Cairn Advancement Hack

Growth in Cairn is driven by the narrative and is not primarily mechanical. The overview words it this way: "Characters are changed through in-world advancement, gaining new skills and abilities by surviving dangerous events and overcoming obstacles."

Characters grow in status based on the things they have accomplished. They grow in power through the relics they collect. They grow in experience as they explore the world and its creatures. Throughout a campaign the characters may change a lot even if their sheets do not.

The only mechanic for growth in Cairn are scars: damage that brings the characters' hit protection to 0. Based on the amount of damage taken, characters receive different scars that can affect their stats. For example, "rattling blows" can increase your max HP while "reorienting head wounds" can improve attributes.

This adds a level of excitement to combat encounters; at any point, your character could grow while taking damage. But they are also few and far between. In a twenty-session campaign I ran, a character only received two scars^[1]. Of those, only one increased their stats.

For some players, that might be fine. The character grew in status in his community, climbing from a lowly miner to a hero who was called upon to save the village. But others might find the lack of mechanical growth demotivating. For those players, I learned of a system from another game that might help.

I first saw this mechanic in Paradiso's prototype for a yet-unreleased game^[2], though the creator mentioned that he got the idea from another system:

For every failed save, add a tick mark next to that attribute. Once you receive ten ticks, then erase the marks and increment the attribute.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it connects growth and failure in a way that mirrors real life. We get better at things by trying them and failing forward, like Edison's "10,000 ways that don't work". And second, it is self balancing. Characters with low attributes will fail more often leading to more growth. As that attribute increases, they will fail less often and growth slows.

Growth should be capped to 18, mirroring an optimal 3d6 attribute roll, and scars maintaind for increasing hit protection. There are no other necessary rule changes beyond that.

I haven't tried this hack, but I like it conceptually and believe that it could work. The number of failures required to grow might need tweaked, and it might be nice to have a section on the character sheet to track them.

If you do try the hack out, let me know what you think. I'm going to give it a try the next campaign I run and will report back.