Running a (semi-)open table Dolmenwood campaign in Cairn(-ish)

12 Jun, 2026

I've run the first four sessions of a quasi-open table ¹ Dolmenwood campaign. I've been running OSR-ish games for a while and, after starting with Shadowdark, have gravitated more and more in a rules-light direction. For this campaign I'm using a hacked version of the Cairn barebones edition, with gear packages inspired by these ones and very lightweight kindred rules (breggles get free armor and humans earn scars a little easier, basically).

Neither I nor my players are excited about non-diegetic advancement, but my players do tend to care a lot about character differentiation and identity. Dolmenwood's background and traits tables do a lot here, but I wanted to add just a little bit of "class" identity to characters in addition to the starting equipment lists. I implemented this with "Training." Characters start out with "Training" in one or two areas depending on their character class--for instance, the Knight class gets Training in Nobility and Warfare, the Cleric gets Training in Religion and Warfare, and the Magician gets Training in Magic. Characters can use downtime to get Training in additional areas. So far this is working as intended; characters feel like they have niches based on their character class, but don't feel limited.