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Cairn Review

2026-08-28

Last week I finally got the chance to play my favorite TTRPG, and after the sessions I got to experience, definitely the TTRPG I hope to continue playing for years to come. I absolutely have to evangelize the work of Yochai Gal, Cairn. Looking to adapt Into the Odd (an Original DnD hack by Chris McDowall) to be able to be played in Dolmenwood (a fairy forest setting by Gavin Norman), with additional hacks and rules inpsired by Dungeon World and Knave, Yochai Gal made, Cairn. An adventure game, that is in my opinion, the best distillation of what makes TTRPGs so fun.

The principles of play are straight forward. Cairn is:

• Classless
• Leveless
• uses a Slot-based inventory
• and is Fiction First

Character growth is diagetic through the Scars system, player inventory, and in-world advancement as determined between the players and Warden (Referee).

There are only three Attributes: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower. Saves are roll under. Instead of Hit points, you have Hit Protection, or a character's ability to avoid damage in combat. Armor reduces incoming damage, and there are no attack rolls. All attacks automatically land, you only roll damage. Spells work like they do in Knave. Each individual spell uses up a single inventory slot. You can freely cast but each attempt adds Fatigue to your inventory. With only 10 inventory slots, a magic-user character has an in-game reason for only carrying their spell books, no armor and weapons, to be able to maximize their spells per day!

The rule book for the 1st edition of Cairn was only 20 pages. You can get all the information necessary to play Cairn for free on the website, but a printing of the game is less than $10 USD.

The game is rules light, easy to pick up, and has everything you need in an elf game in my opinion. Though you may wish to hack in one or two elements, I encourage you to "play it by the book" the first time. The simple rules, quick random character generation, and barebones character sheets allow for you to easily wrap your mind around it and let your imagination get to work.

While I think that you can wring tactical combat (a Tucker's Kobolds situation should totally be possible in Cairn), others may disagree. And compared to a PBtA-style game such as Stonetop, others may find the basic resolution mechanics (or lack there of) equally disappointing.

As mentioned earlier, I got to run multiple Cairn sessions. Here is my report on those games:

Demon Driven to the Maw

Written by Brad Kerr, Demon Driven to the Maw is a classic Party-crawl adventure module for Cairn.

Set in a castle during a wild party, the players are thrown into a pretty chaotic, weird, and downright creepy situation.

I played this as the Warden. There were 6 other players at the table. They managed to have a lot of fun over the course of about 2 hours after character creation (which in Cairn is rather quick).

If you are looking for a quick one-shot, and have a more mature (some elements are rather adult, in both a sexual and violent nature, so certainly not appropriate for a younger crowd) group, this fits the bill.

Spoilers for Demon Driven to the Maw

Before the adventure started I rolled the 4d4+1 and got a result of 8. So after roughly 8 “turns” I had the NIGHTMARE PHASE start. The hook is that players were searching for the famous thief Jougal, who recently robbed the king.

Players arrived and immediately sussed out that the women hosting the party were off. Figuring out through a feat of strength contest (random event) that the women have hooves for feet. This caused them to switch from “party mode” to “rescue Jougal mode”. Additionally, one player had a read minds spell and read the mind of the host of the party, Helel (literally Satan) and I told them they just saw visions of Hell, torture, screams, etc. These two facts tipped them off to the weirdness of the party and so they split up.

One of the random encounters was a young man attempting to jump out a window. I did not know that Jougal was imprisoned in the basement (Note to self: Read modules more thoroughly before running them!), and they kept thinking this was Jougal, so I let it be Jougal. This actually turned out to be brilliant later, but I digress.

I only managed to roll up 1 Redcap. If more Redcaps then players are in a room, the Redcaps attack. Since this was not the case, this 1 Redcap just ran around just out of sight causing a little mischief. One player chased after this Redcap, using one of their spells to turn into slime and ooze after them. I had them use this to be able to ooze into locked bedrooms. A very clever way for the player to get around that I thought was cool.

The players end up finding Anne, rescuing her. Teaming up with the Giantess, and then suddenly, the Nightmare phase started. The smoke was pretty deadly and the players, without much time, could only escape it in the basement.

Here is where the fake Jougal turned out to be awesome, because I had him be one of the Baobhan Sith when they got to the chapel to find the real Jougal. The players managed to win the fight, rescue Jougal and escape with their lives.

The rest of the building burned and none of the other villagers survived. But the players all had a blast. They used the treasure and spells to unique effects and Cairn was simple and essentially got out of the way, which facilitated a lot of fun.

I didn’t utilize the module fully. I could have used the random guests, the Baobhan Sith table, the small talk and more. There is a lot of replayibilty here, in the time to the Nightmare Phase, players “solving” more, and of course, players choosing to go into Hell.

Of the 6 players, 3 were experienced TTRPG players and 3 this was their first time, or they had very limited experience. None of us had ever played Cairn before this and so this was a big success in my opinion.

Winter’s Daughter

Later, by popular request, some of the players and I from the first session, plus a new player, all played a second round of Cairn. This time, one of my favorite modules that I have run more than once, Winter’s Daughter by Gavin Norman.

Set in Dolmenwood, the players have to explore a tomb, travel to Fairy, and reunite star crossed lovers (if they are not evil that is).

This adventure is more appropriate for younger players or a general audience.

"Converting" the adventure to Cairn is easy. For one, there is limited combat, and if you are familiar with Descending AC (THAC0) in Old School Essentials (and of course classic BX/2E/Retro-clone parlance) an AC of 12 is pretty similar to Armor 1 in Cairn Hit Die and Hit Protection can pretty much convert 1-to-1 and so on and so forth.

Spoilers for Winter's Daughter

I had, same as the last time I ran Winter's Daughter, elected to have the players be tomb robbers. The hook with being hired by a wizard to raid a tomb is too good to pass up. If the players manage to be the bad guys (they never have) they steal the ring from the tomb and then they will be kicking off future adeventure hooks. The ring will haunt whoever has it if it is removed from the tomb and not brought to Fairy to give to Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk. The Magician (they recommend Mostlemyre Drouge of Prigwort (in the Dolmenwood Campaign Book)) will obviously be pissed at the player's for giving him a cursed ring. He can then show up later to hassle or otherwise mess with the players, leading to wonderful drama and rivalry through the campaign.

The players ended up getting pretty spooked by the Drune stone circle but quickly moved on to the burial mound. They explored around it and found the "worm hole". They elected to take it as an entrance and quickly dispatched the worms with minimal issues. They then proceeded to loot the whole room, not leaving a single stone unturned. Easily finding the first clue for one of the dog names.

The player's immediately abandoned their original mission to steal the ring upon meeting the ghost of Sir Chyde and accepted his quest. They blasted through another worm fight and made it to the room with the mirror. Without hesistation one of the players checked themselves out in the mirror and they were frozen. Continuing this "speed-run" mantra they just dragged him along into Fairy, and upon entering sunlight he unfroze so they were quick to solve that issue without any help.

They got the knight encounter on the frozen lake. They proceeded to murder him and take his invitation. I like the knight encounter because, again if this was going to be more than a one-shot I would have the knight go inform the Cold Prince of Mortals being able to freely travel into Fairy and kick off that thread for further adventure. Dolmenwood is packed to the brim full of possibilities like this.

I had the goblin and troll frustrate them by requiring they eat mushrooms to gain entry anyway. One player cleverly faked eating a mushroom by doing a sleight of hand trick with a handful of mushrooms he already had (Cairn background thing where his character was addicted to these mushrooms and had a bunch).

The other players ended up with: Eyes on their Hands, Purple Skin, and the 10 feet of Hair Growth. All silly, they had fun with it.

And then the adventure is over. They return the ring, attend the wedding, reuniting the lovers, and getting rewarded. Winter's Daughter is my favorite of the Dolmenwood adventures and is a fantastic intro to TTRPG's in general in my opinion. Bravo, Gavin.

Conclusion

Everyone enjoyed playing Cairn. I definitely find that it gets out of the way and allows players to follow the principles of play rather easily. Compared to DnD (even OSR/Retroclones, let alone 5.5e/2024 Dnd) where you can have 3+ different choices to make per turn, per player, per round of combat (and the fact the game seems to be so combat focused by default), Cairn is so much more straightforward. There was a mix of experienced (not with Cairn) TTRPG players and brand new players at the table and everyone seemed to mostly get along well with the game, not being tripped up by the different rules. With being able to essentially keep the rules all in my head, I rarely had to stop and read anything that was not from the module.

I would say that Chris McDowel, Yochai Gal, and the many creators and wonderful invididuals part of the Cairn "community" have cultivated a style of play that really resonants with me and is clearly a success. I hope to have years of play ahead of me with Cairn and certainly will be keeping an eye out on any of the other hacks of Into the Odd or Cairn that are out there.

5 Columbo Cigars out of 5. Check out Cairn!