New School Revolution

Turning the Dial

Nerds love taxonomy; it gives order to the world, and provides a meaningful sense of control. Of course, it's all an illusion. At best taxonomy is a useful tool, and at worst it makes things too concrete, too immutable. It's a flashlight, not a prison!

Still, I wanted to dip a toe into RPG theory for a moment. I promise I’ll pay the Joesky Tax at the end!

Inspired by posts like this one by edmocat, I’ve been thinking about play styles inside the OSR, and how those styles collide (and remix) in surprising ways.

First: hacking games is fine. It’s good, even. It’s how we got here in the first place! Cairn is a hack of Knave and Into the Odd, which are themselves hacks of OD&D and B/X, which are themselves variants of Dungeons & Dragons. So in a certain sense, Cairn is D&D.

Over the years though, I’ve noticed a pattern.

People find Cairn, admit to liking something about it, and then proceed to change the mechanics to fit their preferred play style. Sometimes they do this without ever having played it. Other times they play it for a while and then discover it doesn’t work for their group… so they start making major tweaks.

This post isn’t aimed at the first group. I’m not interested in gatekeeping anyone’s fun, but I do think hacking a game before you’ve experienced it RAW is usually just hacking your assumptions.

Playing rules-as-written isn’t obedience. It’s literacy. It’s the only way to understand what pressures the design creates, what it emphasizes, and what it leaves intentionally unsupported. If you don’t play it first, you can’t really say what you’re changing, because you haven’t yet seen what the original is doing. Plus, if you understand what you're hacking, your work will improve as well. You'll make better hacks!

Even so: let's set that group aside.

The target of this post is the second group, the people who have actually played Cairn and then decide to reshape it substantially into something else.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But it illustrates something about play culture that I find genuinely fascinating, and honestly a little hard to describe.

Here is the pattern: people will arrive at Cairn because they’re hungry for something different… and then, almost by reflex, they pull it back toward D&D.

Dials

Imagine you’re a fan of games like 5e, Pathfinder, Labyrinth Lord, OSE, Shadowdark, and so on. What connects these kinds of games? They are not all the same style of game. But they do share a common relationship with mechanics. These games are full of dials. I don’t mean “rules-heavy” or “crunchy” as an insult, and I don’t mean “rules-lite” as praise.

For some, RPGs are enjoyed primarily as engineered systems. Not in the sense that they want to exploit loopholes, but in the sense that interacting with the machinery is the fun. For this group, mechanics are like dials, each offering discrete choices, builds, optimization, and progression that’s explicitly measured. They like the feeling that the game will “catch them” if something goes wrong. They like clear scaffolding around play. For them, rules aren’t just a framework. They are the most important aspect of play.

And to be clear: dials are a spectrum. You can find love of dials even in the most minimalist of games. All it takes is a single knob that matters. In fact... I actually like dials. I like being a grubby little guy with a limited-but-abstract inventory, weak defenses, and a hard ceiling on how durable I can become. I think there is fun in the rules. But for me, the fun isn’t in turning those dials. The fun is pushing against the limits that those dials can create.

The fun is in driving the car, in seeing how far I can take it!

I want the experience of play that emerges from pressure, uncertainty, and immersion in the fiction. I enjoy rules that create constraints, where the center of play is in facing unusual situations and overcome problems. For me, the focus of play is the world itself.

Cairn was built to support a particular kind of experience that I felt was under-served at the time, at least for me. But that experience isn’t found in advancement ladders, tactical character builds, and long-term power growth. It’s found in:

So what fascinates me is when someone plays Cairn, likes it, and then says something like:

"...we're looking at how we could bring this game a little closer to the expectations of people who might otherwise ask me to play an Official Brand Product or an old school retro-clone... so we're adding in Levels..."

Or:

"There's an added upside to Levels in terms of baking-in some additional resilience for player-characters of a long form campaign game, but the goal shouldn't be to break Cairn's lethality."

The specifics aren’t important. It doesn’t have to be levels. It could be:

What matters is the direction of the gravitational pull. Because Cairn isn’t short on support. It’s short on assurance.

A lot of these hacks aren’t really solving a play problem, like “we played for 30 sessions and ran into X friction.” They’re solving a cultural discomfort problem.

They’re attempts to make Cairn feel more legible to D&D expectations. To make it feel familiar. To make it feel safer. To make it feel like you can play “a campaign” the way your brain thinks campaigns are supposed to work.

It’s less “this dial would be fun,” and more “this dial should exist.”

It suggests that for a lot of people, the desire for dials is only matched by their desire for a certain aesthetic reassurance: it has to feel like D&D: six stats, AC, to-hit rolls, classes, and so on. More buttons to push! And for some, safety rails.

And look, I get it. That’s a coherent taste. It’s a whole culture. It’s also very well served!

But Cairn isn’t trying to be “D&D, but better.” It isn’t trying to be “B/X, but streamlined.” It isn’t trying to be a universal chassis that can meet every preference halfway.

So if you play Cairn and immediately start rebuilding the engine to make it more like D&D, I’m not here to stop you.

But if you want to turn dials, you deserve a game full of them! And Cairn isn't really that game.

Tax

As promised, here is a table of gameable material.

d6 Lawyers You Meet in the Underworld

d6 Name Speciality
1 The Advocate of Ash Fingertips stained with soot-black ink, they can quote any contract ever burned and demand signatures in cinders. Calm, inquisitorial, asks questions that feel like opening locks inside your ribs.
2 The Barrister of Irrelevant Citations Speaks only in irrelevant precedents, each case-law reference clinking like dragging chains. Kindly, grandfatherly, delighted by other people’s misfortune in an academic way.
3 The Widow’s Solicitor Veiled, gentle-voiced, and terrifyingly precise; specializes in promises made over fresh corpses. When they speak, a choir of unseen clerks murmurs citations in harmony.
4 The Grammar Tax Lawyer Collects “fees” in words, cross-examining until you speak yourself into silence. Eats documents to “understand” them; the louder the crunch, the more binding the clause.
5 Beatified Defense Counsel Defends the newly dead in trials of moral accounting, arguing mitigating circumstances and systemic cruelty. Refuses payment, but requires a penance: you must publicly confess the most convenient lie you ever told.
6 Mouthpiece of Appeals A tall figure wrapped in bandages of legal vellum. Their mouth is a slit filled with teeth like staples. Every appeal they file requires a “filing fee” taken in memories. They’ll politely ask which year you can live without.