Playing Symbaroum with Cairn, an Introduction
Like most folks, I was first drawn into Symbaroum by way of the art. It has a dark, gritty vibe to it that is vastly different and more appealing to me than the bright, colorful art I was used to seeing in the 5E Player's Handbook. The setting, though mostly taking place in a single forest, feels expansive thanks to all the richly detailed locations and all of the factions in play, allowing for a wide variety of hooks and situations to present to your players. The system, however, began to break down for me about 8 months into our campaign.
I stuck it out for quite some time, made little band-aid fixes to the game here and there and some of them made life a little easier for me, but it was never enough. And so, almost a year and a half into our campaign I told my friends that I couldn't do it any more. Either we end the campaign and play something else, I become a player and hand off the reins to someone else, or we continue the campaign but try a different system. They chose to try a different system.
For some background on where I'm coming from: I had been the GM for a short-lived game of Deadlands many, many years ago and I had played in a year long 5E campaign that felt pretty terrible. The upside was that it gave me a solid foundation for what I didn't want out of gaming. I left that group and decided I was going to run Symbaroum for some close friends. During the course of our campaign I discovered the OSR, and have since been running an OSE campaign set in Arden Vul one week and Symbaroum the next. All of my games have been played in-person at a table and so I have no experience with playing online using a VTT. I have been told some of my issues with Symbaroum would be mitigated by the use of a VTT module that would do the heavy lifting for me, but I'm lucky enough to have great friends that are great players living near me and I refuse to squander that by forcing the game online.
Rather than attempt a review of Symbaroum and list all of the qualms I have with the system I will instead assume you have your own reasons for not wanting to play the rules as written but still wish to play in the setting, corruption and all.
For my game, I have chosen Cairn by Yochai Gal to replace the Symbaroum rules. I must say first of all that I feel incredibly lucky in that my players/friends are all in on supporting me having as good a time running the game as they are playing it. They knew that all the cool abilities and traits they had saved up to buy with their hard-earned XP were basically going to vanish, and that no longer would they be able to mow down wave-after-wave of enemies with nary a scratch to show between them.
In the posts to come I will detail which rules I have converted and why, as well as what is working well and what isn't working so well.