RUNNING CAIN
This section is mostly for the player acting as Admin who will be running the story of the game, the investigation, the Anomaly, and all the NPCs. Players who are not planning to act as Admin may also wish to skim through it, but should avoid the Anomalies section if they want to keep certain information a surprise.
SAFETY FIRST
CAIN contains numerous references to and implications of abuse, self-harm, trauma, and mental health crises. By default the game is about untangling the traumatic events that have led to an anomalies’ birth, which requires engagement with that history. For this reason, CAIN might not be a good fit for your table, you, or your players.
It is critical if you are the Admin and are planning in including any of these topics in an investigation that you handle this with care and specifically discuss your intentions with your players beforehand, and respect any boundaries or requests that your players make of you. There are numerous safety toolkits available online that can be helpful for running games like this, but for a simple start I recommend the following:
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Without discussing specifics, ask your players, based on their comfort level (this can be done in private), topics that should be omitted from the game. Then respect that boundary.
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If a player ever is experiencing discomfort for any reason during a game, pull back and pause. Ask the table, without discussing specifics, whether they’d like to continue or whether they would like to skip past the current sequence of events, no questions asked. Then respect that boundary.
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Have a tone discussion with your players before even starting a game. Ask what players want out of the game, what topics they are interesting in exploring, and what topics they are interested in avoiding - these don’t even have to be potentially objectionable topics.
References to these topics in game are kept vague for a reason. You are free to adjust their importance and representation here as you like.
PRINCIPALS AND TIPS
Here are some basic principles I think the Admin should try to follow when running a game of CAIN that will help the game run smoother.
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Put the fiction first: CAIN is a story-forward game. The fiction (do you have a gun or bare, broken knuckles? Are you standing in the dark waiting for an ambush or out in the open?) is an important part of playing the game and helps determine the circumstances around rolls. The Admin uses these cues to adjudicate rolls, making them hard, risky, or giving them extra dice. Small details like whether you are tired or how you feel about a situation can become important!
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Only roll when necessary: Roll when the situation is tense, unclear, or contested, and let the game flow otherwise.
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Be a fan of the players: The Admin should be a fan of the player characters and try to view the playing of this game as a collaborative storytelling experience - not as a competitive one. The players are the main characters of the story, and they should get the spotlight and a chance to shine. If a player failed a roll, it’s not because they were incompetent - circumstances just weren’t on their side. Take opportunities to let characters shine and show off.
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Make information available: Make information available to the player characters wherever possible, unless hiding it would create interesting tension. If a character hunts for certain information that will progress the story, just give it to them. This is especially important in an investigative game, where the tension comes from connecting the dots and not finding every little piece of the puzzle. Don’t bog down the investigation by hiding information behind rolls - reward player curiosity!
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Respect player initiative: Don’t be afraid to push things along if the story is slogging, but never do this without giving your players an opportunity to do so first. Offer them chances to change a situation, take action, or reach a desired outcome.
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Don’t be afraid to pull things back: Pull back from in character conversations and have them out of character if things feel like they are getting stuck or a conflict is arising between players or players and the Admin that needs mediating. Feel out the situation and ask the players (and characters) what they want before diving back in. Letting mediation take place directly between players can be a more comfortable place for a conversation. Often times things can be done quickly ‘off screen’ or out of character that aren’t important to play out in game. Don’t feel the need to do everything in character - there’s no audience watching!
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Put player safety first: Always respect player safety and never cross a boundary that a player has asked to be respected. Set enforceable and consistent safety rules for your game and make sure they are clear to all players.
Inter-character Conflict
Characters might sometimes get at odds with each other, especially if their worldviews or belief systems clash. In such a case, it’s important to first make sure the conflict is between characters, and not players. Then, pause the game and pull back, then do the following negotiation:
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Out of character, ask each player what their character wants out of the situation, and if they are willing to compromise once they’ve heard the other party’s desires. Sometimes hearing this can help players realize their characters are willing to concede or don’t want something as badly as they thought.
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Take suggestions for offers that would help resolve the situation.
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Then, bring it back in character and play it out.
If characters are truly at odds, it can be helpful to remind players that the tone of the story is one where characters have to work together - perhaps by necessity more than desire, and whether it’s worth continuing a character whose basic desires and needs are so out of line with their group. It might not be an enjoyable experience moving forward!
If players are still at odds and both still want to resolve a conflict, they can make a roll off. Importantly, they both must agree to a contest.
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Each party names what they want out of the situation. Then they each roll 1d6, describing their characters actions. Executioners of the same category are generally regarded as equally matched in skill. This roll cannot be modified in any way.
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The winner of the die roll gets what they want out of the situation, the loser must cede it. If there’s a tie, the executioners clash and pull back and there is no winner or loser. They must decide whether to roll again or concede to each other.
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Executioners can never physically harm another in game terms. An executioner that gets into a fight with another may inflict pain or injury in the narrative, but it has no effect on an executioner in game terms, such as stress, afflictions, or injuries.
SETTING, TONE, and INTENTION
CAIN was written mostly because I wanted a ‘monster of the week’ style investigation game married with the tone, styling, and pacing of supernatural battle shonen anime and manga.
Here are some of its influences
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Anime/Manga: Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, Bleach, Dandadan, Mob Psycho 100.
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Video Games: The Persona series.
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Music: Vaporwave/Barber Beats.
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Movies: Nearly any horror movie.
And here’s some of its quirks:
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CAIN is very investigation/episodic focused - what can go on between investigations might as well (and probably should) be freeform roleplay.
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I foresee a ‘campaign’ of CAIN lasting probably ten or less sessions, at least to see a few anomalies or uncover some larger plot. People that develop a good game might want to push their executioners all the way to category 5. It’s certainly not something I see people playing for years.
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You will notice that base level executioners deploy in uncomfortable shoes and basic uniforms, missing even basic necessities such as money or cell phones. This is by design.
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By default Executioners don’t have many uses of their powers, mental burst being a fairly precious resource, and fighting anomalies is hard using mundane means. They are therefore incentivized to dip into strain, an uncomfortable tension that I hope will create drama. If the Admin finds this tension too much, they can increase mental burst to 4, or adjust strain overflow cap higher, or make it so strain is fully cleared after a mission.
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Executioners can choose to confront an anomaly right away if they find it, without uncovering the anomalies’ traumas. However, finding traumas both does damage to the anomaly and makes the fight much easier, so my intention is both investigation and combat are weighed fairly equally.
TONE
The tone of the game by default is pretty brutal and oppressive and can be fairly lethal. The Admin by all means doesn’t have to stick to what’s in the book. CAIN operates by the following basic tonal rules:
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The executioners are treated as weapons, not people. They are as much prisoners as they are valuable assets.
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The executioners all have some kind of internal strife that drives them forward.
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Agendas will clash with each other, not everyone will agree on the path forward.
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Bodies and minds mutate, change, are twisted and affected in the course of the work.
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Confronting trauma in its most literal sense is the main work of the executioners.
You can change these at your table as needed.
FILLING IN THE DETAILS
Here’s a few useful questions The Admin can ask themselves and players to fill details in in your version of CAIN:
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Who is in charge of handling the executioners? What does their deployment look like? Who are their points of contact?
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What is CAIN potentially hiding from the executioners?
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How does CAIN style itself? What do the corridors of a CAIN facility look like?
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What does it look like when someone manifests an anomaly? What do sins look like in your version of CAIN?
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Who are the executioners? How were they recruited? What is their history with each other?
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What is each executioners’ biggest fear? Their biggest desire?
CALLING FOR ROLLS
CAIN is intended to be played, like many other narrative games, in a style where rolls are only made when the game is in moments of uncertainty, elevated stakes, or elevated tension.
A good rule of thumb is to only roll if you want to find out what happens next - and don’t roll at all if the outcome is already clear. This includes things that might normally be tense, like getting into a fight. You can always refer to CAT or the executioners’ abilities to judge this. For example, a CAT 5 executioner with the Vector power can probably throw an 18 wheeler truck or a small building around. You can imagine all kinds of situations that would not be an issue for someone with that kind of power.
When calling for a roll, the Admin doesn’t call for a specific skill to be used (though they are free to suggest one). Players choose the skill they are using and assemble the advantages they want on the roll. The Admin can adjudicate:
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Whether a roll is hard, risky, or impossible.
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Whether advantages can apply to a roll.
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The consequences of a roll on a failure or mixed success.
Rolls should be creatively assembled when possible, improvising based on the situation. Players may often gain more advantage dice than they have dice from skills. This is by design, as it allows players to change their approach and use their abilities and creativity to get through situations. Always allow players to negotiate or even back out of rolls so rolling feels fair and on good terms.
USING CATERGORY
CAT is a shorthand for the narrative scale of powers and supernatural forces. It serves two purposes:
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It can be easily referred to when an executioner wants an answer to the question ‘Can I do that?’.
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It can also be a good reference for whether a roll should be hard, risky, impossible, or even required at all. To restate: tasks are usually hard if they are higher category, or impossible if they are three categories higher. The same goes for lower (easier if lower category, probably not a roll at all if three or more).
General mundane capabilities of executioners are usually CAT 0. CAT is not so strict and has some leeway for interpretation. Generally I view it as the following scale:
0: Small/human scale
1: Above average/exceptional human
2: Large/room or small group scale
3: Very large/vehicle scale
4: Massive/building scale
5: Overwhelming/block scale
6: Epic/neighborhood scale
7: Cataclysmic/Town scale
Powers from defiance scale up in specific ways with CAT, and the powers and abilities of Anomalies can refer to CAT as a shorthand. When in doubt, bend these categories if it suits the tone of your game.
TAGS
Tags are this game’s versions of task trackers. You may have seen them in other similar narrative games in the form of clocks. They’re only tags here because it fits the tone better.
The general rule is to set out tag if you want to track a complex task, if you want to track a project, or if you want to track the progress of something. As a shorthand, set out a tag if you think a task or activity is going to take more than one roll to accomplish.
Tags are useful generally because they provide a clear goal and end point of an activity. Executioners know that when they roll on a tag, they are making concrete progress towards something, therefore tags should always be public knowledge, and what they represent should always be resolved by filling up the tag (positive or negative).
Here’s a few tips about them:
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Executioners will usually score somewhere in the neighborhood of 0-2 successes on them. Therefore you can expect short tags (2 segments) to take one or two rolls. Use this as a shorthand for how much rolling you expect on a task.
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Always write tags as descriptive, not proscriptive - let executioners figure out how they want to make progress on them.
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Rolls on tags that don’t fill them out all the way represent partial progress on a task, and can be narrated as such. ‘You get partway up the wall, but you’re out of handholds. You’ll need an extra push or a new approach to continue climbing the wall’. ‘You catch up with the fleeing man and corner him, but he still has a small chance to dart away.”
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You shouldn’t put out tags for every task, just the ones that look like they are going to be a little more complex. Most things should just be done in one roll.
The most common tags are execution tags, which track the physical health and condition of both the executioners and their opponents. There is also the tension and pressure tags. Here’s some other ways to use tags:
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Set racing tags out for a degrading situation, maybe as a complication in a fight. In this situation, executioners are trying to fill up one tag before another one fills up, slashing the bad one each time they take an action, or extra as a consequence for failure. For example:
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the house is falling apart and crumbling off of the cliff, in a few more minutes it will fall completely into the lake. Can you finish the fight in time?
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the survivors are under attack and being massacred one by one. Can you rescue them in time?
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reinforcements from the paramilitary group are about to arrive. Can you unlock the vault in time?
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The same works for a chase scene or a stealth scene: set a tag out for the pursuer and the pursued, or one for an alert level and a stealth goal. Fill one out when the players take action, and the other (negative one) automatically when rolls are made, or extra on failure.
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You can set out a tag to represent someone’s attitude towards the executioners, with adjustments made based on their actions (higher values, better attitude and vice versa).
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Tags can be used to represent supplies, medicine, reinforcements, or some kind of limited resource, adjusting slashes when this resource is used up.
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Tags can be used to represent long form projects or investigations, maybe those that would last from hunt to hunt, or something that tracks a meta narrative. For example, a tag could be used to track the executioners’ status within CAIN, or their investigation into a secret organization, or their work on a hideout.
Getting a feel for using progress trackers like tags can really help control the flow and pacing of a game like CAIN. You can use them at both the very small scale of gameplay (the moment to moment action, like a fight) and the very large scale (long term projects).
CREATING INVESTIGATIONS
CAIN is centered around investigations, where the executioners are dispatched to look into the emergence of an anomaly, unraveling the mystery of its birth along the way. Each investigation culminates in a climactic fight in a warped, extra-dimensional space against the anomaly itself: a supernatural entity made of rampant psychic power and human trauma.
Writing an investigation is primarily the work of the Admin. An investigation can be tricky to run, unlike other role playing games, since they are typically more open rather than linear, and players are chasing clues and information that must be spread out and kept secret to maintain tension, but also has to be relatively available to players to move the story forward.
Here are some basic tools for writing your own investigation that will help keep things moving at a core level, and let you structure investigations in a way that is clear and productive.
THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE
The number one rule to follow is: If executioners go looking for a critical piece of information, give it to them! Otherwise, tell them where, what, or who they will need to find to get that information. In other words, if they don’t know exactly what they need to know, they should always know how or where they can get their hands on it. Following this rule can stop investigations from stalling out!
STARTING HOOKS
To start writing an investigation, the Admin can look to the following:
First, look to the anomalies themselves. Since each investigation centers around the emergence of an anomaly, looking at their abilities, themes, behavior, and origins can help spark an idea. Reading through the anomaly sheet can also provide inspiration for inciting incidents. Look at the anomalies’ trauma questions and see if they create a story for you, as you’ll have to answer them anyway.
Second, think about something terrible that could happen to someone. Anomalies are always born from trauma, and can manifest post mortem. Here’s a quick list of easy hooks, and some follow up questions:
- The host was murdered (why? by whom?)
- The host lost someone close to them (through sickness, accident, or something worse?)
- The host has been suffering at the hands of another (a boss? a classmate? a partner?)
- The host experienced a crushing loss (failing out of school, losing a home, getting fired, being romantically rejected, all the above?)
- The host suffered a catastrophe (illness or accident, and what?)
- The host was forced to give up on a dream (who or what?)
Third, the Admin can look to media for inspiration. CAIN was written with the pacing of battle manga and horror movies in mind, where tension slowly builds into a climax. Check out the inspiration media or nearly any horror movie and think about how they build a story.
Here’s some more specific example hooks for you to use or modify as a starting point using the above:
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The anomaly host was a boring but doting father who had just bought concert tickets for his daughter. He missed a train from the city and decided to walk to the next station, was robbed and shot when he refused to give up his wallet with the tickets. The perpetrators panicked and dumped his corpse in a drainage canal, where it manifested a Hound, hellbent on hunting its killers (and random passers by).
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The anomaly host, a successful financier, lost his wife to cancer when she was only 30 years old. She wanted children with him but he wanted to wait on his career, and feels immense guilt at delaying her decision. His grief manifested a Lord that created a kingdom at his workplace, transforming a 30 story skyscraper into a palatial tower where his many figment-children are overseen by a cadre of monstrous and overbearing nursemaids.
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The host is an animator at an indie video game studio who is suffering from crushing amounts of work, regularly working 100+ hour work weeks and sleeping at the office. She began to dream about an accident so terrible it would save her from her brutal workload, and manifested a Centipede anomaly that caused an outbreak of monsters, causing a catastrophe that immediately killed dozens of people and created a five block quarantine zone in a downtown shopping district.
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The host went to a prestigious college, but failed mid-way through the first year as she was distracted by partying. Unable to bring this news back to her distant, strict, and wealthy parents, she remained in her friend’s college dorm feigning attendance, spiraling into a deep depression, and manifesting an Ogre.
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The host was in a random car accident that left them paralyzed below the waist, in a wheelchair, and in a long and painful process of recovery. Their only refuge during this long ordeal was online window shopping - looking at things they could not afford due to the heavy medical bills. They manifested a Toad masquerading as a delivery driver who began to gather the things they desired while the host was sleeping.
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The host dreamed of becoming a DJ and music producer, but never made much money. When their overbearing and controlling partner landed a prestigious and well paying job, they were forced to stay home and become a homemaker instead of ‘wasting’ time and money at auditions. They manifested and fused with an Idol that allowed them to slip away at night, become a legend of the local nightclub scene, and gaining a cult.
STRUCTURING AN INVESTIGATION
Here’s a quick and simple way to structure an investigation. You’ll need a sheet of paper or a set of note cards and something to write with.
First, assemble your critical information. This is the following:
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The basic hook or inciting incident. What drew CAIN’s attention? Who or what called the executioners here?
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The anomalies host, their status and identity.
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The anomaly itself.
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The answer to the anomalies three trauma questions.
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Where the anomalies’ palace is located
Then, assemble your secondary information. This is any person, place, or thing that is connected to a piece of critical information. You don’t have to go in great detail here, just write out the basic connections or details. Write in people, locations, evidence, objects, recent events, interlopers or foes, potential obstacles, etc.
Then, you can connect any of these pieces of information as you see fit. Draw in the direction of information. You can draw this out with note cards or on a piece of paper if it helps and draw actual physical connections between them. I like to visualize it like a map. You can even make an actual map of the investigation area, drawing in locations as you go.
Track the path of information that executioners would have to follow to find the anomalies host, find the palace, find all three trauma question answers, and confront the anomaly. This is the critical path the executioners will always follow if they’re trying to complete the investigation, so following it now will make sure it is obvious where players should go when they collect any piece of information.
Sustaining tension comes from putting obstacles or challenges in the path of the executioners and not from hiding the information away. Executioners should always know where they need to go or who they need to talk to. If executioners fail to make an uncooperative person talk, dig through some important files, or sneak into the police station morgue, then make sure to always offer them another path forward.
For example: Executioners are trying to track down an Ogre’s host, who has hidden themselves in an abandoned rail car a the edge of town and has been marked as a missing person. Giving them this critical information immediately might defuse tension, so instead the Admin looks at their secondary information and decides to tell the executioners (through an NPC or an info packet) the location of the host’s best friend, who knows where the host is. When the executioners arrive, the Admin decides the police have also arrived at the best friend’s apartment to interrogate them as a suspect about their friend’s disappearance. This creates a tense scene where the parameters and goals are clear.
The executioners, in this case, fail to stop the friend from being arrested. The Admin can either offer a new challenge to break into the police station and rescue them, or give another piece of secondary information to move the story forward.
It can be very helpful to try to have more than one connection between pieces of information so that executioners feel like there isn’t just one path forward. When you draw out connections between pieces of information at the start, try and make as many as possible. Draw in relationships, locations, objects - things that all these clues have in common that connect them. Imagine it like a simple maze that executioners must navigate, from the edge to the center.
MOVING FORWARD
The following section (and the rest of the notes) deals with CAIN and the Anomalies themselves. Use the anomaly sheets and the references provided as a tool during gameplay to speed things along. When in doubt, look to a sheet for a cue or inspiration!