the Universe and brings its stories, rules, and digital projects together as a coherent whole. At the same time, DAIRN is conceived as an open world created together with its community. There is a place here for writers, artists, translators, researchers, developers, and game masters—for everyone who wants to add their own voice to the Great Steppe Universe.
© 2026 Andrey Svininykh·The project is developed with technical support from NORD TRADING NETWORK LLP·CC BY-SA 4.0