GM: Doug
Players: Sean Nittner, Katin, Lucas, Matt, and Aiden
System: Carin
Cairn is an adventure RPG in the tradition of older editions of D&D: it has few rules and emphasizes player creativity and agency. Rise of the Blood Olms is a one-shot adventure written for Cairn by its creator, Yochai Gal. The player characters will venture out to a newly-discovered cave system to try to learn what happened to a previous adventuring party.
Hired by the Order of Nine, Jax the Jongular, Nyx the Half-Witch, Hestia the Aurifix, Beauregard the Mountebank, and Joe Frost the Marchguard plumbed the depths of a new cave system to find High Lector Geleti and the Mud Sieve relic his party used to explore them.
We found a dying tree, a host of very regular bats, a terrified Jhel-Fries, a river spirit, mutated monsters, many different foul smells, several corpses that should have served as warnings but were ignored, rotting fruit, rotting fish, rotting corpses, and for a brief moment a murderous academic.
Joe Frost died as we all knew he would. Beauregard survived because Jax pulled him out of the flood, Hestia survived because Nyx saved him, though he didn’t deserve it with the way he treated his homunculus Percival, and Jhel-Fries escaped with the Mud Sieve, leaving us all penniless at the end. However, being granted the ability to breath underwater, we all eventually became a bit fishy and were content to spend our days destroying the dams that did so much harm to the land in the first place!
Really enjoyed the adventure, the characters, and the game system itself. Fighting is the wrong idea, exploration is key, and compassion does not make you a fool, though it might turn you into a fish. Thanks so much to Doug for running Carin, I’d definitely play it again.
