Rise of the Blood Olms in brief.

Buy Cairn 2nd Edition, and you'll likely play its starter adventure, Rise of the Blood Olms. A small, straightforward adventure that'll last your group 1 to 2 sessions. It's exactly the kind of workhorse adventure I look for.

The opening premise is borderline stock-standard. The player characters are investigating the disappearance of a group of spelunking scholars. Characters get paid a fee for recovering the academic's stuff and every studious nerd they bring back—dead or alive. How hard can it be? Exactly as much as you'd expect.

In just a few pages, the entirety of Rise of the Blood Olms reveals itself. The Olms have history. The academics had history. It's all very fun and engaging without asking too much of five grown adults testing pints of Guinness for drinkability.

And yet, I can't help but ask myself. This adventure might be fun to play, but what does any of this cave shit have to do with the Wall Street Putsch of 1933?

Good story. Flawed execution.

Rise of the Blood Olms is an introductory adventure. The kind of work every rpg ought to have in its catalog. If you're new to running Cairn and its brand of adventures—the kind that emphasize problem-solving—Olms is a great place to ease in. The zine is slim on pages, but surprisingly hefty with practical advice.

Unfortunately, the concise writing and practical advice end exactly when we need them most. Sure, everyone knows a cabal of wealthy businessmen plotted a fascist coup d'état at the height of the great depression, but what's the historical context?

The adventure opens with a rundown of the scholarly NPCs, their story, and what went wrong. We learn about their relationships, goals, and fate with just enough characterization to run the game. The adventure is surprisingly complete despite its brevity. Extensive playtesting has cut the adventure down to its essentials. Which makes its glaring omissions all the more perplexing.

We get the name and stats for every side character, including a particularly fun little freak named Rufus, but we don't get a single named conspirator of the Wall Street Putsch. It's a baffling jumble of priorities. High Lector Geteli, the leader of the scholars, gets a war chest of actionable details in his stat block, but the very existence of Smedley Butler, the retired Marine Corps major general the financiers conspired to install as dictator, is left entirely to the reader's interpretation.

I don't mean to be a prescriptivist. There are many ways to structure an adventure. Some designers insist on laying out the entirety of an adventure—no surprises, no interpretation, no tension. Other designers, like Yochai, take the opposite approach. Rather than highlight every important detail through writing and typesetting, Olms' lets is prose create an emotional resonance. Salience by means of experience rather than diction. Both approaches work. Both approaches can be art. It's all in the execution.

I'm looking at this adventure based on what it does well. The subplot with the cannibal cave monsters is a highlight. But I have to wonder—does the plot about George Bush's grandfather trying to kill Roosevelt get a bit lost? I think it does.

What is Blood Olms really about?

Rise of the Blood Olms is a story about exploitation. The scholars, "The Order of Nine," are the adventure's victims in need of saving and its guilty party. Over the span of just eleven locations, we get a story of resource extraction, environmental destruction, and the resulting extermination of a native population. It's a familiar, tangible scenario, charged with tension.

If this were all Rise of the Blood Olms was about, I'd consider it an effective and engaging premise. The problem is that, like the keying, it hyper focuses on its subplots at the expense of its central conflict: class warfare.

It will be interesting to see how the player characters stack up against the GM self-insert, Smedley Butler. The adventure doesn't even name him, but we can gather from context that he's the story's intended protagonist. It's a challenging balancing act that the reader is left to manage entirely on their own.

If the players are okay with a little railroading, they'll likely love the reveal that Smedley Butler was an anti-war socialist. It's an exciting highlight of the adventure, overshadowed slightly by the exploding gas trap in room C3. Of course, you'll need to do some deft improv to convey the best scenes effectively. The McCormack–Dickstein Committee meetings are particularly challenging. Those hearings and the resulting coverage by the pro-fascist New York Times editorial board can quickly dominate the play session, sideline the player characters, and turn an otherwise quick and effective one-shot into a year-long campaign. Worst still, it's not even keyed.

A few rules clarifications or play examples of Robert's Rules of Order would have been a nice addition as well. Note-taking is a must for this adventure—it does not hold your hand through its subtle faction play.

Great in all ways but one.

If you're looking for a romp in a cave of monsters, traps, and mysteries—Rise of the Blood Olms is an easy recommendation. It's easy to run, fun to play, and sprinkled with moments that'll make your players feel smart, scared, and dumb all at once.

Unfortunately, reviewing the adventure holistically, it falls short in several ways. If Rise of the Blood Olms were just a starting adventure for new and experienced players—the kind who want terse writing and pragmatic keying—it would be a no-brainer. Sadly, it's also an adventure about the Business Plot of 1933, the one where American industrialists tried to form a shadow government in control of a fascist dictator. This adventure pays no time or attention to its central conflict, focusing on themes and techniques that are objectively bad, no matter what game or idea the designer is trying to convey.

It's important to review creative work on its own terms. Rise of the Blood Olms is perfect if what you want are eyeless, big-limbed shark monsters with a splash of social commentary. If you want a sprawling campaign about America's ongoing love affair with capitalist-backed fascism, move along. This adventure perfectly executes the classic fantasy adventure, but fumbles the rest. Disappointing.

Stay tuned for my next review of the long-awaited game, Stonetop. Its mechanics and world-building are great, but is it a good manual on Pennsylvania Dutch woodworking? You'll have to read to find out.

Until then, I'll keep exploring.

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