Post-mortem: Cairn 2e fortnightly game

26 Apr, 2026

A couple months ago, I proposed to some friends that we start a fortnightly Cairn game, with 3-ish hour sessions. I'm generally used to games with more time in-between sessions (and longer sessions as well), so I thought I'd try something different and see if I could make it work. It was also the first time in a long while¹ in which I ran something where I was actually creating the game world and not running some sort of scenario or module.

Long story short, the campaign died in three sessions due to (say it with me, class!) scheduling issues, but they were pretty fun! I'm not going to go over things in a play report sort of way since I don't enjoy reading or writing that, but I think it's worth my time to list some of the main takeaways from this short game.

• As I mentioned in a previous post, actually creating a world and all that is a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm going to do it again so soon. Cairn has awesome tools and procedures to do that, but I'd much rather read the work of a more competent worldbuilder than me, bring it to life and see the players wreck it.
• Character creation is a lot more fun in campaigns than in one-shots. Having the players' interesting items and bonds gave me a lot to work with, both while prepping and during play. For future one-shots, I might use the Cairn Barebones.
• Speaking about prep, given the overloaded encounter dice, I feel like I needed to stock dungeon and forest locations with more stuff than I did. The procedures did create interesting spaces, but I should have built upon them more with setpieces, not just the general vibe. I often found myself stumbling when trying to create environment changes, so maybe that would have been a way to deal with it.
• I think in one of the forest tables there was a Moss Knight and I was like "wait, I know that guy". So I rolled a Moss Knight from Mythic Bastionland and put him there. The players were very keen to find out who actually knighted the Moss Knight, but I didn't want to get a Seer from Mythic Bastionland as well, so I figured a Lichen Queen² would make sense.
  • This will be from now on my textbook example of how reading a lot of ttrpg books is good for your games even if you don't end up playing them all.
• I ended up de-proceduralizing a bit of what the players can do in their turns, instead of listing the Wilderness or Dungeon Actions, just describing the actions diegetically according to the location and always making clear that those weren't the only options. This came from both an interest of mine in having less verb-based gameplay and an interest of the players in not reading the rulebook.
  • I would, ideally, like players to read the rulebook. I'd love not to have to list the actions and just describe the surroundings to players who are aware that they can either interact with the fiction or go for a proceduralized action from the rulebook. But oh well.
• I feel like in exploration games such as Cairn, I should do more "location" random encounters. It really shows how ingrained some things are, that even though I'm very far from a "traditional fantasy ttrpg player", for some reason all of my random encounters were creatures - or people - in situations. What if they encounter an interesting statue randomly? A crater with signs of a huge explosion? A beanstalk that leads to a sky dungeon?
• Due to the three hour sessions, we never ended up in a place where downtime procedures made sense (generally inside the Forest or a dungeon, or in some kind of cliffhanger). I feel like I should have tried to shove them in somehow, maybe making downtime flashbacks so players could start the next session with some new stuff to play with?

Well, those are the main things that come to mind. Cairn is a lot of fun, let's hope I get to play it again in the future.

anb

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