Where Are My Games At?
I recently read a post on Meeting a Game Where It's At by Dungeon Merlin—The RootRing Random button continues to bless me—and it made me pause to think about which games I'm playing and what their intended goals are, so to speak.
I'm mainly playing two games these days: Cairn, and a bastardized b/x Wolves Upon the Coast hack that I've really been enjoying.
Cairn
So where is Cairn? It bills itself as a game designed to run fantasy OSR modules with the simple fiction-first focus of an odd-like, and I think it achieves that.
But let's dig a little deeper. What's the flow of play? What are the broad structures that Cairn assumes or flat-out states that really make it sing?
Is This Scooby Doo?
I mean this with the utmost respect. I can't count the many evenings I spent in front of the TV trying to guess who the criminal was before the gang unmasked them with their antics.
The gang was always the same, but the situations were rarely connected, and no over-arching narrative emerged.
Cairn assumes the "Cities" are a rather unimportant area from which the PCs originate. The real adventure is out in the woods, and play tends to be episodic. The gang explores an area, engages with it to solve its mystery, and (unlike the gang from Scooby Doo) emerges a little changed by their time in the dark (if they emerge at all). Then they return to the cities, heal and pursue downtime actions, and wait for the next call to go into the woods.
While folks can and do play more epic games using Cairn, I think it really thrives in short, flavorful, dangerous mysteries.
To illustrate my point, the Cairn Adventure Series published by Yochai Gal himself includes Trouble in Twin Lakes, Rise of the Blood Olms, The Feast of Tegny Woods, and the upcoming The Forgetting of Lockwood Manor. Short, flavorful, dangerous mysteries.
And it's fun!
One more illustration to add to this is the way the Cairn Warden's Guide does region creation. Simply put, the warden rolls a bunch of d6 on a blank sheet of paper and adds points of interest where they landed. Then routes are created between those points.
It works!
Notably, however, this means that an adventuring region is sparse. That's completely fine if the focus is on moving to the short, interesting mysteries and focusing on the dungeon crawling or forest crawling, etc. But that's not the only way to play a game.
Songs Unsung
The hack that I'm currently putting together is mechanically a classless game with strong backgrounds and Wolves Upon The Coast style progression.
On the Referee side, the procedures are largely about inventing large-scale conflicts, stocking hexes, and maintaining a living calendar.
Suffice it to say the focus is very different. This game is more about discovering how the characters tip the balance in a dangerous world, how they act in a world gone mad, and the legends they leave behind.
Similarly to Dungeon Merlin's comments on Mythic Bastionland, you could say this game aims to invent a history. And thinking about that, it might be very fitting to include some procedures for seasons and ages passing...