I know that I didn’t use the term Cairn properly in the title but that’s the great thing about the English language is the ability to play on words at times.
For those of you who don’t know what a Cairn is, allow me to define that for you…
There you go.
Okay, getting to what you’re looking at from the first image, this is a tabletop roleplaying game called, yep, Cairn. It’s a small, digest-sized 25-page booklet and it’s one of the easiest games to play for either one-shots or even extended campaigns. It’s a fantasy game that mostly focuses on a sort of Celtic aesthetic and it’s based on the games Into The Odd and Knave.
The print version will cost you less than $4 on Amazon but the PDF is 100% free. I’ve been sitting on it for about two years, barely looked at it and never played it. In fact, I’ve horribly misjudged this game.
I’m the kind of guy that, if it’s free, it’s for me. I’ll grab it whether it’s good or not…it’s free. It’s not like I lost money on it. I can tell you why I never played it or looked into it much…it was the cover art. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a knock on Yochai Gal or the artists that worked on the game, that was all me. I’m a little spoiled, I will admit.
The booklet that I downloaded went into my tablet and phone and was immediately forgotten. On a whim, I ordered a physical copy and a copy of the bestiary back in January. I’d been hearing whispers around the internet for the last couple of years.
I had seen that the kickstarter for the second edition was successful. When it comes to market, I may just buy a box. Why? Why would I do that after my initial dismissal? Well, it’s a weird and complicated story but, simply put, I think the BrOSR were their greatest advertisement.
I’ve been advocating for games to be more rules lite. It’s why I never connected with Pathfinder or some other games.
Think of this like a vacation. Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere remote that has goods and services without completely crippling you if you decide you want to take your shoes off on the beach or making you go through each step of taking your shoes off, rolling to see whether or not you successfully remove them, leaving you wearing one shoe or ending up with a rule making you wear both? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have books that are tomes and still have a simple rule set. Games like Castles & Crusade, Cha’alt, Wasted Lands, Night Shift, Swords & Wizardry, Lamentations of The Flame Princess and the list can go on and on. Some of my games like Cha’alt are deceptive. Sure, three big tomes with a fourth on the way but they all use the same seventeen-pages of rules and the rest of the book is setting and lore. Love that.
Cairn doesn’t really have much in the way of rules or setting. It’s twenty-five pages and it gives you a basic skeleton of a game. For some, this is a huge disappointment but, for others, it’s a blessing.
In my travels through my PDF library, I decided to look into this one again. I looked at the book and decided to look around online, see if the whispers would yield more than the myriad of voices expressing their highest praise of it. I didn’t find a single detractor anywhere.
That’s when I decided to go through the book myself and instantly regretted my decision to leave this book to collect virtual dust in my digital folder for so long. The skeleton that is this game immediately stirred my imagination. This game doesn’t focus on dungeon crawling like Four Against Darkness does, in fact, it does a sort of point crawl through dense forests. The forests themselves can even become a sort of de-facto dungeon. What it lacks in information, it makes up for in imagination, namely yours.
Rules light systems like this give you the ultimate creative freedom. You can prepare an entire adventure for it in as little as 15 minutes. Character creation barely takes 5. It’s a d20 roll-under system making a roll of 1 an automatic success and a 20 the critical failure. There is a means of playing it solo and there are variants to this game itself. It doesn’t suffer from bloat and it favors a Rule Zero approach, leaving you as the GM to rule as you see fit as long as it makes sense.
If you feel the need for supplemental material for the game, that’s not a problem either. A litany of resources found on Itch.Io had been produced a wide variety of supplements, new classes, adventures and bestiaries, most of them free as well.
Rather than purchasing new games, going through my older stock of games really yielded some positive results with this one. My only regret is that I just downloaded it and almost completely forgot about it. This is the mental vacation where you can say “I know it’s night time but I want to take my shoes off and walk along the beach in the moonlight” and I as the GM can say “Alright, your walk is a successful one. You emerge from the beach, back onto the boardwalk feeling renewed. Where would you like to go next?”
Remember also that this 25-page booklet is free. It’s a full game. Use your existing dice, round up a few friends, print out some character sheets and get right into the game.
This is exactly what a true tabletop role-playing game is meant to be.
I didn’t choose the rules-lite life, it chose me.