Dungeon Bison

Cairn Academy

This semester I've found myself with about 3 hours a week of teaching time that is not allocated to any required curriculum. I teach in an alternative learning program; we have three classes. I am working with the junior class for these three hours.

I decided I would play Cairn 2e with them.

the set up

So, I'd played a few sessions with this little crew. They're a mix of emos, street toughs, and socially awkward young people. The first little session I played was with some pre-made character sheets, and it went fairly well. They laughed and got the hang of rolling dice and working together, but that was quite a few months ago. What this semester called for was a little more rigour, a little more oomph, and a little more... not me just playing rpgs in class.

There are 10 students on my roll. I get between 2 and 7 students on any given day, and they range vastly in their ability. I have a student reading some high end literature, and another who struggles to recognise his name in a list.

This was at the for front of my mind when I started. It also became apparent that the general understanding of what medieval fantasy meant was pretty low. I had kids talking about Master Chief and others talking about Pokemon.

I am going to outline my process for this term with the crew. You could say the following headings are lessons, or weeks, or units. It would depend on your class. For my class, each of the following was roughly a week.

what is fantasy

Defining fantasy was tough with this lot. Our conversations swung from 'it needs to have dragons' to 'anything that isn't real is fantasy'. Both statements are accurate, but I was at risk of playing GTA 5 the RPG with this class if we continued down that path. So, our first step was to understand what fantasy was and what about the genre each of us liked.

We watched trailers for various movies first. Below is a list of the trailers we watched, and below that are some of the guiding questions I used after each one. This is not the definitive list of movies to teach with, just ones I knew well enough to talk about.

movies

questions

This then led into art gathering activity. I gave the students a bank of search options to get them started. This included phrases like 'medieval fantasy' and 'folklore characters' but also the names of books, established settings, and artists such as 'The Black Company', 'Westeros', and 'Erol Otis'. From this activity, each student made a collage of all the artwork they liked, thought was cool, and wanted to exist in their world.

inhabitants of a shared world

This is where I told them they'd be making a world together. That all their ideas would be put together to make a new world for their characters to live in. Some ears picked up at this, but there was still quite a bit of reluctance at this stage.

So, it was time to bust out the dice and start making some characters. Cairn character creation is simple enough for most students, but I still had to talk them through it. I gave one student a simplified document that allowed them to write straight into it and not worry about the character sheet till later. Worked for them, but would have bored the others. Once the dice started rolling, there was a lot more interest in what we were doing.

The backgrounds and their art instantly help some students get into the right frame of mind. And creating characters gives enough information without creating overbearing background stories. It gives just enough to latch onto something but not anchor them to anything. This process took some kids 30 minutes, and some kids almost 2 hours. I wasn't anticipating this, so had to come up with some else for the others to do.

There were two reasons it took two students two hours. 1. They have very low literacy skills. 2. They were genuinely invested in understanding all the elements of their characters. So, this meant taking the time to help them understand why the character was a Rill Runner and not just a sailor.

your face and items

Those students who had steamed ahead had time to start fleshing out their characters. They could use their traits to inform a drawing of their character, or use them in a search engine to find something they liked. One student used AI to create one, which opened up a conversation about using AI for art (interestingly, most of the kids think AI is trash but also use it all the time). With this cohort, I will not challenge them on engaging in this learning on their own terms.

The next task was for them to look through their starting items and write a few sentences about up to 4 items. I wanted them to explain where the item came from and why it was important to them. They're getting around with maybe 10 items; surely they must mean something if these are things they've brought with them. The activity was challenging for most of them. "I don't care about this crowbar," was a pretty good example. Something so mundane, yet heavy and awkward to carry. The whole table, three students, weighed in this. They decided that the character was untrustworthy and would probably loot your corpse.

So, another week is down. But now they all had characters ready to go.

cartography

The cool thing about making characters before making the world was that now all those characters needed to come from somewhere. The Rill Runner needed a river; the Hexenbane needed a school; the Half witch needed a forest, and the cutpurse needed places to rob.

We have these round tables with whiteboard tops, and they're excellent for little group discussions and activities.

For this one, I got a collection of whiteboard textas and had the students sit around the table with their character sheets in hand. Each student needed to add two locations to the map that connected to their character directly. We took turns, moving around the table, drawing on the map, and explaining our choices. They added schools, and rivers, and towns, and forests, all the things I thought they would. But then a student said, "Where's the dangerous stuff?"

So they drew a little skull to represent a dungeon.

Oh, my heart.

I thought this would be a quick activity, but it ended up taking the whole lesson. We had to have discussions about scale and size, and biomes, and geography, and HISTORY. Fucking nerds. They wanted to know why the capital city was over on the edge of the map near the desert and not near the big river. Great fucking question, kid. So, they moved the capital but kept the old one on the map, put a skull next to it, and called it a ruin. They're going to get kill the undead king that lives there soon.

my map isn't your map

Their next task was to create their own map of the world. It is fine to have a big shared map of the world, but each of their characters sees the world differently. Each of their characters has differing opinions on the world and on what is important. Even on what is real.

Each student has now created their own map of the world. Each with their own thoughts on how the world looks and what will be found where.

I have also created GM map based their map. This is not necessarily the 'real' map, but it will inform my processes for the most part. Some students have strong opinions on what is real and what is not real, though, so I will keep my mind open.

name day

Our next lesson is all about place names. I'm still prepping this one. But I want them to name all the known places in their world. But not just that, i want them to learn how the naming of places works. They there are old systems for deciding which include where a town is and what people do there, but also just who even went there first. Places often have more than one name, too, and their characters will know them.

This isn't done yet. I'll report back.

5 weeks in

and we haven't even played yet. This is actually fine, though. The students are engaged and enjoying themselves. They're talking about this world as if it were an actual place, and some of these students would have done nothing like this.

I will get about 4 hours of game time in before the end of the term, though. Stay tuned for a play report.

Long days and pleasant nights.

Stuart.

#cairn #play report #teaching