Running Cairn for My Kids
Introduction
I've started a Cairn campaign using Dogtooth Valley by Nate Treme of the Highland Paranormal Society and some house rules I have been cooking up specifically for kids. I almost didn't, and in fact I've been putting off running a game for my kids for a long time. This is, of course, despite the fact that I have run Cairn for a bunch of kids at this point.
This post is a little bit of a confession about my TTRPG design tendencies, a little bit of play report, and perhaps a bit of review of Dogtooth Valley as well.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, read on.
My Hesitations
I'll start by saying that I put off running a game for my kids for a while. Some of it was that I was busy with other TTRPG projects and the general stress of work and life, but mostly the issue was that I was hesitant to push my hobby on them for fear they wouldn't like it. However, even when my kids expressed interest, there was still the matter of deciding what to run.
It shows you how deep in the weeds of this hobby I am that I did not consider the possibility of running one of the myriad modules or systems I already own for them.
I began tinkering with rules hacks, pondering how I might craft the perfect bespoke adventure module for them, etc. Sure, I have a ton of practice running games for kids, but these are my kids, you know? The stakes are so much higher if they don't like it. The truth is, I could easily spend months in this state if I give into this tendency to tinker and iterate.
Recently, however, I realized I was being foolish. My first experience with TTRPGs certainly wasn't perfect, and that didn't stop me from dedicating a whole bunch of time and brain-space to it. Ultimately, my kids just wanted to spend time with me and experience my favorite hobby for themselves.
So I swallowed both my pride and apprehension, slapped together my rules hack into a coherent enough shape to run them through character creation, printed out a hexmap and did a little doodling, put a little character sheet together, and we sat down and got the show on the road.
Module Setup, Character Creation, and Hooks
I went with Dogtooth Valley because it is a sandbox with a central base surrounded by a bunch of different dungeons that looked like they could be completed in one session. Also, Nate's modules always have a whimsical vibe that I think kids can appreciate. My goal was to resist the urge to revise the contents of the module as much as possible. I even fought off the urge to convert the hexcrawl to a pointcrawl, but I did place terrain in some of the hexes of their hexmap to let them make some informed choices and also placed a river because I felt like it.
I'm not going to go into any sort of detail regarding my rules variations just yet, but I used Cairn Barebones Edition for the chassis of character creation because it is quick and flexible. After briefly going over player principles, I explained that they were young people who had paused their apprenticeships to go on an adventuring sabbatical as a rite of passage and we started the session with them at the outpost.
I gave them the hook about looking for "Dwerven" artifacts that is suggested in the module, but a rumor they heard in the tavern about a "witch in the swamp" and the promise of a hefty reward for finding out who desecrated the local graveyard meant that they quickly had three potential avenues for adventure. They ended up going with the graveyard, no doubt helped by the paint droplets that helpfully led them two hexes over to the Necromancer's Mound.
Session 1
This was a really fun little starter dungeon, and I appreciate that Nate put his thumb on the scale to try and make sure players would go there first. It's got traps, treasure, a secret passage, the works. My kids ran into their first problem when they realized they both had started with 2-handed weapons (a Bow and Longsword respectively) and so no one had an easy way to hold a torch. They quickly invented a little procedure where my son's character (the person with the Bow) would cover them at all times while my daughter's character would carry the torch but place it in a sconce whenever they thought she would need her Longsword.
It was very interesting to see my kids act as OSR players in ways that differ from their normal behavior. My son was very cautious as a player, using his Bow as a method of setting off traps from a distance. In real life he's very energetic and not at all as cautious as his fictional counterpart. Meanwhile, my daughter is a very thoughtful and deliberate person in real life, but spent the whole session mercilessly destroying anything standing in her way through bold action. They ended up capturing the Necromancer, though he likely would have ended up dead had my son not pointed out that the post man that had hired them might want the foul sorcerer alive. My daughter, when threatened by the necromancer with the glowing green hand, initially wanted to chop his arm off to nullify the threat. Truly, she would make Conan proud.
They ended the session returning to town and turning the Necromancer and missing skeletons in for the reward money. I was left with the task of figuring out exactly what the General Store sold, since I knew they'd want to spend their hard-earned gold next session.
Session 2
They started with a little shopping, buying more armor and some weapons that gave them more flexibility. While shopping, they heard a rumor about coyote bandits and hired a tracker to help find the keep they were based out of.
After they found the keep, I let them know that the amount of foot traffic they see in the dirt suggests a decent amount of bandits, so they went back to town and hired a mercenary. Smart.
Retracing their steps, they entered the Coyote keep and began exploring. They were stymied by a locked door, but then another pathway led to an encounter with their first Coyote bandit. My son quickly bribed said bandit to leave and not give them away to the others.
They crept past two other sleeping in another room, stole a bunch of their stuff in a storeroom, but then walked right into the throne room where the bandit leader was hanging out with 4 of his minions.
A quick Reaction roll determined the bandit leader was curious. My son tried his same tactic of bribing, but the bandit leader turned it around on him and demanded an exorbitant toll of 50 gold pieces for trespassing in his domain, which he doubled to 100 when my daughter refused to play along. My son actually agreed to the amount, which he later explained was because they had stolen the money from the bandit's storeroom in the first place, but the bandit leader then asked them to leave in a menacing manner.
My daughter, however, had spotted some keys dangling from the leader's neck. Not letting a little thing like being outnumbered stop her, she marched over to their leader and attempted to snatch the keys off his neck.
Naturally, this led to things getting violent.
The fight was initially rough, with my daughter's character quickly discovering the dangers of letting herself be surrounded. Luckily, she managed to defeat the leader which lead to two of the coyote bandits failing Morale and fleeing. My son, rather than help his sister finish off the rest of her opponents, opted to shoot one of the fleeing coyotes in the back and chase the other one through the rest of the keep.
After wrapping things up in the throne room, my daughter and the bodyguard they hired had to come to my son's rescue as he found himself suddenly outnumbered when the fleeing coyote managed to wake his two sleeping compatriots. The second clash of arms was brief but brutal, with their hireling nearly succumbing to his wounds, but in the end they were victorious.
They ended their session freeing both a fairy and a dragon, which certainly won't have any consequences moving forward, and returning to town to lick their wounds.
Critiques
I'll start with my own performance as a Warden. I made a few missteps in the 2nd session. My biggest one, I think, was not determining why they were seeking out the bandits. I honestly assumed, given that their was no reward attached to the rumor, that they were intending to kill or capture the bandits and bring them to justice. In actuality, I think they were interested in finding locations to explore and the bandits merely acted as an obstacle for this objective. If I could go back, I would have had the bandit leader offer to hire them to undermine the Outpost rather than nudge the interaction towards a confrontation. The relationship would have soured the moment they realized their storeroom had been sacked by the PCs, but it would have better honored my son's intentions.
So far, my kids have been pretty clever with the use of their weapons and the hiring of henchmen when appropriate, but I regret not putting my thumb on the problem-solving scale a bit more by ensuring they started with items that encourage more lateral thinking. My son is very fond of checking for traps with his Bow, but my daughter seems fond of solving problems with her Longsword. It's hard to say how much of this is the result of her natural tendencies as a player and how much is a consequence of starting with a d10 weapon.
I also think both of my kids are under the impression they can "100%" Dogtooth Valley, like their mom has taught them to do with video games. Gentle Reader, I must carefully disabuse them of this notion.
As for Dogtooth Valley itself, I like it a lot but I want more from it. I think some of my demands are more reasonable than others.
My most reasonable complaint is that that in some of the dungeon keys you might find that there is undefined "treasure" that you have to roll for in a second section of the book. I find this irritating when you could just place an actual item there and then still have a random treasure table for when you unexpectedly need a piece of treasure. Worse, these items are not given a gp value, so my players can't really decide what they should keep around and what they should discard and I have to eventually decide what they will bring at the marketplace.
My unreasonable complaints relate to the nature of the hexcrawl and the lack of interconnectivity.
The hexes are mostly empty, and there's no procedure for traversing them besides rolling for a random encounter every time you enter one. Sure, you can borrow procedures from your system of choice, as I did when I reached for Yochai's Cairn-compatible Hexcrawling rules, but the actual experience of exploration is akin to going from one empty room to the next until you stumble upon a location worth exploring. It would have ballooned Nate's tiny A6 zine to an incredible size to address this issue to my satisfaction, but I think exploration would feel a lot better as a result.
Meanwhile, the locations themselves are often fun but their contents feel largely isolated from each other. This is a strength as far as pulling them out of the book and using them in other settings, but I find myself wishing that the items and monsters present felt a little bit more of the same place. Even the actions my kids took in freeing the fairy and mud dragon ultimately don't amount to much besides adding the fairy to the random encounter table and making a location in a swamp hex much more potentially dangerous if they manage to stumble upon it.
As I already admitted, these are not reasonable complaints on my part given what Nate was trying to accomplish here, but they are things that I myself plan to address for my own personal satisfaction.
Conclusions
My kids and I had a lot of fun! We have conversations on the way to school about what they want to do next. My plan now is to tweak some of the unexplored locations to have a bit more connective tissue, nail down the treasure, and plop a few more locations on the hexmap for them to uncover.
Maybe Barrow of the Elf King will become Tomb of the Turtle Knight.
I also think it's time they see some real impact from their actions. So far, their major acts have been to capture a necromancer, destroy half of a bandit group, and free a fairy and mud dragon. I think some of these things merit more positive impact than is currently written into the module, but it occurs to me that a recently vacated necromancer's mound might be of use to a bandit group that may feel the need to abandon the keep that they find most of their compatriots dead in.
Time will tell whether they discover the party is responsible and what they will do about it.