The Gate

This was a short Cairn 2e campaign, meant to do a number of things: serve as a simple starting place for players new to TTRPGs and intimidated by more rules-heavy systems; test out Cairn’s campaign structure; and test how a homebrew adventure would work out in such a system. The campaign lasted for 17 sessions, and in the course of the campaign, we were able to test out all of the Cairn 2e campaign structure systems:

• Hexcrawl travel

• Combat

• Procedural travel/dungeon crawling

• Random monster generation

• Character and story milestones

• Magic

Having run a number of Cairn 2e one-shots prior to this, Warden (Cairn’s term for GM) opted to use the Glog Magic hack for this campaign, to provide some more defined terms and boundaries for spells. Warden also wrote the adventure with the intention of utilizing the Milestones mechanic. The map Warden created used hexes that each represented about a day’s travel on foot, and spaced towns according to the guidelines included in the Warden’s Guide. Once created, the towns themselves were populated using the guidelines in the Warden’s Guide.

Results: Players

Once they adjusted to the very open-world, emergent style of Cairn, the players seemed to enjoy themselves. The lack of character structure did not prevent good moments of roleplaying, creative thinking, and a feeling of groundedness. In fact, there were times when the players were able to accomplish something that would have not been possible, or would have been harder to do, in games such as D&D or Pathfinder 2e. An obvious example is that anyone can cast spells or wield weapons; in fact, a well-rounded character should have a little of everything to help ensure survival. 

The low Armor and Hit Protection, and the difficulty in healing also made the players more cautious and creative, and they survived many encounters that parties in other systems may have Total Party Killed in, due to the necessity of caution. One might read the Cairn Player’s Guide and assume that it’s a system that carries a high mortality rate, but this group found the opposite to be true. Warden has run multiple tables in multiple systems, and every one of them had more tense moments regarding hit points and character death, or near character death, than in Cairn. 

In fact, not a single player character died, despite encountering their fair share of combat and encounters where the deck was very obviously stacked against them. The players found Cairn to be a system that quickly and easily rewarded creativity. The only limits were their imagination and the fiction itself.

Players also found it easy to jump into combat, and the loosely structured initiative system meant that combos and tactics could be more easily employed, with greater success. Combat also ran quickly, and much more combats could happen in a session if a party chose to do a combat-heavy session or campaign. Popular D&D adventures like Out of the Abyss, for example, would work quite well in Cairn and move very quickly, especially the first half of that adventure.

Results: Warden

Getting players up to speed on things like combat and dungeon turns was very quick and easy, and easy to explain in a manner that was easy to grasp for beginner players. The books themselves are written with less jargon and more plain language than many rule books, which has the benefit of quick comprehension. Pivoting with the fiction on the fly was similarly very simple, and if needed, Warden could have rolled a monster in 2 minutes.

Final Impressions: Players

An overall good introductory game to TTRPGs, especially to the OSR. Players of all experience levels will find it easy to jump in. Combat runs smoothly, and exploration prevents some players from charging forward while others hang back.

Pros

• Quick to understand and learn

• Short character sheets

• Complete freedom of character progression and action

Cons

• A few players found the openness of character action overwhelming at times

• Poor organization of the Player’s Guide made finding rules and explanations difficult at times. There is material in the Player’s Guide that might be better suited to the Warden’s Guide

• A few players disliked the inventory management aspect of the game, and even for those that did enjoy it or didn’t mind it, inventory management caused more than one instance of confusion (encumbrance issues), and distributing inventory bogged down the game far more than any other mechanic or procedure in Cairn

• A few players found frustration with combat with they felt limited by their character’s weapons or abilities and felt overwhelmed by enemies with no clear option other than to flee

Final Impressions: Warden

A wonderful game to prep, write, and run for. The mental load for the Warden is exponentially less when compared to other games, especially non-OSR games. That being said, Warden may prefer systems with a few more rules, such as Shadowdark or Flail (see Pros and Cons, below) because of the lack of guidance in critical areas of the game.

Pros

• Extremely easy game to prep, write, and run. The idea of having to improvise situations, NPCs, or Monsters is less stressful and complicated than in other systems Warden has experienced

• Cheap materials; the rules are completely free online, and the books are very reasonably priced if someone prefers physical copies. The barrier to entry is extremely low, which comes with many of its own advantages.

Cons

• Lack of guidance in areas where it really mattered: how many enemies is too many to throw against the party; is your starting backpack part of your starting inventory or separate; how many factions should an outpost have vs. a settlement; how to give out rewards; how to create items without breaking the game; etc. The onus is shifted onto the Warden to either answer these questions in the moment or foresee the need to research them ahead of time (the Cairn Discord is the best place to ask questions and the game designer is usually fairly prompt; but it is annoying to have to go to the Discord so frequently with things that should be in the books to start with.)

  • Dropping Backpacks: in the Discord, it was suggested that parties could fill their inventory slots and then drop their backpacks during combat so as not to incur the penalties, accepting the risk of dropping their packs in a dangerous location. Guidance on this is not in either of the rulebooks.

    • Warden found this slowed the game as players agonized over what to keep in their backpacks and what to take, how many things could be wielded at once, whether it was worth the risk, etc. 

  • Puzzle Combat: boss fights in Cairn are intended to be a process of finding the monster, conducting reconnaissance, doing research, and trying multiple times to defeat the creature. In practice, this means that epic scale campaigns in Cairn will either be fast-tracked or will take a very long time to complete. Campaigns are more likely to be about dealing with faction warfare or one very dangerous monster, but this is not said anywhere.

    • The intention seems to be to prevent players from winning too easily and simulating a realistic approach to monster hunter, and for some groups this will be great. Warden found this to be a tedious process to ask players to repeat numerous times, and often broke that cycle in the interest of progressing the game, for a number of reasons:

      • Many players do not come to a low-magic fantasy game expecting to have to do a lot of research

      • Having to do this for multiple game cycles made boss fights an adverse goal simply because of all of the hoops required to get to a possible win condition

      • Multiple systems exist already with research at the forefront of their mechanics, begging the question, why not just play one of those if investigation is to be your focus?

      • No skill exists to accurately represent research, and getting information essentially for free after “attempting it for long enough” felt cheap and unearned

• Limited tables. The game is meant to be a hexcrawl game, but the procedure tables themselves are rather short, leading to a fairly repetitive gameplay loop that Warden found bored players after one or two cycles.

• In the same vein, while aspects of the game can be randomly generated as needed, when done on the fly, if the Warden isn’t used to interpreting the results of a table on the fly, large chunks of the game can feel repetitive and unremarkable.

• Loose magic system. Even when using the Glog Magic hack, the magic system often raised more questions than it answered. While there were a few instances where this led to unexpected and hilarious results, in general, a few extra words or an extra sentence to clarify the spell just a little further would have been greatly appreciated.

• The lack of technical game jargon meant that things that were easy to understand were still not necessarily easy to make a ruling on. See: Loose Magic System, earlier.

In Conclusion

Cairn does exactly what it claims to do: rules light, fast gameplay, quick comprehension. Many groups love Cairn and run it constantly, or at least regularly. Warden took a number of tools from Cairn and the OSR that she employs in her crunchier games, like D&D, including clocks, countdowns, tension dice, and dungeon turns, and while this isn’t her preferred OSR game, these mechanics work so well in other games that she’s encouraged to try the OSR again in the future, albeit with another system.

Overall, the players enjoyed themselves and the times we had to stop and parse the wording of the rules was minimal to non-existant, leaving more room for gameplay. We were also able to run with as few as two players and still move the plot forward, which is a huge advantage over other d20 fantasy systems.

For Warden’s part, while it is a fun system, Warden prefers systems with slightly more crunch. Their next foray into OSR will probably be Shadowdark or Flail. In the end, though, everyone had fun and we still told a cool story with some badass enemies.