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...