Adventure Review: The Feast of Tegny Wood

A Cairn Adventure by Yochai Gal

NOTE: Spoiler warning appears further down—this section is safe for players.

This adventure is…

• A forest crawl (using Cairn rules) that further introduces Vald, the home setting of Cairn.
• An “investigate the weird stuff in the woods” mystery
• Written by Yochai Gal, the author of the Cairn RPG
• Free to any who would like to download it on itch.io

I am a big fan of Cairn, Yochai Gal, and his podcast, Between Two Cairns.  Over the last two years, Gal has become a significant influence on how I run games.  Still, this adventure confounds me.  

I’ve run it twice now. We had piles of fun. But aspects of it ended up being challenging to run.  I’m hoping that this review will not only inspire you to give it a shot, but will also help you chew on some fundamental differences between traditional and OSR RPG gameplay.

Usability – 2/4

The beauty of a good OSR adventure is that they’re usually plug-and-play.  Read it once, review it again the day you run it, and you’re good to go.  When I read Tegny Wood a week or so after its release, I was pumped.  Here’s a creepy mystery that explores a different aspect of Vald: the Wood.

I’m a sucker for a wander in the woods.  So I was in!

But about two hours into running it, I had two realizations:

• It was going to take more than my normal 3-hour one-shot time to finish.
• The adventure seemed to be missing some details for the Warden / Game Master (more on that in the spoiler section below).

All in all, this adventure seems to want 4-5 hours to complete–especially if PCs want to have fun at the titular Feast! We probably spent a full hour in both groups just RPing at the Feast of Tegny Wood.

The bigger concern is this: if your players are typical gamers who want to fully solve the mystery, you’re going to need to modify the adventure somewhat.  I do wonder whether this isn’t simply a difference between traditional and OSR roleplaying?  In trad games, you’re a hero who can solve any problem.  In the OSR—especially games like Cairn and Knave—you’re a grubby little nobody, who really doesn’t have any business solving the big problems of the world.

So it’s feasible that the players aren’t meant to solve the whole mystery.  Instead, perhaps they goal is to investigate, survive, and report back to the authorities?  If that’s the case, the adventure could be run “as is.”  My players (and I ) wanted more, so we went further.  So, for usability, I give it 2 out of 4, because I certainly had to do more prep than I typically would for an OSR game.

Art – 4/4

I know that Yochai reads my reviews, which have previously praised the art of Ari-Matti Toivonen.  I like his work a lot. And in past reviews, I’d said I wanted more. And boy, did Yochai provide! 

We’ve got nine separate pieces in this 20-page adventure, including a full-spread map and one image that crossed two pages.  It’s really excellent work, blending setting with the story.  I couldn’t be more pleased and I’m eager to see Toivonen’s work in the next Cairn adventure!

Content – 3/4

This adventure is a LOT of fun.  But it feels like it’s trying to do two things at the same time: (1) introduce players to the Wood, which is a big aspect of Vald, and (2) unfold a mystery story.  It would simplify if the adventure only tried to do one of these. For players eagerly trying to gain clues, some of the portions of the forest end up being unrelated and almost like a red herring.

I’ve heard Yochai say that he designs these adventures using the Cairn dungeon generation procedure, something that I’ve also done several times.  It strikes me that he rolled a bunch of “Lore” locations, based upon the number of locations that seemed to be more about the Wood than the main problem the players are solving. It’s also possible that the next module in the series will go deeper into the mystery and this was intended to just get players’ feet wet.  If so, I’d love to know! 

So, altogether, this adventure was fun.  But it felt like it was trying to do more than was necessary.

But before the spoiler section, I want to reiterate that I really did enjoy this adventure.  I felt it just needed a little massaging for my players, in contrast to Yochai’s other work–especially Rise of the Blood Olms, which I continue to feel was a perfect dungeon.  I eagerly look forward to his next adventure in this series, so that we can return to the land of Vald once again!

[Spoiler warning—players stop here!!]

Alright, so here’s what’s going on.  Players are being sent out into the woods on one of several story hooks:

1. A corpse was found in the river
2. Farmers have animals turning up diseased
3. There are rumors of illegal lumber work in Tegny Wood
4. Taros Quill has deserted from the Marchguard and a Bloodhound has disappeared searching for him

In truth, Taros is behind all the problems.  He was (Rest in Peace) an alchemist who has  started an old-fashioned anti-civilization cult.  But it’s all gone wrong.  His alchemical formula, meant to evolve his followers, turned them into plants. It also turned the Bloodhound into a huge crab monster called the Chitin Knight.  Taros got killed in the process and now the Chitin Knight is chopping down trees and spreading a contagion that is killing plants and animals.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  Except I’m extremely confused about (1) the relationship between Taros’ formula and the Contagion and (2) the effect it has.  I interpreted the formula and the contagion to be one and the same…but now I’m not so sure.

If they are one and the same, the contagion/formula seems to effect different things in different ways:

• Taros’ followers and PCs die in 1d6 turns after exposure, turned into plant/animal hybrids (pg. 2)
• Fish seem to simply die (pg. 14) or merge with other flesh (pg. 8)
• Trees’ sap changes color and then they seem to die (pg. 9)
• Dogs turn into massive crab monsters (pp. 2, 19)

It’s the “dogs to crab monsters” transformation that really complicates all this.

It’s also unclear to me whether the Creeping Vines and the “explosion of plant life” in the Tower (pg. 13) are the result of Targos’ formula…or something else?  

Finally, it’s difficult for players to discern that the Chitin Knight is the Bloodhound.  In one of my run-throughs, I put a collar around its neck, so that players would be able to identify it more easily.

But again, maybe players aren’t intended to figure all of this out.  So, here’s my recommendation on how to handle all this. With any of these options, you can easily adjust to run this adventure with little difficulty.

Option 1 (simplest): just make sure the players/PCs know that the goal is not solving the mystery, but gathering intel.  They can leave the hard work to the professionals.  Get info; report it back; profit!  This is your simplest solution and, frankly, is most attuned to OSR sentiments. Get in there, experience the world, and try not to die.

Option 2 (middle route): drop a handwritten journal into the wreckage of Targos’ workshop that includes the following information:

• He has struggled to perfect his transforming formula.
• It seems to effect different creatures in different ways; he really doesn’t know how it would affect everything.  But the time to ascend is now!  No time for finicky details.
• It is highly explosive.

This option could account for the inconsistency between varying creatures.  It could also explain what happened in the tower.  What happened?  When everyone started dying, Targos dropped several bottles, causing a plant life explosion! Problem solved.

Option 3 (adds 2-3 hours to game): drop in this dungeon, which I designed to help my players put the pieces together.

I designed a small ten-room underground dungeon that explained the cult and Taros’ history a bit more.  By the end of it, players were able to piece together the whole mystery.  I’m happy to offer it on itch.io as a free supplement to the adventure, if you wanted to extend it beyond what Yochai has written.  I ran it as a basement under Taros’ abandoned home in the village.  But, of course, you can put it wherever is convenient.

I had eleven players run this adventure and everyone had a great time.  I’d recommend it to anyone interested in forestcrawls or Cairn more broadly.  But I’d recommend trying one of the options above for the smoothest game experience.

^{Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That means if you click and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the blog!}