Cairn

What's this, my second grumpy post on a single grumpy day? Well, yes, but Cairn (Yochai Gal) has left me considerably less grumpy than V20 because at least it didn't make me read 500 pages before I could have a neutral opinion about it. Cairn is only about 20 pages, and those pages are about half the size of an average rpg book . . . but the text size is also smaller . . . but also there were a lot of tables. Let's just say it took less than an hour to read and leave it at that.

So what did I get out of that hour?

Like all rules-lite rpgs, Cairn reminded me that the core of the hobby is just "saying things happen." The players say what their characters are going to do, based on the nouns and adjectives written on their character sheets, and then I, as the GM, say what happens based on my logical assessment of the likelihood that those actions will have an effect. Sometimes, there's an element of uncertainty in the likely outcome, and in those situations, I'd have the players roll a "Save" against one of their three Abilities, and assign good or bad outcomes based on the quality of the roll (though, in this game, low rolls are better than high ones).

There's also a very simple combat system. It's streamlined even compared to other rules-lite d20 games. You have no to-hit roll. Everyone just rolls damage. The main tactic just seems to be picking your battles by persuading the GM not to call for a fight. 

I don't want to get too backhanded, though. I knew, upon picking this book up, that it would be minimalist. Do I really want to penalize it for that?

On the other hand, why do I need it? What am I getting out of it? And those aren't really questions I can answer. I've been doing this hobby for 30 years. I could make a more complex game than this in the space of a day. I'm fairly certain I have. But would "more complex" automatically mean "better?"

I guess that's the lesson that rules-lite games teach us. What is it possible for us to live without? How much can you take away and still have the essential heart of the hobby? And if we're talking about the essential heart, then Cairn persuasively argues that you can take away quite a lot. . . Even if I, personally, cannot live without exception-based design.

Anyway, this is a short book, featuring a game with more random charts than pre-defined rules and I think it would probably work. You can tell a fantasy adventure story by just saying what happens and occasionally rolling dice. Who knew?

I do, however, have to take a quick moment to give credit where credit is due and say, for only being one (half-sized, small print) page long, the "Principles for Wardens" section gives some pretty useful general GMing advice, like "Players do not need to roll dice to learn about their circumstances" or "Use binary 'so A or B?' responses when their intentions are vague."

Overall, this was not the book to make me a convert to rules-lite OSR, but I kind of liked it. And that was enough to briefly make me forget my cold.

Ukss Contribution: There's not a lot of room for setting flavor in this book, but the spell-list, which is little more than a name and a brief (1-2 sentence) description does manage to do some fantasy worldbuilding. Based on the names in the Random Spellbook Table alone, I'd narrowed my choice down to:

Anthropomorphize
Bait Flower

Cone of Foam

Marble Craze
Objectify
Summon Cube

And while some of those are more useful than others, when I finally got around to the descriptions, it could only be Marble Craze: "Your pockets are full of marbles, and will refill every 30 seconds."

That spell was some mage's senior thesis at magic academy. I can just feel it.