An Improvised System for Faction Combat in Cairn

Last night I was playing some Cairn online (pictured), and it just so happened that there was a major skirmish between two factions. I have no problem with the phenomenon of faction collapse in most of my games, but Cairn rules are more focused on narrative choices than combat crunch. So I made up a system.

Blackfeather Bandits vs. Lodge of the Flame, Forlorn Fen YR 1080

In this system, I treated each side as a detachment. In the Cairn rules, detachments are groups that function as single units, doing blast damage and dispersing once taking a critical blow. The PCs were included in the Blackfeather Detachment.

The Bandits were fleeing across the swamp when they ran into an ambush. After surprise, I started combat with each side rolling an attack die against the other, to represent the attack of the full faction. I used a d8 for the Lodge and a d10 for the Bandits to represent their relative attack power. Each side had 1 Armor.

For this battle, each time critical damage was dealt to a detachment I randomly selected one of that side’s fighters to die. I had the players take turns rolling for the faction.

Example: The Blackfeather Bandits’ HP is reduced below 0, and their STR goes to 12. I give their side a strength check, they roll a 10 and succeed. No Bandits die, but now they are at risk. The next time they take damage the Bandit’s STR goes to 8, they roll at 15 and fail. Now they take Critial Damage, meaning one their number is critically wounded. I roll a die to choose which one. It’s an NPC. The bandit known as Just Fron falls into the mud and does not get up again.

If it’s a PC, I reduce their HP to 0 and let the Player take their own STR check for critical damage. If it’s an NPC, they die. After a casualty occurs, I reset the HP to 10, and reduce the STR by 1 to represent the loss of one faction member.

The Blackfeather bandits (but I wasn’t about to run all these as individuals!)

So, how did it work? I would say: OK. Is it clean, concise, and useful for simulating faction combat? Yes. However, using 10 HP led to fairly drawn out combat. The random death aspect was good because the players were reluctant to go critical even once, but it could rub some players the wrong way.

I also decided to the Players turns outside of the faction turn as the combat went on, so they could take unique actions. The transition between the two styles (PCs in faction —> PCs out of faction) felt more natural than I expected, and reflected the energy of moving from the chaotic start of combat to the intricacies of later stage battle. An enemy spellreader also had a unqiue turn.

So there you have it. What do you think about these Faction Combat rules? Would you make any changes? I think I would give the players probably drop the 1 Armor as well, to make it go faster. Meanwhile, my goblin player has wrapped themselves in Bandages, starting a sort of ‘Bandage Meta’, so I’ll probably tackle that next.