Expanding Injury in Cairn (and elsewhere)
Exploring options for critical damage, scars and wounds across Cairn 2E (and other Odd-like ttrpgs).
Cairn 2E is my second most Wardened system of 2025 (after Mothership), so it’s perhaps unsurprising that after rolling multiple times on the latter’s wound table that I’ve been thinking about how Cairn, and Into the Odd derivatives in general, treat serious injury. Off the back of playtesting my most recent (free) Cairn adventure, I’ll be exploring this more in new modules in 2026.
This is not, however, an overarching review or attempt to derive the ‘best’ way to approach this part of gameplay. It’s one of those things where everything is a trade-off and rulings > rules, so I’ve collated some suggestions and points of design discussion alongside each other. Everything presented here is optional, alternate or additional — each element can be used with or without any other and alongside or in place of the core Cairn 2E rules and will fit into most Odd-like games as well.
In the Beginning
The above is an excerpt from Into the Odd: Remastered, and unsurprisingly is the most concise, core version of the rules around hit protection, STR loss and Critical Damage. There is a subtle evolution in the rules from the Cairn 2E Player’s Guide:
Here, PCs suffering the effects of Critical Damage are noted as being able to “crawl weakly, gasping for life” but nothing more than that. Furthermore, while ITO leaves ‘tended to’ open, Cairn specifies that aid typically requires resources such as bandages. Cairn also introduces additional, monster-specific, effects on Critical Damage which may result in unsurvivable injuries (e.g. the Blood Elk’s ‘gores its victims by ripping out their entrails’).
Via Electric Bastionland, Cairn uses Scars as its own system for character growth, triggering when PC HP is reduced to exactly zero and presenting a varied table of scars that may well result in limits on a PC’s ability to act (more on this below). Cairn hack Liminal Horror then developed a wounds system (where wounds fill an inventory slot and are detailed, either from the fiction/Warden ruling or a random table) which is almost fully backwards compatible with Cairn.
So where do we go from here? I’ve presented some options below.
The Effects of Injury (Fictional)
It’s first worth considering that the Warden can rule on the impact of any injury — they aren’t limited to when a Scar is triggered. Some suggestions:
Characters with broken bones (not just limbs — broken collarbones and ribs still limit movement) will be slower and fail to defend themselves.
Open wounds risk blood loss and infection.
Even minor injuries can be extremely painful. A character in pain is likely to make a lot of noise.
Head wounds and/or direct injuries to eyes, ears etc dull the senses and memory, impacting Spellcasting especially.
Burns and lacerations make clothing and armor impossible to wear or make use of.
Injuries to hands and fingers mean characters will struggle to wield weapons effectively.
Torn muscles make someone less agile and acrobatic.
The Effects of Injury (Mechanical)
In terms of how injuries might play out in a mechanical sense, here are some rulings that could derive from the fiction above:
STR/DEX/WIL saves are required when they would not be otherwise (or automatically fail), and/or the penalties for failure are increased. E.g. Automatically fail DEX saves at the start of combat.
Your weapon attacks have their die reduced in size or are fully Impaired (d4 damage).
Enemies deal increased or fully Enhanced (d12 damage) against you.
Gain 1 or more Fatigue (fills an inventory slot until removed).
Restrictions on equipment. Unable to use two-handed or bulky items and/or cannot perform fine manipulation (e.g. lockpicking). Armor no longer provides a benefit.
Restore only a limited amount of Hit Protection (e.g. 1d4) and/or halve your HP, take a penalty to it etc.
Receive the Deprived condition (cannot recover HP or ability scores or remove Fatigue).
Roll the Dungeon Encounter die (potentially more than once) due to noise and/or time spent recovering.
Creatures see you as easy prey (penalty on reaction roll) and/or hirelings become less willing to follow you.
Spellcasting requires a WIL save even with time and space to focus.
Treating Critical Damage and Scars
There is then a further level of fiction and potentially resource management when it comes to treating injury:
Wood/metal or other similar strong materials to make crutches and other aids. Add in fabric if you want to create a splint for something like a broken arm. Why not create a sling from the clothing of the creature that broke your arm?
Bandages help stem bleeding and protect open wounds, as noted in the rules. Improvised bandages might be dirty, requiring a die of fate or STR save against infection.
Painkillers — either herbal remedies or something like strong alcohol. Often valuable as treasure, making some adventurers avoid using them.
Injuries might need to be cleaned up or disguised, to appear less of a target to bandits when returning laden with treasure.
Once in a place of safety, downtime can result in interesting custom prosthetics. Possibly more powerful than what they replace.
And of course, anyone with an injury means bargains for magical
healing are both more likely to be offered and have more strings
attached.
Critical Damage Variants
If you have saved against Critical Damage during this combat, roll a Die of Fate each time you receive further damage. On a:
1-2, damage is inflicted on your lowest ability score
3-4, damage is inflicted on your middle ability score
5-6, damage is inflicted on your highest ability score
If you don’t want all Critical Damage to inflict a wound (in the Liminal Horror mechanical sense), the Warden can either adjudicate based on the fiction or roll a Die of Fate to determine the impact.
If you want to offer players a Heroic Devil’s Bargain, give them the choice between being unable to act due to Critical Damage (as per the original rules) or taking one (or more) wounds and continuing to function. Either way, they still die within the hour if the wound isn’t treated.
Additional Trigger for Scars
If you receive damage to an ability score and the new ability score value is now equal to another damaged ability score, look up the result on the scars table based on the damage taken. For example, if you went from 12 to 9 WIL, and already had your STR reduced to 9, look up result #3 on the scars table.
Extra Scars Table
Usable alongside the original zero HP trigger for scars and/or the variant trigger above. Likewise, can be used alongside the published scars table
1 HP Signature Scar. A visible part of your body (face, hand, ear etc) now has a memorable mark. Roll 1d6. If the total is higher than your max HP, take the new result.
2 HP Infection. You struggle to eat and drink, which risks making you weaker. Once it’s gone, roll 1d8. If the total is higher than your max HP, take the new result.
3 HP Broken Nose. For the rest of the day, breathing is difficult and your voice changes. After you sleep, increase your max HP by 2.
4 HP Fracture. An error results in a cracked bone and makes you vulnerable. Once mended, describe how you learn from your mistake, then roll 2d4. If the total is higher than your max HP, take the new result.
5 HP Sprain. Roll 1d6 | 1: Wrist, 2: Ankle, 3: Shoulder, 4: Elbow, 5: Knee, 6: Groin. The joint is extremely tender and painful until you receive rest. Once healed, roll 3d6. If the total is higher than your max STR, take the new result.
6 HP Embedded Fragment. An arrowhead, talon or tooth is lodged inside you. Your condition continues to worsen until it is removed. Once it’s gone, roll 2d6. If the total is higher than your max HP, take the new result.
7 HP Voiceless. Your tongue and throat are burned, crushed, torn or otherwise damaged. You cannot speak until you’re healed. When you speak again, increase your max WIL by 2.
8 HP Deep Cut. Needs to be stitched, glued or otherwise held together. After recovering, roll 2d8. If the total is higher than your max DEX, take the new result.
9 HP Blinded in One Eye. Can only be restored by miraculous magic or experimental technology. Roll 2d8. If the total is higher than your max WIL, take the new result.
10 HP Organ Damage. You are deprived until you receive full medical treatment or the magical equivalent. Afterwards, your body may not function as well as it did before. Roll 3d6. Take the new result as your max STR.
11 HP Extensive Scarring. Extreme pain makes it difficult to take any action at all. Some may consider your new appearance horrific, others the mark of a seasoned veteran. Roll 2d6. Take the new result as your max HP.
12 HP Marked for Glory. You sense this battle has a wider importance on a cosmic scale. You will fail any Critical Damage saves you make in this combat but deal enhanced (d12) damage. If you survive, roll 2d8. If the total is higher than your max HP, take the new result.
Mothership Campaign Framework 2: Shore Leave & Scarcity
You’re light years away from home, your vaccsuit is torn up and covered in the multi-coloured blood of an unknown horror… and the vending machine has an ‘Out of Order’ sign posted on it.
Roll a Sanity Save.
The Story so far
I’m 10 sessions into my second Mothership campaign, where I’ve been testing out a campaign framework and some additional classes. Both have performed reasonably well, but something that I’ve noticed is that the downtime game loop runs much the same after each module.
Players take Shore Leave based on their character’s interests/priorities. They may seek out B-Class Ports/Experiences for roleplay reasons, but will otherwise default to the 10x cheaper C-class. More expensive shore leave is never considered.
Player spending prioritises Wound Treatment, then ensuring they have a firearm, followed by armor and stimpaks. Sometimes other expensive things like pets are purchased.
Now, all of the above is perfectly logical — this is a semi-open table with d10 months passing between published modules, so it’s intended to be low prep for everyone involved. There is nothing preventing me from coming up with something more detailed and tied to specific player characters, NPCs, factions etc other than my limited free time.
But, something I always want to avoid across almost every TTRPG system is default or assumed choices. Not to the point of complete random chaos, but enough that players have to consider the opportunities and limitations at hand. In particular, it struck me that there’s one thing that isn’t talked about much in the context of Mothership.
Scarcity
With a setting that’s almost the polar opposite of a Star Trek post-scarcity utopian future, we should consider what that would mean for the people on the ground. The characters lead lives that are economically precarious (an important factor in motivating them to take such extreme risks) and this therefore also presents us with implied scarcity. Where this comes from is varied – systemic failure, deliberate action (hoarding, blockades, embargos), the vast distances of space etc. Probably the easiest way to imagine it is from history; the Rim sees humanity scouring for resources and knowledge at great speed, much like a Gold Rush leaves Ghost Towns in its wake.
Mechanically, let’s consider that Shore Leave is the closest thing a character has to a ‘lifestyle’ and that the various port types have an implied level of wealth/social class, from utilitarian through to billionaire playground. It effectively buys you access - a network of people/factions, albeit transient.
The Mothership Player’s Survival Guide describes the following, and I’ve added a suggested level of scarcity to each:
X-Class Criminal (1d100 x 1kcr) – Swings between abundance and scarcity
C-Class Outpost (2d10 x 100cr) – Always some level of scarcity
B-Class Industrial (2d10 x 1kcr) – There may be some scarcity
A-Class Metropolis (2d10 x 10kcr) – Almost no scarcity
S-Class Corporate Sanctum (2d10 x 100kcr) – No scarcity
The System
First determine the class of shore leave each crewmember is taking (use C-class for anyone not taking shore leave) before making any other purchases. Then roll once for each class of shore leave taken on the relevant tables below. The resulting modifiers apply to every crewmember who took that level of shore leave.
As per the example of play on P.39 of the PSG, it is possible for different characters to take different levels of shore leave at the same location. If this occurs, the Warden can rule on whether multiple modifiers impact an individual character and/or whether characters can assist one another.
E.g. Miguel’s higher class of Shore Leave allows them to buy a combat shotgun for Sophie, whose Executive Teamster Plus Accommodation didn’t include access to the station’s arms locker.
X-Class Port:
Puppies! All Pet costs are halved.
Looted Freighter: All Equipment* and Armor costs are halved.
Arms Dealer in Port: Firearms cost are halved.
Deals being Done: No scarcity.
Plenty of Work: No scarcity.
New Shipment Just In: No scarcity.
Power Struggle: Any item has a 25% chance to be unavailable.
Hijacked Transport: Any item has a 50% chance to be unavailable.
Protection Racket: All costs are doubled.
Company Fleet Inbound: Increase all costs by 1d5 x d100%.
*Items that are not Armor or Firearms, see pages 10, 11 and 13 of the PSG
C-Class Port:
Teacher’s Strike: Skill Training costs are doubled.
Gold Rush: All Equipment costs are doubled.
Hazardous Environment: Armour costs are doubled.
Insurance Monopoly: Medical Treatment costs are doubled.
Warzone: Firearms costs are doubled.
Inflation: All costs are doubled.
Network Lockdown: Skill Training and Medical Treatment are unavailable.
License Crackdown: Firearms and ammunition are unavailable.
Supply Chain Disruption: Any item has a 50% chance to be unavailable.
Economic Breakdown: All costs are tripled.
B-Class Port:
Business as usual: No scarcity at this time
Medpod Tax: Medical Treatment costs are doubled.
Committee for Public Safety: Firearms and ammunition are unavailable.
Exclusive: 1d10kcr minimum spend at this location.
Black Market: Any item has a 50% chance to be unavailable.
Exchange Controls: You cannot spend more than 1d10kcr (excluding Shore Leave).
A-Class Port:
Rampant Mid-Stage Capitalism: No scarcity.
Credit Crunch: No purchases can be made here at this time.
S-Class Port:
Do not roll for any member of the crew (but note you almost certainly needed an invitation to be here).
Warden Comments and Advice
There are other ways to do this! You could have a ‘Save vs. scarcity using your lowest save’ for example to see if a character suffers extra costs/restrictions individually (with advantage for higher class ports).
You’ll notice that none of these results give out stress — perhaps characters can take stress in order to ignore them?
Disregard anything under 300cr for the modifiers above. Items this minor are always available for sale and price fluctuations aren’t worth tracking. This leaves the more powerful equipment items; firearms, armour, stimpaks, scanners, pets etc as items that maybe be difficult or impossible to get.
At the other end of the scale, ship purchase costs, ship repairs and travel costs are ignored for this exercise. Most crews don’t engage with this aspect of the game in a strict cash sense.
Everything above is a prompt rather than a barrier – restricting a particular thing that a player character is in desperate need of is a great opportunity for roleplay, a stat check, a save or even an entire impromptu job.
So, You’ve Decided to take a Stimpak
Is there a more widely used item than the humble stimpak in the Mothership universe? No matter the anti-canon, literal cannon or obstacle at hand, any crewmember can always benefit from one or more of the effects:
But how about some more detail and flavour? Given that there are 3 x d10 rolls involved, here are some suggestions on how to deliver a memorable dose each time:
Brand (1d10 health restored)
Jefferson Industrial Lubricants
Porky’s Porcine Plasma (now with less hair)
Nguyen Stim ‘n’ Save
Doc Robert’s Old Timey Remedy (a division of GUN corp)
Generic Medical Ltd presents: The Stimpak
Xenotech Test Batch #481, not for resale
Executive Midnight Boost Pro Plus
Miracle Cure (Brought to you by Amalgamated Faiths Ltd)
Leviathan Blood, Rage Combo, High-vis Green Limited Edition
Warden’s Favour, Survival Guaranteed
Contains (1d10 minutes advantage)
Corn syrup factory run-off
Lead
[REDACTED — CODE INDIGO PRIME]
Essence of Sawdust
Very Heavy Water
Synthetic White Blood Cells
Horse urine
Prions, folded for your convenience
Lab assistant residue
Excess personality
Warning (1d10 rolled to determine overdose risk)
May contain chitin and ichor
Traces of gigaplastics
Manufactured in a facility that handles Forbidden Vegetables
Must be kept refrigerated
Side effects include temporal realignment
Expires end !error, date not found
Studies have linked this product with political extremism
Once opened, do not reseal under any circumstances, even if the stimpak requests it.
All Terms & Conditions must be viewed and counter-signed before use.
Tested on clone-adjacent husks.
Bastion Station Mall: Alternate Mothership Starting Equipment Loadouts
The Mothership starting equipment loadout tables are an excellent piece of game design, but can they be taken in a different direction? And is there some inspiration from another great series of indie rpgs?
What is a Starting Equipment Table for?
This is a question with one obvious answer (to equip player characters rapidly for starting play) and a few slightly less obvious ones:
Worldbuilding — A GM will probably read an entire table, or at least skim it. A player will read the entry they roll and probably the ones either side of it. They may scan other classes to get a feel for how they’re different. This is all valuable setting-evoking real estate.
Tool Provision — You are likely to see items on these tables come up a lot, so expect them to be frequently deployed against the threats, obstacles and puzzles in the game. This is true for weapons, tools and more obscure/’useless’ things.
Character Power Level — Most games have at least some level of ‘item progression’ built in. A starting table therefore typically doesn’t give you access to the most powerful items, instead setting the characters up at a level that they can upgrade from as play continues.
With these points in mind, let’s look at a couple of examples from the Player’s Survival Guide:
The strong and consistent formatting leaps out immediately, where armor is always first, following by weapons and ammo. There’s also the elegant system of underlining any item not in the equipment list, which in turn introduces the important concept of Warden rulings.
In terms of both worldbuilding and gameplay expectation there’s something important here; these tables are internally unbalanced. Whilst all classes are treated a similar way, all the class tables (perhaps Android more than the others) have a wide variance in terms of what they receive. Not just in terms of whether you get a weapon or not, but simply whether you have lots of possessions or a few.
(It would be unfair of me not to mention that the PSG does include an alternate rule on P.6 of starting with 2d10 x 100cr and buying everything from scratch. On average, this will get you a revolver or submachinegun and a few simple tools/light sources — I’ve found it works well for experienced OSR players who want that level of control)
Now, this makes worldbuilding sense (emphasising the nomadic, often precarious life of a Mothership character, as well as the inequality of the setting) but for me it has some gameplay issues. For certain scenarios it works great — my personal favourite way to run Screaming on the Alexis for example is to have PCs wake up from cyro, not even realising they were being transported on an archaeological vessel and hence having few items and foggy memories. But as we move into the more ‘Aliens’-esque scenarios some of the loadouts start to limit players’ ways of interacting with the environment.
Of course, this can be resolved with more Warden rulings, and some players are completely fine being cast in the implied role of Corporate Android Escort. You could even argue that it drives characters to take interesting risks in pursuit of tools. But for those new characters that join an existing campaign of freelancers, or a one shot that implies at least some preparation/knowledge of the risks, I wanted an alternative.
The Inspiration
When I tackled the above at the start of my current campaign, I did something more complex than I describe here with players assigning d10s to various tables to give themselves a spread of items or rolling with advantage on a more specific one. It worked fine (and the exercise yielded some ideas for new equipment which are at the bottom of this post) but was ultimately too slow compared to the rules as written.
Looking at my shelf of games for a reset, I took the opposite route – hypothetically, what would be a faster way of doing this? And of course, there is one; Into the Odd and its follow-up Electric Bastionland by Chris McDowall. Characters that roll lower are, as a general rule, rewarded with more powerful items.
How it Works
Rather than rolling for equipment, use your character’s class, health and lowest stat/save to find your equipment loadout and bonus items on the tables below. I’ve tried to stick with the broad themes from the original tables, whilst quasi-balancing for lower health
Optional: If you want to further specialise characters and match them to their gear, switch steps 7 and 8 of character generation (P.5 PSG) to generate loadout before choosing skills
(Note: Rather than use alt-text on the images, I’ve copied the tables into a Google sheet that can be found here)
Marine and Android
Some of the more powerful Marine loadouts hew close to the original tables, mostly because there are only so many powerful weapons/armor in the game and I still want to reserve them solely for Marines. I’ve tried to tell a bit of a story with some of the others, whilst giving them more utility items than in the PSG.
The Androids get a bit more armor than originally (but strip out the vaccsuits, reserving them for the Scientists and Teamsters) and an assortment of implied “jobs that nobody wants to do”. I’ve deliberately kept their combinations of weapons and armor low powered compared to the Marine, but everyone still gets something — in my experience of running the game it’s a rare player who doesn’t grab a weapon in advance of their second mission. Given the strangeness/toughness of Mothership’s enemies and hazards this doesn’t feel like an issue to me, as a weapon (especially in unskilled hands) often presents a risk to everyone around it, friend or foe.
Scientist and Teamster
I tried to create sets of Scientist items that implied ‘specialist’ whilst deliberately not tying it to the Master skill list. The Teamster gets an array of practical gear much like the original table, just more stuff to support their prepared all-rounder status.
Bonus Items
Due to the stat/save bonuses offered by the classes, there are a few combos here that won’t appear for certain characters, but using both stats and saves provides some variety for everyone. This is deliberately much more random than the lists above, giving an assortment of wildly different value to sprinkle on top of a more established, class-based platform.
New Equipment
Observant readers will note some weapon and armor entries in the class tables that can’t be found in the PSG. I would speculate that most of these were considered and either cut or rejected during Mothership’s development, but I felt like adding a little more variety to the armor and weapons.
Appendix N: The OSR of the first level of Deus Ex
25 years ago a videogame introduced me to sandbox level design. Spoilers ahead.
Deus Ex (2000) is a game that sits within a lineage which extends all the way back to the earlier Ultima Underworld games and continues spiritually until at least Prey (2017). But as this is Appendix N we’ll begin with a longer list of inspirational videogames for me, before we zoom in on just one.
Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995, Mindscape)
Sid Meier’s Civilization II (1996, Microprose)
Fallout (1997, Interplay)
Half-Life (1998, Valve)
System Shock 2 (1999, Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios)
Deus Ex (2000, Ion Storm)
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (2000, Bioware)
Left 4 Dead 2 (2009, Valve)
Dishonored (2012, Arkane Studios)
FTL: Faster than Light (2012, Subset Games)
Invisible Inc (2015, Klei Entertainment)
DOOM (2016, id Software)
Return of the Obra Dinn (2018, Lucas Pope)
Disco Elysium (2019, ZA/UM)
Roadwarden (2022, Moral Anxiety Studio)
Now, I didn’t play all of these in their year of release, so what’s important is the context of my experience at the time I first played it. I was obsessed with Half-Life, its expansions and the burgeoning mod scene, but had come into PC gaming via turn-based and real-time strategy games (“look Mum, Civilization II teaches you history!”). I was familiar with the idea of secrets and easter eggs via the Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem shareware releases, but that’s pretty much it.
So this was my first real introduction to multi-route levels and variable approaches to problem solving, and I think there are several reasons why OSR dungeons appeal to me (as a player, GM and designer) today that can be traced back to this game 25 years later.
A Clear Main Goal
Admittedly not “grab a bunch of treasure” as per the classic OSR maxim, but if you strip all the plot away it’s “you see that big statue over there? Get to the top of it” — you do not have to speak to anyone except your brother and you could theoretically speed run/sneak past every single obstacle (it is possible — even without using the prod to stun enemies).
There’s also a secondary objective (rescue someone who, if you choose to arm them, immediately shoots his way out and can’t be killed while doing so) and what might be thought of as a tertiary objective (get a way to solve a puzzle by speaking to someone,
The genius of it is that by scattering all of these goals around AND presenting lots of useful things to find and pick up and use AND lots of enemies to fight/avoid AND lots of information you create a very natural gameplay loop even if you aren’t focused on the goals at all (which I certainly wasn’t the first time I played).
A Looping Map
It’s with the level design itself that we really get into the Jaquays of it all — the simplified map above doesn’t even capture how many possible loops there are on the main circle, due to the ability to ‘cut corners’ and the large spaces and low lighting allowing for evasion of enemies rather than being stuck in corridors.
It also feels like a real place, in a way that not all the later levels in the game do (a number of those are also somewhat linear, small or fall into the trap of having multiple parallel routes rather than loops).
You get an in-game map of limited value (an entertainingly low-resolution satellite photo) — this is something more OSR modules should do, a basic clue about the main areas but no secret doors/tunnels and limited detail.
Interaction, Puzzles and Secrets
Three computer terminals to hack (or find the password for), two of which control gun turrets as well as doors. Multiple things to blow up (which don’t just create explosions, there’s also some barrels of toxic gas) which you are also in danger from — crucially these can be moved around, and the noise of setting them off will lure enemies. You’re vulnerable while moving them as well, an important factor worth considering when ruling on player-created traps and ambushes.
The game avoids trapping itself in FPS weapon progression — you can pick up a lot of tools in this level, ranging from pepper spray to a sniper rifle and even a rocket launcher. There’s a lot of crate bashing (thanks Gabe) but at least that makes noise as well. The puzzles seem basic now but didn’t at the time, and the HUD gives a very clear ‘it will take this much resource to get through this obstacle’ — with almost all doors offering a choice of lockpicking/electronic tool or explosives.
The secrets themselves (once you’ve passed the puzzle) do a good job of offering you those tools or upgrades that you can’t get elsewhere. It’s never ‘oh cool, some more ammunition’ (even though that itself is deliberately kept somewhat limited) it’s ‘I didn’t know this kind of grenade was in the game’ or ‘this game has a weapon upgrade system? Amazing!’. You are rewarded for your exploration and puzzle solving with a new way to interact with the game.
Information Everywhere
Clues are a constant feature (note I recommend skipping the opening video that manages to not only spoil some of the plot but also doesn’t really explain anything about the world beyond ‘there’s a plague happening’) but it’s more than that. Deus Ex has probably the best ‘worldbuilding through clues’ of any game ever made. They are typically brief, but written in distinct voices (often characters you’ll never meet) and assemble a desperate world around you from fragments.
Newspapers, books, datacubes, dialogue and computer terminals all combine to form a rich tapestry where you’re rarely reading for more than thirty seconds at a time. Something that the later Deus Ex games miss is that not all the lore is plot relevant — my personal favourite being that around 40% of the way through the game you read about an unrelated news event that is clearly holding the public’s attention far more than anything you’re up to (at least until an event immediately before the final mission, and even that is probably written off as an accident).
Enemies to Defeat/Threaten You
The combat is reasonably deadly, at least on Realistic difficulty and/or if you’re inexperienced (personal dexterity with mouse and keyboard is of course a major factor here). Scoping out the number of enemies you’re taking on in each encounter is important, so that you can prepare. More patrolling enemies would have been nice, as there’s a few too many standing around (even if that does lead to some good worldbuilding conversations you can overhear).
One enemy is only vulnerable to certain weapons (the sentry robot on the most obvious route requires explosives or EMPs to defeat) which dramatically ramps up the difficulty and is again something that could be more widely used. Again, noise is a big consideration here, with the trade-off of melee (silent but risky), pistol (noisy) and tranq dart (silent, but takes time to knock an enemy out) creating interesting choices.
You’re going to want to loot these bodies, but that will almost always only yield ammunition (in this level it’s the only way to get a sniper rifle, later levels sometimes yield useful but not essential keys or grenades on bodies).
Loot/Merchants
The game posits a strange setup where you’re a UN special forces agent who is… paid immediately after each mission by your boss, including occasional performance-based bonuses. There isn’t much hard currency around to pick up but you can hack random ATMs for money. There are people to buy useful things from but they are never signposted as such, creating an organic black market feel to everything.
One interesting quirk here is that you can buy things throughout the game but (almost) never sell them, and there aren’t many ‘plot coupons’. Consequently, inventory management is purely about whatever combination of offensive/defensive/utility objects you want to haul around, based on their slot count (heavy weapons take up far more space than simple pistols).
What’s Missing
This mission doesn’t have usable factions– or rather, there are two factions and your relationship to them (one friendly, one unfriendly) is fixed and cannot be changed. Luring enemies into friendly security bots is an option I suppose, as is changing the allegiance of the gun turrets. There’s also no time pressure or respawning (System Shock and Prey both feature this, in conjunction with a more megadungeon-esque setting rather than discrete levels).
How to Make Huntable Monsters
There are many ways to defeat a monster. Here is a list so you can enthusiastically support any mad idea your players want to try.
Note: I’ve used Cairn 2E as an example since it’s the NSR fantasy system I run the most, but all of this works with a lot of different games.
Note 2: There’s a lot of hyperlinks in this one. It’s a common topic that touches on a lot of other areas.
Consider the Black Wyrm
Framing this topic as an OSR/NSR blogpost might seem counterintuitive on the face of it. After all, this is an area of TTRPGs where, famously, we don’t have to kill everything because the XP/growth will come from treasure. Combat is fast, often fought unfairly and/or imbalanced (as war tends to be) so a lot of the time we can Just Use Bears. Moreover, we can:
Play different factions off against each other to avoid dirtying our hands with the messy blood of uncompensated battle.
Treat powerful monsters more as framing devices, environmental hazards or obstacles to be overcome, such as Bonebreaker Tom in The Waking of Willowby Hall (although he still has a stat block and can be killed).
But
It cannot be denied that a cornerstone of D&D and all that has come after is the slaying of Terrible Beasts or Corrupted Men. Even if it’s in pursuit of a bag of gold as a reward or whatever magical artifact corrupted the man (‘I never thought it would imperil MY immortal soul’ etc).
An example of this is the excellent adventure The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford. The titular creature must be defeated (not necessarily killed) and it has a lot of weaknesses… and also a lot of strengths, enough that taking it on without a plan is essentially impossible. The other creatures in the module aren’t as detailed, but that’s the point — this is intended to be a list for creatures that entire quests, entire villages, even entire regions pivot around.
As a checklist, this is intended to be a more specific one than Goblin Punch’s very good Monster Checklist (which you may well want to use to generate the monster in the first instance), but without the complexity of Nested Monster Hit Dice (hence using Cairn 2E as the example system). And of course, any of these can be given layers of complexity by varying how widely available the information is to the players — they should certainly know something even if they need to intuit/investigate further, but you can classify according to Landmark, Hidden, Secret.
So, what might our party try? And what does that mean in terms of the description and mechanics of our monster? I’ve split it into two main categories, then provided an example.
Holistic Solutions
A cartoon of a dragon AI-generated content may be incorrect.
It’s important to consider all the options, as our monster does not exist in a vacuum and the sandbox nature of OSR/NSR gaming means the scope here is incredibly broad. But look to have answers in the following categories:
Satisfy Desire - What does the monster want, and what will happen when they get it? You might be able to defeat the roaming mummy by returning its stolen canopic jars to its tomb (or making some fakes) or kill the guilty person a revenant is pursuing. Desires can easily be used in a more mundane way as lures for ambushes or bring the monster to a more favourable combat setting (see Environmental Weaknesses below).
It’s fine for a desire to only be satisfied temporarily (a dragon will eventually want to add even more gold to their hoard, but you can still use treasure to buy time to try other things) but it should still have a noticeable impact on the situation at hand.
Use a Resource - I’m going to limit this to ‘resources the GM makes available within scope of the monster/adventure’ because there is an infinite array of ‘the party use the reward they got from the last adventure to defeat the monster in this one’. This can be specific (a sword of slaying X is stashed nearby due to the infrequent appearance of X every Y generations), semi-specific (a nearby dangerous plant that will kill any monster provided it has a corporeal digestive tract) or broad (the local monster hunters guild will do your work for you if you can solve their guild licence recently being revoked).
Protect the Victim - Let’s assume that this is a viable choice i.e. the party could take whatever they learned/obtained and engage the monster in some form of combat… but maybe they can simply direct its attentions elsewhere? A warding circle around the village under threat, an ancient guardian roused from their slumber, persuading the local mayor that they don’t need to fly the traditional red flag of victory when the great bull of terror is nearby. The monster is still out there, but those offering up the reward are satisfied that they can go about their lives peacefully (enough that they pay up at least).
Exploit Weaknesses
Here, we move onto an assumption of violence by the party. This still doesn’t mean it’s to the death, and there’s a certain level of inherent OSR tactics that can be applied to anything — but because we’re dealing with a severe power imbalance, we need specific options so that the players feel they are meaningfully stacking the odds in their favour.
Inherent - At its most basic level, this is “it has eyes, why not shoot it in the eyes?” and can go all the way to “every third attack its ribcage opens up to reveal a green glowing heart”. A strength can also be a weakness — a dragon’s ability to fly make it much more dangerous but restrict this in some way and it becomes more vulnerable. A weakness may well still require a specific tool and/or skill to make use of it (see Smaug + Bard + The Black Arrow).
Note a subcategory of the popular “magical object bound to the soul of the monster” — this still implies violence but might involve travelling somewhere entirely different to the monster’s lair and/or a certain level of investigation.
Behavioural - Here we’re interrogating the monster’s routine in pursuit of its goals/daily life. Most monsters need to sleep for example or have specific periods where they’re weaker. This is likely to be secret information, as it’s in the monster’s interest not to broadcast the knowledge.
This can also include aversions/attractions. The cartoon elephant being afraid of a tiny mouse, or Yogi Bear wanting a picnic basket – these are quirks that add character and are something a resourceful party can use to their advantage.
Environmental - Jaws is a lot less threatening if you can somehow get him 100ft out of the water. 5e notably has ‘lair actions’ which are meant to drive dramatic lair-based encounters but also encourage lair destruction or luring from lairs to somewhere else. This can elevate the simple ambush into something more complex — combat as war means channelling Sun Tzu to fight on terrain that suits you and probably building some traps as well. Just hiding and benefiting from surprise isn’t necessarily enough, mechanically speaking, against monsters in this category.
An Example
First, we write some general fiction about the monster, why it’s a threat and who is asking the party to take care of it.
Note, we can assume all of this is Landmark (told to the party when they arrive in the area) or at most Hidden (they get it from asking in the tavern for stories, talking to survivors of attacks etc).
The Towering Snatcher of the Beanstalk Forest - Once there were four of them; Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum. They had a farm with many large beasts, in keeping with their tremendous size. Stories tell of four giant brides for four giant brothers.
Now only Fum is left.
He farms no longer. Instead, he prowls the forest with a grace that belies his twelve-foot height and muscular body. He seeks meat and does not care if it is human or animal, only that it is fresh. Into the sack it goes.
He crafted a coat of bone to protect against attackers, but there are fewer of those now, since so many have been struck down by his axe. The inhabitants of Jackbury fear the night, when a crash of splintering timber means a barn (or worse, a home) has been struck.
Fum must be stopped. The villagers will pay in coin and vacant farms. There are several of those available now.
Then, we turn it into a meaningful stat block, in this case based on the Cairn 2E Warden’s Guide:
Fum - 8 HP, 2 Armour, 16 STR, 12 DEX, 12 WIL, Stomping Feet (d8), Huge Iron Axe (d10)
A brooding, bitter woodland hunter. Armour made of the bones of his victims.
Stalks targets at night carrying his axe and sack before inflicting brutal violence.
Critical Damage: Target is thrown into the sack, to be eaten later that night.
And finally, how does it stack up against the checklist above? What do we add to change or add?
Satisfy Desire - It’s unlikely the party will feel too much sympathy for Fum, but there’s a whole tragic thread for them to pull on here that the GM can put more effort into the players respond to it. Playing giant matchmaker is a nice change from stabbing things and it has the option of making a lure by building a literal strawman/woman of a sexy giant.
Nothing more required for now, but we could add some additional hidden or secret information with greater detail about Fum’s backstory and/or the wider giant community. This might include directions to a giant village, at which point the challenge becomes persuading Fum that it’s real and that he should go there.
Use a Resource — We might define the Village of Jackbury as a resource but it feels like if forming an angry mob to take on Fum had a chance of working they would have tried that by now. We also don’t have much supernatural or magical at play here — Fum’s just a big hungry guy, so let’s add:
To the West (away from the Beanstalk Forest) there is a smoking hole in the ground. This is all that remains of an ancient evil temple, where worshippers would sacrifice victims by burning a special, magical incense that fills a whole room with smoke and removes breathable air.
This could be an entire dungeon or simply a puzzle to extract unburned incense from a hazardous environment. It’s a useful magic item, but it can’t readily be used in a pitched battle, so we can also add.
Fum has a log cabin deep in the forest. It is all that remains of his family farm. Although on a larger scale, it is not really that different from the villager’s homes — aside from the large cooking pot and pile of bones in a midden outside.
This gives us a closed space where the item could be used — although the party could easily lure him elsewhere.
Protect the Victim - We’ve already added something magical, so let’s not introduce a ‘Ward of Giant Protection’. Something Fum is scared of is a possibility, but there isn’t anything obvious in the fiction for that. Let’s try something else:
Hilda Brennigan is campaigning to be elected leader of Jackbury. Her proposal is simple, the entire village packs up and moves South — paying the party for protection along the way if necessary.
This gives us a way to completely flip the quest on its head. Whether the party are onboard will probably depend on how sympathetic Hilda is – a cautious, defeated widow? Or a wild-eyed populist?
Inherent Weaknesses - Since Fum is a big human, I don’t think there’s much to add here — his biology will be familiar to the players. They might go for the eyes or the Achilles tendon. Similarly his prodigious appetite is inherent, but specific ways to utilise it fall more into behaviour (see below).
Behavioural Weaknesses - A bone coat sounds awfully awkward to sleep in. And I’ll draw from reality when it comes to eating a large meal:
Those that are able to observe Fum in his home will see his post-hunt routine is always the same. First, he removes his bone coat before cooking (though his axe remains on his back). Then, after boiling up his most recent victims and eating them, he falls into a deep sleep.
If we want to make it harder for the players, we can also add a pet or noise trap here — Fum isn’t stupid after all. We also have “food as a lure” being an obvious option, but since it has to be meat the party will either need to persuade some villagers to give up valuable animals or go hunting themselves.
Environmental Weaknesses - All of Fum’s attacks are melee, giving the option for some classic homo sapien vs. mammoth tactics.
To the South, the banks of the River Bean form a thick marsh. Deep enough to drown a human, and severely slow a taller creature like Fum. The villagers say a family lives here, and has built a series of log bridges (which would surely snap under Fum’s weight) to navigate via secret paths. But they are insular and do not trust the villagers, let alone outsiders like the party members…
And that’s it. By looking at a simple situation we’ve already fleshed out the wider world and made it more gameable as well — you can then add in other opportunities and places to raid (perhaps whilst having to watch out for Fum in the forest, or not having much in the way of supplies because Jackbury is so desperate).