Cairn

Cairn is a classless, rules-light adventure game about exploring a dark and mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. Character generation is quick and random, adventures are tense and reward careful exploration, and combat is frantic and deadly. Cairn was written by Yochai Gal, drawing on the Into the Odd lineage of OSR design.

A character’s role or skills are not limited by a class. Instead, the equipment they carry and their experiences define their specialty. Death is always around the corner, but it is never random or without warning: the game favours fiction-first resolution over dice for difficulty, and reserves rolls for genuinely risky moments.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Attribution: Cairn is created by Yochai Gal and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Source: github.com/yochaigal/cairn.

Player’s Guide

• Overview & Principles — Neutrality, classlessness, death, fiction-first play, growth, player choice, and the principles that guide both players and the Warden
• Core Rules — Attributes, saves, healing, deprivation and fatigue, armor, reactions, morale, hirelings, combat, scars, and magic
• Character Creation — Backgrounds, attributes, hit protection, inventory, character traits, bonds, and omens
• Procedures — Dungeon exploration, wilderness exploration, travel, weather, downtime actions
• Marketplace — Armor, weapons, transport, upkeep, hirelings, and gear prices

Warden’s Guide

• Saves & Perception — When and how to call for a save, worked examples for STR/DEX/WIL/opposed/aiding-an-ally saves, and how to handle character knowledge and perception
• Combat & Difficulty — Running combat and detachments at the table, and calibrating variable difficulty on the fly, with full worked examples
• Exploration & Pointcrawls — Dungeon exploration and wilderness exploration procedures, and converting a map into a pointcrawl
• Growth — The Triggers framework for character growth, with eight worked examples
• Creating Content — Designing new Backgrounds and Monsters, the meaning of Bonds and Omens, and the example party referenced throughout this guide
• Naming Procedures — Formulas for naming settlements, factions, realms, and forests
• Dungeon Seeds — Principles and a full random-generation procedure for building dungeons, with a worked example (The Fractured Temple)
• Forest Seeds — Forestcrawl exploration and a full random-generation procedure for building forests, with a worked example
• Setting Seeds — Building a region’s people, factions, terrain, weather, points of interest, and paths
• Bibliography — Design influences and further reading credited by the original text
• Character Sheet — Blank character sheet (printable) with interactive generator

Structured Tables

Machine-readable JSON for all procedural generation tables. See the tables index for the full list and schema.

Entities:

• backgrounds.json — 20 Backgrounds with names, starting gear, and roll tables
• bestiary.json — 84 monsters with HP, armor, stats, attacks, and traits
• spellbooks.json — 100 Spellbooks with effects and mundane effects
• reliquary.json — 46 Relics with uses and recharge conditions

Roll Tables:

• naming-tables.json — formulas and word lists for settlements, factions, realms, forests
• npc-tables.json — quick NPC generation (traits, quirks, motivation)
• monster-creation-tables.json — appearance, traits, attacks, abilities combinators
• dungeon-seeds-tables.json — purpose, construction, denizens, room stocking (monster/lore/special/trap)
• forest-seeds-tables.json — description, trails, POIs, encounters
• setting-seeds-tables.json — culture, factions, terrain, weather, paths