A low barrier to entry TTRPG

July 30, 2023 5:41 AM

With a freely downloadable, compact ruleset, fast character creation and narratively focused gameplay, Cairn is a low barrier to entry table-top roleplaying game. It's derived from Chris McDowall's Into the Odd and Ben Milton's Knave and is a prime example of the emerging NSR scene. Several dedicated adventures have been produced by the game's enthusiasts. Popular starters include Tannic and Barrow of the Elf King. Alternatively, there's a growing list of conversions of classic OSR modules. Most recently, creator Yochai-Gal has recently made available a playtest of the game's second edition, meaning that there's never been a better time to get on board with the Cairn community.
posted by lovelyzoo (17 comments total)

Disclaimer: I have written two of the conversions listed in the link above.

These are hobbyist, rather than commercial, contributions.
posted by lovelyzoo at 5:45 AM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I needed some help on the acronyms:

OSR == Old School Renaissance or Old School Revival or Old School Rules (wikipedia link)

NSR == New School Revolution (link)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:03 AM on July 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

What is the New School Revolution? Part 1.

NSR games have:

• A GM
• A Weird Setting
• A Living World

are:

• Rules lite
• Deadly

and focus on:

• Emergent Narrative
• External Interaction
• Exploration

posted by glonous keming at 6:54 AM on July 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Probably the best way to get to grips with what the term NSR refers to is to watch this actual play of Cairn.
posted by lovelyzoo at 7:12 AM on July 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you like having hard copies, the online games store Exalted Funeral is having a 20% off sale right now: Tannic, other Cairn games (be sure to grab the sale's freebies).
posted by icebergs at 9:34 AM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

It seems like Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold fit this classification. They are fun to play and run. Trophy Dark is for one-shots and follows a group of doomed adventures deeper and deeper into the horrifying setting, while Trophy Gold aims for an OSR-lite experience with messy characters trying to stay ahead of financial, physical, and spiritual Ruin. Build on Cthulhu Dark.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:51 AM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd always assumed NSR had less to do with an aesthetic shift from OSR than it does with an attempt to consciously distance itself from some OSR stars' crappy politics. I can't say the bullet pointed list by pandatheist makes me think much differently.

Which is fine! I love this stuff, and I extra love it if the creators are good people.
posted by HeroZero at 11:44 AM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Huh I haven't heard of this branch of the OSR being called the NSR before. I suppose Mausritter belongs there too.

I find the "class = inventory" slot stuff a little too fake for me, though I like it in Mausritter because of the inherent fakeness: your cute little mouse really can't carry that much.

I'd always assumed NSR had less to do with an aesthetic shift from OSR

Possibly because the "weird horror" part of the OSR is most adjacent to those folks you linked to.
posted by fleacircus at 12:46 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

>Possibly because the "weird horror" part of the OSR is most adjacent to those folks you linked to.

The less savoury aspects of the OSR community is utterly unrelated to the weird horror genre. It's mostly an (rpg) conservative reaction against the (rpg) liberal indie rpg scene of the late 90s and early 2000s (loosely centred around Gaming Outpost and then The Forge).

See there was an explosion of small, innovative/gimmicky RPGs that deliberately tried to buck conventions and explore new ways of doing things, and attempting to find new ways to think and talk about RPGs. And there were a handful of loud, shrill internet voices who found an audience by loudly shitting on this indie scene as artsy fartsy nonsense. Anti-feminist anti-PC right-wing asshats, parroting the fashy argument against modern art pretty much note for note.

When the OSR scene kicked off, it was (initially) everything these arseholes said they wanted. And a lot of the initial OSR creators and players were new blood with no history in online RPG discourse. So these arseholes with all their followers hitched their wagon to a train who didn't know any better. Not to mention the appeal of "rejecting modernity and embracing tradition" to your traditional fashy type.

Early on, a lot of the left-wing RPG scene was very sceptical of the OSR movement because it was home to these known malefactors. Fortunately it's since grown far beyond that and even produces exactly the sort of game designs that used to upset these unnamed-asshats so much.
posted by Lorc at 1:59 PM on July 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'd always assumed NSR had less to do with an aesthetic shift from OSR than it does with an attempt to consciously distance itself from some OSR stars' crappy politics.

I remember a couple years back where Ben Milton was running around various RPG subreddits defending Raggi and Smith so I'm not convinced there's much distance from their politics in the NSR.
posted by haileris23 at 2:33 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Can't speak for Milton but I spend a considerable chunk of my time on the NSR Discord and I'm very convinced that there is a considerable distance between participants there and the sorts that Lorc mentions.
posted by lovelyzoo at 3:00 PM on July 30, 2023

The less savoury aspects of the OSR community is utterly unrelated to the weird horror genre.

That is the genre Raggi and Smith mostly operated under.

I'm not saying that MORK BORG or ItO are tainted (afiak) in the way that Stuart's stuff is tainted by direct touch, but it's still shoulder-to-shoulder by genre.

And a lot of the initial OSR creators and players were new blood with no history in online RPG discourse.

Hmmmm I think the proportion of "new blood" compared to today was minuscule but who can say.

To be clear: the OSR was not a reaction to the FORGE; it was a reaction against mainstream TTRPG play, just like the FORGE had been. The OSR rejected the FORGE along the way; it mocked it, but it wasn't in any meaningful sense about it.

Sure, Zak hated the FORGE, but I think his main problem with it was that it had been a cult-like avant garde space that hadn't been centered around him. And he wasn't a fascist -- aggravatingly, to the degree he had real politics, he was an anarchist. Raggi was a reactionary but mostly just a shit-stirring troll, he didn't care about the FORGE, and while noxious, was not much of a thought leader. The actual most prominent fascist-type, RPGpundit, wasn't influential, nor was he into the weird horror part.

Your story doesn't really fit what I have seen.

Also there is still a lot of crusty old anti-SJW syle grognard reaction in the OSR -- ironically I think you are letting a lot of people off too easy. It would be interesting to compare the OSR other geek-culture reactionary spasms like GG or the Puppies. I think, strangely, it could be argued that Smith's antics channeled a lot of bad energy away from anti-wokeness, into his weird cult of personality shit, which prevented true reactionaries from taking control. Then in a vulnerable moment (post G+, pre-Discord) his victims exploded him, and the OSR too. God bless them, everyone was free.

The current status is that the biggest OSR discord (which was originally the ItO discord) still has a pride icon up and has a lot of queer and leftist voices.
posted by fleacircus at 11:20 PM on July 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

No disagreement. The OSR itself was definitely not a reaction to the forge. I just mean that some of the domineering personalities who sunk their fangs into it at the start were personally. I'd argue that their favourite genre of fantasy didn't really play into it but I understand now that that wasn't really the point you were making.

I think what really saved the OSR from the poison was the late influx of players from the rpg streaming boom. The reactionaries have been practically drowned out by the new generation of excited young creatives and artists.
posted by Lorc at 12:31 AM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

The hate the forge generates always surprises me. It was a bunch of people interested in RPG design who felt that most designs of the time left them wanting something more in play. The rules got in the way of the goals of the designers or the players, and much of that was because there were so many unwritten assumptions of what a RPG was. So there was some pushing at the boundaries that look a little silly. That's what questioning a system leads to. You can't define something without sometimes trying things that, in retrospect, clearly aren't. It wasn't a cult, it was a bunch of people geeking out about design.
posted by aspo at 12:36 AM on July 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Emergent Narrative

This is glorious. So much RPG gaming is a plodding and static meander through some GM's static headspace, taking player buy-in for granted and doing nothing interesting with it. Emergent narrative means the living stuff that happens at the table is the key part, not the dead stuff in the text.

The hate the forge generates

I think some of the heat around the Forge can be attributed to Ron Edwards' disinterest in making his work and thinking accessible to the mainstream -- the place was cryptic as all hell and demanded a huge amount of buy-in from its participants. Edwards' cavalier use of the term "brain damage" didn't help either, not with the hypersensitive nerds of the day.

For me, I decided that the best way to experience the Forge was to ignore the forums and enjoy the games that sprouted from it, many of which are quite good.
posted by Sauce Trough at 10:33 AM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Been thinking about this all day. Damn I miss the discussions that were happening at the forge at it's height.
posted by aspo at 3:43 PM on July 31, 2023

The best thing that ever happened to my gaming life was when one of my friends finally wore me down and we switched our game night from D&D 4e to Dungeon World. The shift in attitude from, like sauce trough said, a trip through the GM's world to all of us playing together to find out what happens was so wild.

Not to mention that it freed up hours of my time as a GM because collaborative planning and leaving most of my map blank meant that i can use my prep time for fun stuff.

The only drawback for me was that i don't have as much excuse to have copies of The Monster Manual on the bookshelf.
posted by Naib at 7:25 AM on August 1, 2023 [2 favorites]