Corny Groń was a cool little solo game in zine form that I definitely owned but cannot seem to locate at the moment (one of many portents that I do, indeed, have too much stuff and need to get rid of a bunch of it). If I recall correctly, it was based on Dark Fort, the Mörk Borg solo play rules. The idea was to take those dungeon crawling rules and apply them to wilderness exploration and wrap the whole thing in the folklore of the Polish Carpathians circa the 18th century. It featured lovely woodcut illustrations by Ala Wisniewska that further set the mood.
Beyond Corny Groń: Adventurer’s Guide (2023) takes the original solo material (and Wisniewska’s art) and expands it greatly, turning it into a rules agnostic setting suitable for group play. Much of this is driven by random tables. There are tables for regionally appropriate character backgrounds, equipment, treasures and so on. The intention is to explore a wilderness region on the fly, surprising both the players and the GM, so the table results are designed to come together quickly using a process of map discovery, which accounts for the unique pathfinding and varied elevations that are part of mountain climbing. A number of factions, both natural and supernatural, round things out.
Oh, and there are lots and lots of monsters of course. Some are staples of fantasy games. Others are drawn from regional folklore (Leshy, noon maids). Because the region is also a liminal place between East and West, many creatures of other lands are known to pass through — faeries and drakes and night creatures drift from Western and Northern Europe while djinn and ghouls accompany the traders and spies of the Antolian Empire (an analog for the Ottoman Empire).
I love the flavor of a different place and time. This isn’t a recreation of the Polish Carpathians, but a dream of it. The appeal is very similar to A Thousand Thousand Islands and Kala Mandala, something exciting, something outside the frame of the commoditized tropes of Western heroic fantasy that is given weight by the genuineness of its inspirations but is accessible because of the way it hews to some basic TTRPG standards. This is the kind of stuff I mean when I say I want to visit new places through RPGs.
