Playing Symbaroum with Cairn, Corruption
I really enjoy the way Corruption works in Symbaroum and how it fits seamlessly into the setting and lore. Corruption in Symbaroum, thankfully, is not based on someone's moral compass but on a very tangible thing: the manipulation of the natural world. Whenever nature is bent to the will of humans it seems to retaliate with corruption, stealing a portion of the life force of the folks doing the bending. The world can retaliate with a little corruption or a lot of corruption depending on the level with which it is being exploited.
Corruption in Symbaroum basically works like this: You have permanent and temporary corruption. Temporary corruption goes away relatively quickly, however permanent corruption stays with a character until their death. If a character takes on enough temporary corruption to reach or exceed its Corruption Threshold (CT) then that character will take 1 point of permanent corruption.
If the combined sum of a character's permanent and temporary corruption ever meets or exceeds the character's Resolute value then that character turns into an abomination.
In order to calculate a character's Corruption Threshold (CT) in Symbaroum we need to look at the Resolute stat. Resolute, according to the Core Rulebook, can be as low as 5 and as high as 15. To find a character's CT we divide Resolute by 2 and round up, which means the lowest a CT can be is 3 and the highest it can be is 8.
In my experience players are terrified of corruption to the point where it can inhibit them from adventuring into corrupted areas, even if they know there's something they want in there. Some of the weakest forms of area based corruption are causing players to roll 1d4 and taking the result as temporary corruption. This can put a character with a low Resolute value over the CT very quickly, causing them to take permanent corruption. If there is also a monster in this area with a Corrupting Attack they are likely to cause anywhere from 1d4 to 1d8 points of temporary corruption when they damage a player so you can see how quickly a character's corruption can snowball, turning them into an abomination very easily.
So how do we translate corruption to Cairn? First, we have to determine what stat out of the 3 Cairn stats to base corruption on, WIL being the obvious one. In Cairn you roll 3d6 to determine your stats, meaning the lowest WIL can be is 3. This is far too low to be of any fun for a player and it is unlikely that they will ever want to take any risks interacting with corrupted terrain or creatures.
What I have chosen to do is to mitigate any low results with the following table:
| WIL Value | 3-4 | 5-10 | 11-16 | 17-18 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corruption Threshold | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| Become Abomination | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
So a player who ends up with a 3 for WIL can take 5 points of temporary corruption before they take 1 point of permanent corruption. If at any point that player's total corruption meets or exceeds their Become Abomination (BA) score they will, of course, become an abomination. I feel that these numbers will give players some space to explore corruption without immediately succumbing to it.
I am basically giving players with low WIL a little bit of a buffer for surviving corruption while also making it a little easier for players with a high WIL to become an abomination if they're not careful.
Corruption is always on the mind of a mystic in Symbaroum and so I will describe how I've converted magic and spells to Cairn in my next post.