The Ravens Nest

First Impressions From The First Adventure.

Last night was quite the night. For a week, I knew this Memorial Day party was coming. Question is, was it going to be another Magic: The Gathering Commander Deck night, was this going to be the continuation of Alien RPG, HeroQuest again, perhaps even Risk?

I sent the message. We could do Alien RPG again or I could bring along something simpler that we could all play in a couple of hours.

Of course I was only telling a half-truth. I’d only gone back through my old games to find Cairn (Free PDF Here!) but I wanted to play it. They never did get back to me, so I did some digging through the folder of small adventures and found one I thought would be perfect; A Feast For Flies. I read through it. I loved it. It seemed simple enough and plenty of things to go randomly. I printed it, packed a few extras that I wasn’t sure that I’d use (I didn’t) and put it all in the bag. By 2pm, I was heading out the door.

I showed the booklet off among the people there who would be potentially playing. Only two people aside from myself had any experience with RPGs and out of the entire group, only one actually downloaded the free PDF.

Still, I had character sheets, dice and erasable pens for everyone. Once the food had been cleared away, it was time. I set the table to play but there were still snacks everywhere. One of us had to head out to walk the dogs. The remaining two, I had them sit down for character creation. In the middle of character creation, it was revolving door of people who needed to get up for various reasons.

This makes keeping track of who has what difficult. Still, we got character creation done.

Diving right in, I didn’t have a real plan for the town of Tiefenwalde. I didn’t have a map of the town, I just ruled that the party had been travelling together, entered the local Inn late in the night and managed to secure lodging before waking up and meeting downstairs in the tavern where the locals had gathered. They could tell, even though it was sunny outside, there was the metaphorical dark cloud over the townsfolk as though something troubled many of them collectively.

A young woman was berating a barmaid and one of the players said “What was her name again? Karen?” which garnered a nice laugh. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. Our Ranger approached the table of a sullen man and plopped a drink down in front of him to ask him about local rumors (didn’t bother introducing herself) and he barely said a word to her. Our Thief made a much better approach and got the full story instead. Meanwhile, the dwarf, wearing clothes that had been long-stained in blood got challenged by a local teenage edgelord to spend the night at the Barrow Mound because he looked like a teenager himself in order to truly prove his guile.

The rumor was that the local kids were sending other kids to a Barrow Mound outside of town as a test of nerve but the man at the table, Martin, a local ealdorman had a son who disappeared at the mound and was desperate for anyone to go and locate him. Upon comparing notes, our adventurers pooled what little gold they had and purchased a mule for some extra carrying capacity. Our Ranger also had a bloodhound as equipment, now netting our party with at least two animals.

Upon heading toward the Barrow Mound, they were met with a cloud of black flies all swooping and diving at them. Our dirty adventurers decided to fight them, making short work of them before the cloud of the remaining flies moved on and began terrorizing the town.

Let me be clear, the players heard this, shrugged and went, “Alright,” and continued to the mound.

Some of you know about the literary and movie device called foreshadowing, right?

So on to the mound they went. Having only three torches between them, I can tell you I was not as strict as I could be on this one…at first. Knowing those supplies were limited, I decided to bring the hammer down on this one. With only 25 pages of rules, yes, some things were initially hand-waived but the book did get multiple references with me wanting us to play as closely to the rules as possible. Each torch was only given one full hour after that. For that, I simply used the timer on my watch to count down from the moment the torch had been lit.

I’m also going to point out that all characters from start to finish were just randomly rolled save for the starting equipment packs. I let each of the players select a starting pack in order to take the guesswork out of it and rolling on the table, for some reason, had the tendency to just fill their packs a little prematurely and some didn’t even come with an honest-to-goodness weapon. There were no rules at all in the book concerning how long torches last and, by my rights as Warden (Cairn’s term for Game Master) I could have easily have hand-waived that but, I wanted to make this more of a challenge.

Another thing I hand-waived, movement. Let’s face it, there wasn’t much of an ability to track movement even with the map I’d printed of the Barrow Mound itself. I also wasn’t going to be super-pedantic about some things.

In fact, there was so much the rules didn’t cover. This can be a bit jarring if you’re not used to this type of system that leave so much of the complexity or lack thereof for some. For me, it was simple. Rule it and keep moving.

At present, I’m working on some dollar-store jenga blocks, repainting them and dolling them up to make dungeon walls that can be laid out as a dungeon is randomly rolled. What would I possibly use for something like that? Simple. The Basic Expert’s Blue Dungeon Generator & Geomorphs or even Tim Harper’s Murcanto’s Lair will absolutely work for something like this. No need to really raid another system unless I need something else.

As you will be able to tell, some of the things I brought, I didn’t even bother messing with during this adventure. For more homebrewed adventures and settings, that won’t be the case.

The desire to randomly roll and leave characters not knowing what to expect…produced results from cringeworthy to hilarious. This was a module that was supposed to lean into horror but, thanks to my rolling reactions to being a little pedantic at some points like entering a dark room with a torch, suddenly lighting braziers or making noise as they entered, my attempts to give the players something to think about, ended up making the creatures merely curious about them. In fact, the little hostility they ended up facing was a trap sprung by the second room. They lit the brazier, saw the body of young Robin, Martin’s son and realized that this is what killed him. He died on the way out of the area. So close, there, Robin…so close!

The insectoid goblins and the two large centipedes breeding behind a tapestry didn’t attack but regarded the adventuring party as though they were curious. The Insectoid orcs in one room regarded the adventurers differently. One of them was wary, another curious and the third was oddly helpful in terms of reactions to them. This is when Antonia, the young woman who was acting entitled was discovered following our adventurers.

Before that room, our adventurers made their way via a large drain into a secret room, bypassing the door in the next room altogether. They found a spellbook and took it then backtracked to the room where they ended up discovering the entitled Karen named Antonia following them.

Remember that foreshadowing thing? Yeah, well, the one who had some experience with RPGs of this sort was really overthinking things. So much so that Antonia and some other events were randomly rolled in order to keep things moving. Keep in mind these random rolls are meant to move things along but in a meaningful way. Meanwhile my reaction rolls and missed morale rolls on some of these beings, that didn’t contribute anything but leaning very heavily into more comical than horror territory. When I was out of these rolls, I was faced with a problem.

The players were seriously overthinking things and one of them even asked me “What should we do?”

Noooooooope.

I set a timer on my watch. I was gonna step out for a vape, use the men’s room and then, they had to make a decision. They had ten minutes to plan. Go!

**Ten Minutes Later**

I re-entered the room to hear the sounds I had hoped to hear.

“Okay, we’ve got a plan.” I was told. Thank goodness for that!

The plan was to use pieces of torch cloth wrapped around a damaged arrow that had been recovered (another area that I became a little pedantic on allotting only 10 arrows to the Ranger) and turn it into a torch arrow and try to hit the last brazier. There were spikes in the ceiling and this would be a shot from the secret door which they’d managed to open.

The first shot failed but the second one hit the mark. Gravity reversed, sending the insectoid orcs and Antonia straight up into the spikes on the ceiling.

I know what you’re thinking, reader. They Killed An Innocent Girl!

Ummmm, nope. Antonia had sent Robin into the mound to steal a necklace from a statue of a demon named H’thlux. He did. This resurrected H’thlux from his grave only for him to find out that he’d been betrayed and Orcus had selected his Lieutenant for the title of Demon Lord. Robin had been killed trying to escape with the necklace, still clutching a love letter to Antonia. Antonia heard Robin scream and then she marched in, took the necklace and that is why her entire town was now being terrorized by the flies that H’thlux was sending in his quest for revenge.

Our adventurers were now in the Crypt of H’thlux and faced with him, however, H’thlux was attempting to contact Orcus, demanding to know why he’d been passed up for promotion as it were. Our adventurers had the jump on him and began attacking. H’thlux really only had two attacks and they were weak as hell. They finished him off after he’d reversed gravity again, grounding everyone. He never got the chance to use the coat he was wearing which itself was a cloud of flies that were around him.

The party then dropped themselves back into the room from whence they came, making their way back. They had found a few items of treasure, one of them being the sword, Orcus’ Shard and the necklace that Antonia refused to give back.

Going back into Room 2, they went for the treasure chest on the ceiling using the spellbook. The same player took another point of fatigue after he used the same spell to bring them down from the ceiling.

They escaped, made their way back to the city to find the flies gone, the Barrow Mound had imploded on itself and they had to break the bad news to Martin that his son was gone, Antonia was behind it and now she’s dead and our party will adventure another day.

…hell of an ending.

I think, done differently, this would have lent more to horror than comedy but the one secret they never uncovered was that H’thlux had been passed up because he was completely incompetent. After thinking about it, the random rolls that made the monsters rather idiotic fit and fit well. If in Orcus’ place, even I would have told H’thlux to blow and never come back.

Still, Cairn by Yochai Gal stands out as a great rules-lite system. The entire game took three hours to complete and I’m going to solo play this a bit, see what else I can do with it and cook up another scenario for it myself and see how much of a challenge I can make this one by not completely randomly-rolling everything. Much of this game, according to even my players, was truly random and it had many What The Fuck Moments but that doesn’t mean yours has to. If you ever get the chance to play this adventure, do and let me know in the comments how your game turned out.

All in all, first time running this system for anyone wasn’t bad, the adventure was solid even if I and my players weren’t but it was genuinely fun and the players enjoyed themselves even if they did frustrate me a bit at times.