Posts

Tasks in Cairn 2e: Cost and Risk Instead of Difficulty

A Note On the Blog After a grad total of one post, I'm already moving off Blogger. Sorry to anyone who is subbed to the RSS feed. There will still be an RSS feed over on Substack if you like subscribing that way: https://ratchattowns.substack.com/ This post is also on Substack here: https://open.substack.com/pub/ratchattowns/p/tasks-in-cairn-2e?r=50a1cr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Intro I come from a d20 background. Most of you likely do, too. The resolution mechanic in those games is simple, elegant, and easy to understand. Roll a d20, add some sort of modifier representing character skill, compare to a target number representing task difficulty. If you exceed the target number, you succeed on whatever you were trying to do. If you don't, you fail. Roll-under games like Cairn cut out one third of that process. There's no need to tally up a raft of tiny modifiers, just roll and compare to your attribute. This simplicity comes at a cost, however. Your roll-under...

A Different Way of Thinking about Creatures in Cairn 2e

I recently read through Cairn 2e and thought it was excellent. Yochai Gal is a real class act for putting that much quality RPG out there for free. I more or less immediately started making an adventure with the system's tools. I ran into a bit of a problem when trying to create creatures, though. Using the system's procedure, I whipped up a few. Some I thought were good, likely to be useful and interesting in play. Some, I thought didn't do enough to make themselves more than a mere statblock. This whole process got me thinking about Cairn creatures. What separates a good one from a bad one? And what can adventure designers keep in mind to make their creatures better? What makes a good creature? What I want most out of my OSR monsters are challenges for my players' brains rather than their characters' numbers. A creature that is exactly the same as every other except for higher damage and health is deeply uninteresting, in my mind. I want a set of creatures that fo...