A Quick Look at a Big Book: Cairn 2e

Theodor Kittelsen 1870s, Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Ivarsøy, Dag Andre

 

Once again, I am stretching the definition of "big book", firstly because the Cairn 2e books are not that big, at least compared to chonkers like His Majesty the Worm or The Hidden Isle, and secondly, because I am actually looking at TWO books: the Player's Guide and the Warden's Guide. There were in fact several more books in the box set, but most of those were also Players Guides. For the purposes of this review, I will cover the idea of the box a bit, but mainly focus on the contents of these two "core books", rather than the adventures.

The second edition of Cairn is, like the first, written by Yochai Gal. The books have beautiful cover art by Bruno Prosaiko and interior illustrations by Amanda Lee Frank and Keny Widjaja. I have played a little bit of Cairn 1e (a single session in fact, unless my memory betrays me), so while I have a passing familiarity, I am not deeply enmeshed in the game. To my eye, the main differences between the first edition and the second are the expanded backgrounds which take up nearly half the page count of the Player's Guide, as well as the entirety of the Warden's guide. The basic rules (short as they are) are also located in the Player's Guide, with the contents of the Warden's Guide manly consisting of world generation procedures and tables, as well as an advice section.

I think the truest thing that can be said about Cairn, and its second edition in particularly, is that it is a game made by Yochai Gal for Yochai Gal, and it just so happens that a lot of other people like it as well. Having listened to all the episodes of his podcast Between Two Cairns, I think that I have at least some idea of what Yochai wants from a game, and from reading these two Cairn books, I think they fulfil that goal perfectly. It is clear that the whole gameplay has been tuned to enable and reinforce the Principles. The question is not whether the game is good, it is probably very close to perfect for a very specific style of play, the question is whether what you want from a game and how much it overlaps with what Cairn sets out to do.

The player's guide starts by presenting the aforementioned Overview and Principles for Players, before delving into character creation. Everything is nice and neatly presented, and the additions of Bonds and Omens help provide adventure seeds and connect the player characters to the world. The backgrounds are all super flavourful, and have fantastic illustrations. The list of itinerant professions in the world also serve as implicit worldbuilding in a very useful way: Vald is the type of world that has Kettlewrights, Outriders, and Jongleurs. However, as great as the backgrounds are, this is one of the points of friction between me and Cairn. It is something I have touched on before, but I find that too many of the backgrounds rely on objects with limited uses to make then "special". This might be a case of me not "getting" cairn, as I have learnt from discussing with others that much of this should be implicit from the background, or that having the item implies proficiency with it, etc. However, if this is to be the case, I would have liked a bit more guidance on this front: What does being a Mountebank allow me to do, that a Jongleur could not, once I have exhausted my two uses of Miracle Oil? It is not that I want a whole complicated class tree with advancement and mechanical special abilities, in fact, some Backgrounds already offer exactly what I am after: on a specific roll, the Greenwise might have green skin and subsist on sunlight rather than rations! This is a neat little speciality that cannot be taken away from them, used up, or transferred to another character, which are my main issues with encoding these things in items. That said, the rules and procedures are simple and do their job well, and it is probably more useful to read them yourself and pass judgement than rely on me summarising them. They're short and freely available. If you liked the first edition of Cairn, or any other game derived from Into the Odd, you'll probably feel right at home.

Unlike the Player's Guide, starting softly with the Player Principles, the Warden's Guide gets straight to business, presenting the procedures for worldbuilding with no preamble. I imagine that this is for space reasons, as the book clocks in at ~190 pages (depending on how you count the inside of the cover), so everything superfluous had to be cut, as implied by Yochai mentioning a previous, longer, version on a recent podcast episode. In fact, the Principles for Wardens, despite existing on the website and in Cairn 1e, are not collected anywhere in either tome, replaced by sets of principles for various situations presented in the Advice and Examples section in the back of the book. As a prospective new warden (which I assume is a sizeable portion of the target audience of the box set), I would have loved to see the advice on actually running the game foregrounded more. If I am just going to start by running the adventures included in the box, I am going to need to know how to GM now, while the world generation procedures can wait until later. To be clear, the world generation sections are great! I just question the decision of putting them front and centre like this with no preamble. It makes it feel like the book is targeting experienced Wardens who are just looking for the tools to (more or less) quickly generate a world to play in, rather than new Wardens who would like to be introduced to how to run Cairn. This interpretation also fits with what Yochai said on the aforementioned podcast episode, that he put the things in the Warden's Guide that he would want to have access to as a Warden.

This advice section also reveals that my brain probably works very different to Yochai's (or whoever was beta reading it and giving feedback), as everything is explained with short descriptions followed by lengthy examples of play. I can clearly see that this is how some people learn best, but not me. I would have gotten more from a lengthier explanation, followed by multiple shorter examples, rather than the way it is presented. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the sections on Growth and Saves. To be clear, I actually love the way growth works in Cairn, where interaction with the world and its denizens changes the player character, for good or ill. However, the way it is presented here shows ten different options, each with no elaboration except for a page-long example of play with some warden's commentary. For my brain, it would have been better to have a couple of sentences of elaboration, followed by a handful of examples of each type, condensed to a few sentences each. It would be great to have a selection of possible types of growth and how they might be obtained, similar to the Reliquary or list of spellbooks. Similarly, each save, rather than an explanation, just presents an example of play where the save is called for. In particular, for the examples beyond "Traditional Saves" ("Opposed Saves", "Aiding an Ally", etc.), I could have used some explanation on what differentiates them from the traditional ones, as that is still unclear to me. I wish there was a bit more telling along with the showing. But again, that might just be how my brain works, so if this sounds like a great way of presentation that would be ideal for your learning, more power to you!

Finally, it is worth mentioning the box itself: it's super nice, and its composition really emphasises Yochai's focus on community building. Rather than just a set of one of each book, the box includes three copies of the Player's Guide - this is not just intended to sit on a shelf, it is intended to support a Play Group. I have seen it before, e.g. with the character+rules sheets in CBR+PNK (itch page) or some pledge levels of the recent Liminal Horror crowdfunding campaign, but this is my first time seeing it with a ~90 page perfect-bound book, rather than pamphlets. I think this is hugely admirable, and a choice I hope others follow suit in making for their box sets. I have not yet sat down to read the adventures, but Yochai has assembled a dream team of adventure writers, so I cannot imagine them not being at least very good.

All in all, I think the Cairn 2e box is a fantastic package, and provides a great set of tools for getting to play Cairn, even if I found that some choices made for the Warden's Guide ran slightly counter to what I would have wanted from it.