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| Cover A for IDW's "Sonic the Hedgehog 2019 Annual", by Yuji Uekawa |
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Howdy, Farmhands.
As I am wont to do, I have decided to start Another TTRPG project. It's really just the 20th restart of my eternally unfinished heartbreaker, which started out as a Lasers & Feelings Hack with Opinions and hasn't ended up as anything after, like, 3 years. Surely this will be the time I make it stick haha. You're free to completely ignore these posts if you like, I won't blame you.
Anyway.
The fact of the matter is that I wish to put a Sanic in Cairn, and none of you have any authority nor power to stop me. But before I do, a couple of points must be made. Firstly, what do I think a Cairn is? And secondly, what the fuck is a Sanic?
Part 1: Cairn?
If you've already read Cairn you can skip this.
Cairn is a TTRPG, written by Yochai Gal. It's an "Adventure Game," with a narrow focus on producing Old-School fantasy experiences with snappy combat, a limited inventory, and little else. It's basically a freshly shaved Into the Odd. Maybe. I haven't actually read Into the Odd. From an evolutionary standpoint, I'm led to understand Cairn is like Mausritter, scaled back even further, but with the flavor and genre expectations of someone playing Knave. I would need to actually read more than one of the aforementioned titles to say for sure, though.
(It's probably more than a little bit of a misnomer to state I'm hacking Cairn specifically; it's just my first dip into this school of design. Maybe "Putting a Sanic in an Odd-like" would be a more accurate blog title? Eh.)
Per Cairn's own words, the design focus is on collecting and maintaining Equipment over Class abilities, a Neutral GM that hands out information like candy so Players can make informed choices, the consequences of which could very easily lead to death, but never in a way that feels unfair. The mechanical choices that most enamor this game to me is how it handles rolling dice, HP, and Inventory management.
Similar to Into the Odd, and other games it's inspired, all dice are rolled in REACTION to something in the fiction. Players can declare their characters do anything, really, and so long as that action has no obvious Risk to it's going awry, the game isn't interested in withholding permission from them. All rolls are effectively Saves from a known, possible negative outcome, instead of a game of Mother, May I with the dice.
HP, not content to let Stats be the only thing blowing my mind, is also subverted from what I expected. Instead of a general measure of how much more meat a character can lose before they kick the bucket, HP or "Hit Protection", is instead more of a timer. Attacks auto-hit in Cairn, with Damage subtracting from a character's Hit Protection as they get closer and closer to the hit that sends them down. Once an attack lowers HP to Zero, any remaining damage is absorbed by the Character's Strength Stat, triggering an immediate Save using the new Stat number. A failed save means they're down. This, coupled with the fact that HP can be restored with a short rest, but changes to the Strength Stat requires longer recuperation, creates an interesting scenario where Characters are quickly able to continue on, but still suffer lasting effects of losing a fight, should they survive it in the first place.
Lastly, I'll talk about the Inventory system, which is just. Neat. Who came up with this first, ItO or Mausritter? PCs have 10 slots, with most items fitting in a single Slot unless labeled as "Bulky," which takes up 2. Already, the concern of balancing keeping weapons and armor on your person while still having space for cool stuff you find in dungeons is apparent, but Fatigue, a debuff that can be acquired from lack of food and sleep, backlash from magic, or just as punishment for bad decisions during the adventure, takes up a slot of your inventory. This effectively removes an entire inventory slot from play until the fatigue can be cleared. Get fatigue while all your slots are full? You have to drop something. Carrying more objects than you have slots? Your HP is automatically considered to be an 0, with any harm done to you going directly into Strength.
To summarize a bit, Cairn is a very tight, OSR inspired ruleset that cuts away a lot of the fat of other games in it's genre, while subverting some key expectations in service of it's snappy gameplay. Now, we must ask-
Part 2: What is a SANIC?
Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game mascot produced by SEGA in the early 90's. Due to being designed to sell products, his scruples and identifying traits have shifted drastically from era to era, with fans having wildly different interpretations of the character even within the same close-knit group of friends. The broad strokes, at least the ones relevant to this blog post, is that he is an acrobatic cartoon character that travels to colorful and magical locations, getting into scuffles with antagonistic individuals not out of a sense of public service, but because he's in the right place at the right time to do so. Freedom, Movement, and Speed are key to what Sonic is as a character.
A SANIC, by comparison, is a character that must exist in the same time and place as Sonic himself. As a video game mascot, Sonic exists in a world tailor made to take his defining traits and display them in an appealing fashion. The loops, tunnels, floating platforms and other nonsense geography only really works when you travel through them AS Sonic. His move set is ideal for zipping through the locations he travels to, not because those locations make sense, but because his video game must be fun to play. This causes some logistic issues when taking any character who wouldn't normally be able to do the things Sonic can and placing them into those scenarios. Even if we don't see any houses, someone must have considered a vacation home in Green Hills, after all. Sega has famously solved this issue for their own purposes by creating an increasing number of supernatural or exaggerated abilities and giving them to the characters Sonic interacts with-Flight, Super Strength, Wall-Climbing and so on. At this point, a Sanic is any magical Furry character with noodly enough arms and large enough feet; and I say that as a Positive. By introducing unique constraints from more Traditional Furry OC design mentalities, SANICS gain a unique flavor all their own, even in scenarios where Sonic himself isn't involved in the character's story.
By this metric, I'd probably also consider Mario OCs a Sanic, but I'll fire that gun into a loaded theater some other blog.
Part 3: Why Tho?
Again, The fact of the matter is that I wish to put a Sanic in Cairn. You don't need to understand me and my choices, nor do you need to respect them. This is the path I've chosen to follow; taking my most recent shiny toy and holding it next to my longest hyperfixation that they may kiss.
Something that's enamored me to the description of Adventure Games that Ben posited in the blog post wherein it was Coined is line two - "It implies strangeness, travel, the unexpected, and the confusing." Not that other game styles can't have that, rather, that this desire to go places and see things in a world that's full of weird shit, coupled with the purposefully snappy dice resolution, refilling HP, and inventory management, immediately makes me think this would be the ideal place to start on a SANIC game. Freedom, Movement, and Speed. No asking permission to Do, just chances to fail if you push the risk too far. This is the comparison that has sparked this project. God help me.
Here is where I'm going to have to do some work. First, because the rules I'm starting from are so tight and bare-boned (/pos), any change I make will have massive rippling effects throughout. I can't just increase Armor without drastically changing how combat feels, for example. Tweaks must be made, though, as the threat of character death is something I want to slightly tone down. Not only that, but in a game with no existing advancement mechanics (except the Scars table, which doesn't feel quite right for the vibe I'm trying to emulate), how do I get a player from page 1 to a fully realized magic furry OC before the session starts?
The short of it is, I don't fucking know. Thats why I'm blogging about it.
Until next time,
Farmer Gadda
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