2026 Reviews - Bloodmarm Barrow
Recently I had an opportunity to run a game for a group of people who were almost 100% new to Cairn (one person had played Mausritter before), and I felt that this would be a perfect time to try out one of the adventures that came with the Cairn 2e boxed set-- "Bloodmarm Barrow" by Brad Kerr.
Having run one of Brad's previous adventures for Cairn, I knew that I should expect some weirdness and some non-standard adventure interactions, and boy was I correct. The general premise of this adventure site is that there is a sentient living crystal that is emerging into our world from a transdimensional sea of blood, and touching the crystal allows it to "steal" body parts from you, which the crystal can then use as raw materials to create a daughter of flesh. Any questions? No? Good, let's move on to the review.
Getting it to the Table
This was the shortest of the three adventures included in the Cairn Adventure Anthology, so I felt that it would be best-suited for a one-shot session that included time for character creation. Coming it at just 12 pages, there's still plenty of material for a game that could stretch over multiple sessions-- it all depends on how much digging into the mystery the players want to do.
The layout is clean and concise, with each keyed location including a short paragraph of descriptive text and an overview of the area's contents. After this are bullet points detailing the points of interest and interactivity, and monster or NPC stat blocks are included where they appear. Out of personal preference, I would have preferred that the items that the bullet points were detailing were bold in the descriptive text; there were a couple of instances where information was combined together into single bullet points when it might have served the organization better to have them be separate. Nevertheless, it was clear enough after my first read-through, and it required minimal prep for me to feel that I was ready to run the adventure at the table. The maps were even placed next to the relevant area keys!
What Worked?
- Plenty of weirdness! Another important part of the premise is that there is a witch who is attempting to exploit the crystal's properties for her own benefit, and this manifests as a special potion that causes the imbiber's face to turn into that of the hapless farmer whose face was stolen by the crystal. Thus, the witch, the bandits, the dogs, the rats, and the captive family of the farmer all have the same face. This was incredibly fun to describe to my table of players who had all come from pretty traditional RPG "high fantasy" backgrounds, and it's so Brad.
- Many layers of adventure! At the most surface level, the hook is simple-- a farmer with a bandaged face begs the party to rescue his family who have been kidnapped by bandits. It is entirely possible to have a whole game session devoted to sneaking into the barrow mound, outsmarting the bandits, and rescuing the captives from a deep pit, and it would not even be necessary to delve deeper and find all of the really weird stuff literally below the surface. However, there are plenty of tantalizing bits and alternate paths down to the level where the captives are kept that could easily hook curious players into learning more about the strange underworld that is peeking above the surface.
What Didn't Work?
I struggled to find something to fill this category-- there honestly wasn't much that didn't do its job of making fun situations for the players and to lead them to further interesting situations. Ok, two nit-picky points:
- Match the bullet points with their counterparts by using bold text. Ultimately not a huge issue.
- The only part of it that I couldn't figure out was in the text describing Jenette, the farmer's wife who is held captive with her family in the pit. It says that she is "wounded from a mysterious creature bite in area 10", but it's not clear what creature could have done this, as the only thing present in area 10 is the Bloodmarm crystal pillar itself-- biting part of Jenette would have likely removed that body part entirely.
Final Thoughts
This was a great adventure that could easily be used as a one-shot if you have a time constraint, since there is plenty to do at the surface that can be a satisfying adventure on its own. You then also have the option of really digging down into the weird stuff and having plenty of potential campaign hooks branching off from it.
Currently the only way to obtain the Cairn Adventure Anthology is by getting it with the 2e Boxed Set. Thanks for reading!