I guess it’s Rune Week? This is Runecairn: Wardensaga (2024), the remastered edition that collects the previous zines under one hardcover. A Norse-flavored hack of Cairn by Colin Le Sueur, it’s intended to be played as a duet game, that is: one player and one GM, though both solo and traditional group play are easy enough to finagle.

So, Ragnarok happened. The gods are dead, the giants fled. The world persists but is broken and plagued by fell spirits. This is where the player character must chart their course, exploring new, ever-changing paradigms as the old ones expire around them. Prime among these are the bonfires, ever-burning, that connect the nine worlds. Resting at bonfires returns foes to life, allows players to defy death and to spend souls to improve themselves — all very clearly modeled after the Dark Souls videogame series. You can even be invaded by evil spirits, or helped by summoned allies.

I love this! I understand these to be videogame mechanics, but in the context of a destabilized post-Ragnarok reality they become mythic mysteries of a new world! And they also serve as a way to facilitate the core duet play in a way that immediately makes sense to anyone with even a hint of videogame literacy.

There’s a lot of other stuff to love here, too. I dig the way inventory and actions in the game world work to determine what we’d usually call a static “character class,” and how this opens characters up to change in addition to advancement. I really, really love how when your Resilience (think of this a pool of defense points that are reduced before your character’s actual health) drops to exactly zero, it invokes a random event called an Omen (very, very Norse, this marrying of combat and destiny and the tides of the supernatural).

A very smart, well-designed game. One of the best of the recent spate of minimalist OSR games, in part because of how it marries theme and mechanics. Oh, and fantastic layout and art, but more on that tomorrow. Cover by Crom!