Play Report: Winter's Daughter
We're so back. Yesterday I ran Winter's Daughter using Cairn for a group of friends mainly familiar with 5e dnd. It went well!
We spent a little while on character creation, working through each stage at the same time. To save time, each character only had a couple of traits, and the random generation provided a lot of fun, particularly the misfortunes and vices, as well as adventuring items no one expected to find useful... I also decided to give each player a spellbook, since magic in Cairn is so different to 5e and quite powerful, but this might have been a mistake in terms of widening each player's toolbox too much to easily keep track of. Our cast was:
- Arwell the bony ranger.
- Beatrice Thatcher the rude magician.
- Butcher, a 16 year old with two 10-foot poles.
- Morgwen the exiled priest.
- Grinwit the servant-princess.
- Mannog, a fan of marbles.
Once we were finished making characters, the game could begin. I gave a very brief prelude about Dolmenwood and what the players might know about Fairy and Sir Chyde, then asked them how they knew each other and why they were coming to the tomb. They decided Arwell had seen some weird going-ons in that part of the forest, and had hired the party to investigate further. There was also some talk about how the different characters knew each other, and some immediate antagonism emerged between Grinwit and Arwell.
Approaching the mound, I'd gone with the updated first encounter with the creepy stag and owls. The players spent a while checking this out, rubbing away some of the moss and enquiring about the relationship of such standing stones to Fairy and the church. I'm not overly familiar with Dolmenwood lore, but emphasised the war and that even mysterious and evil factions in the woods worked to protect from Fairy incursion. Mannog decided to look around the perimeter, discovering the worm hole and quickly establishing with the rest of the party that these creatures hunted by sound rather than sight. They then went to open the tomb, climbing on top in case there were more worms lurking when the slab fell.
I wanted to emphasise the problem solving side of the game over combat, and only Grinwit seemed eager to steal from the tomb, so the chiding guardians threatened her and implored Morgwen to keep her in check. Later on, Morgwen would return to discuss the history of the tomb with the book and cherub statue, and no one ended up stealing, so it worked out fairly well. Mannog used his bellows to clear the dust off the floor, a move the rest of the players doubted the use of, so revealing the mosaic was a fun moment. They had made a lot of noise though, so there was an attack from the wormtongues that the players handled swiftly.
Around this point, we got into some shenanigans with the party splitting up. Once the portal to Fairy was discovered, Butcher, Morgwen and Grinwit decided they wanted to stay and look around, but the rest of the group were focused on the tomb. I wasn't eager to split the party, both in terms of survivability and keeping everyone engaged, but the character decisions were firm.
This ended up being quite an interesting way to experience the dungeon, as information from both sites told the story of the princess and Sir Chyde. The dungeon party made their way through the tomb, getting half of the name puzzle as expected and then role playing with the dancing skeletons to find the name of the other hound, which was very fun. In Fairy, the other group eagerly tried the doorman's mushrooms and spent some time talking with the cooks and wedding guests about the princess and her fate. It all came together as the upstairs party joined the others in Fairy with Sir Chyde's ring, and the whole group met the princess, reuniting the lovers at last. It was getting pretty late, so we wrapped up here, with a few words about the wedding celebrations and the changes in the tomb.
The System
This was everyone's first time with Cairn, and I found it very easy to run and teach. The players all enjoyed the inventory rules, and were impressed by the simplicity of spellcasting in particular. One of my friends has always found the way 5e dnd devolves into drawn out combats quite boring, so was particularly happy with the focus on other aspects of adventuring in this ruleset. I think I could have gone further with this- even with the lightweight combat rules the encounter with the worms didn't feel that decisive or exciting. It can always get more ICI. I was also a bit muddy on the critical damage rules, so would probably want to brush up on these before running another Cairn game. On the whole though, it was very smooth and worked really well here.
The Adventure
Unsurprisingly Winter's Daughter was great. The layout is fantastic, very easy to run even with limited prep, and the dungeon's a lot of fun. I think most of the players engaged with the story or the wider Dolmenwood setting, which shows how well conveyed these elements are. Coming from a 5e background, it's also cool to see a dungeon you can pass through relying almost entirely on a social approach. And as a DM, there's so much to work with socially. The holy objects, dancing skeletons and fae doormen were all vividly described in just a few words, and all felt very memorable. I could've done more to distinguish the elf guests once we made it to Fairy though, and would maybe spend a little more time thinking about the princess and Sir Chyde before running this again, since they're so important to this dungeon. I'd be interested in running it as part of a larger Dolmenwood game to see how players with more of a stake in the world approach things- the magic sword for example would be very tempting for characters around beyond one night, and any pre-existing relationships with the church or fairy could have a massive impact on their choices too.