Cairn RPG: From OSR Philosophy to Gaelic Translation

The Cairn RPG: Introducing Yochai and Fanch

Host Cal welcomes everyone to OH!CAST. Joining him tonight is guest host Fanch, the translator of the Cairn RPG Gaelic Translation. Fanch is joined by the game’s creator, Yochai. Yochai is the writer behind the popular tabletop game. He immediately shares his pleasure at hearing his name pronounced correctly. Cal then passes the hosting duties to Fanch.

Simplicity, OSR, and Design Philosophy

Fanch, a Cairn fan himself, immediately dives into the game’s origin. He asks Yochai about the Old School Revival (OSR) movement. Cairn is a prime example of this movement. Yochai explains that OSR games deliberately strip away complex rules. This, therefore, allows the focus to shift. Specifically, the focus moves from character statistics to player agency and creativity. Cairn’s design philosophy aims for clarity and simplicity. This simplicity contrasts sharply with rules-heavy systems like later editions of Dungeons & Dragons. Furthermore, this minimal ruleset makes it an ideal introduction to the hobby.

Linguistic Challenges and Cultural Impact

The discussion moves to the unique Cairn RPG Gaelic Translation. Fanch shares that translating the game involved complex linguistic decisions. He could not rely on existing fantasy jargon. Instead, he had to invent or reclaim specific Gaelic terms for modern gaming concepts. This was a challenging but rewarding process. The final product was a hit. The translated Cairn RPG was sold at Ocon. Indeed, it quickly proved the high demand for TTRPGs in minority languages. This showed that the language could support high-level creative endeavors.

The Role of Language and Culture

Yochai and Fanch share a discussion about language. They consider whether different languages are truly separate or merely varieties of a common root. They discuss the difference between a language and a dialect. In fact, Fanch draws a parallel to the famous Yiddish joke about the difference between a language and a dialect being “an army”. Yochai, who lives in St. Andrews, notes the fascinating variety of Scottish accents. He even admits the Shetland accent sounds Norwegian to him. Finally, the group concludes the Cairn RPG Gaelic Translation project has been a great success. They hope it helps more people explore TTRPGs in Gaelic and other minority languages.

Full Transcript Outline (Quick Jumps)

00:00 Introduction to OH!CAST and Guests

06:00 The Cairn RPG and Its Origins

12:00 Pronunciation and Cultural Context

18:00 Yohcai’s Journey in RPGs

24:00 Old School Revival (OSR) Explained

30:00 Design Philosophy and Game Mechanics

36:00 Community and Diversity in RPGs

42:00 Randomness and Creativity in Game Design

48:00 Second Edition and Future Plans

54:00 Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

Full Transcript

Cal (00:06.604)
Yep, that’s a recording. So, one second.

Hmph.

Hello everyone, welcome to OCAST, the official podcast of Ocon, the comic con of the editor Hebrides. It’s great to be here and joining me tonight for the first time on the podcast is the awesome Farmsh, how are you doing?

I’m alright here.

Pleasure to have you on your first time. Is this your first time ever doing a podcast?

Fanch (00:34.286)
No, it’s my first time on all cast stuff.

All right, cool. And so tonight, very special guest who is in his own way linked to Ocon. We have sold his RPG. Last year we were selling it, wasn’t it, Fonch? And Fonch had the pleasure of translating this into Gaelic as well. So our guest tonight, the writer of the Cairn RPG is Jochai Gael. Welcome to Ocast. Thank you for pronouncing both my first and

It was, yeah.

Yochai (01:00.706)
Thank you.

name correctly. is really nice to hear. It’s really good.

Thank you. So with this, I’m going to let Fonch do the opening questions. They’re getting my pronunciation good here.

All right, yeah, I was kind of looking through a second. for those who listen don’t know Cairn RPGs, there is a first edition, which is the one that we translated last year. And there is a second edition that came out very recently. I came across Cairn myself when discovering the rabbit hole that is OSR, old school Renaissance or old school revival, depending how you want to put it, Dungeons and Dragons, which is going through

It has a great momentum right now, like loads of people are going to it. And especially amongst folks who came to RPGs through Dungeons and Dragons 5E, they seem to be slowly getting into OSR. Yochai, can you tell me then, kind of, you know, after this kind of getting into the OSR thing, what was your incentive for creating Cairn in that big…

Fanch (02:12.61)
patch of games coming out inspired by the DNA of Dungeons and Dragons and other such games.

Sure, I will. But before I do, I want to ask you the question. The word Karen itself is originally how is it supposed to sound? What’s the pronoun? Karen. So you’d say Karen. In the US, people seem to go back and forth. But most of the time when people call it Karen, it’s because they don’t know what it is when they do see it. But like if I if I was to tell someone it’s called Karen, they first hear Karen, which I’m not a huge fan of. And then

both questions and

Scottish Gaelic word.

Yochai (02:30.996)
How is it?

Cal (02:49.356)
And then when I say, Karn, they still don’t understand it. And I say, you know, a Karen, like a pile of rocks. And then they say, yeah, Karen’s like that, you But it’s nice to hear how it’s supposed to be pronounced, because that’s how I always pronounce it. It’s both a foreign word to me as an Israeli and also apparently a foreign word to most Americans too. So that’s nice to hear. But I will call it Karen because that’s what everyone calls it. I started in role playing when I was in high school.

It’s.

Yochai (03:18.488)
playing.

mostly games that weren’t D &D. I was really into Paladine fantasy, for example, later, you know, kind of GURPS games and really super trad, weird, mostly British games. Then when I came back to D &D like games in my early thirties, I started playing just, you know, third edition and then later fifth edition. And then I moved over into more story game territory and did a lot of dungeon world kind of stuff and other story games.

and then eventually figured out what I liked was old school games. And for listeners who don’t know what old school means specifically, it is generally described as a RPG movement in which we are trying to recapture a mythological role-playing experience commonly by those who played the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, namely either the original D &D or first and second edition D &D games that

A

Yochai (04:08.718)
felt by

Yochai (04:13.582)
So the.

Cal (04:18.838)
are still being played today, either in their original format or in a retro clones sort of format, which means someone has basically taken the rules and recreated D &D in their own. An example of that is Old School Essentials, which is a very popular OSR game, which I played when it was called Basic Expert Essentials, BX Essentials, taking its name from Basic Expert, which is a version of D &D that

Guys

Yochai (04:44.174)
cobbled together in the.

early 80s, think. Regardless, my…

design.

background was in the story game space. I was doing putting out games in the Dungeon World universe and when I found old school games, I realized kind of what I was missing and after a few years of playing them decided, okay, I want to make a game that takes all my experiences and the things that I learned that I liked and and let’s have the people play those games too. Specifically with Cairn, I wanted to play games in a setting. Dolmenwood, which is

known as

Cal (05:23.067)
a forest fantasy British Isles inspired setting. It’s a series of adventures and

I guess.

settings, I don’t know how you set up, setting background information in zines that were released by Gavin Norman mid 2010s. probably twice a year and I was super excited to pick them all up and read them and start playing games in that universe. But using something like Old School Essentials or another OSR game was to me not ideal. I didn’t know how much math there was.

like

Yochai (05:41.327)
in the came out.

Yochai (05:57.934)
game.

like

I didn’t like anything that took away from a very specific kind of experience, which I can go into more thoroughly. And so I built Karen to reflect those interests. Karen specifically relied on. AVE by Ben Milton and Into the Odd by Chris McDowell. AVE is a game that Ben Milton originally wrote to play with his.

the game name.

Yochai (06:25.006)
He’s a public.

teacher. He taught a bunch of, guess, 11 year olds and wanted to play games with them in the old school spirit, but wanted to do it in a way that was easy, above all classless. So you weren’t a

and I think.

a paladin or a…

rogue or whatever you’d find in fifth edition and you weren’t even a wizard or a magic user or an elf or a dwarf, whatever, all those things didn’t matter. What mattered is what you had in your inventory. So you might have a bow and a sword and then later in the game find a spell book and suddenly you’re casting spells. And I really liked that idea and I liked the character generation. And most importantly, I liked that Ben released it as Creative Commons, which means I could do whatever I wanted with it. So I took that and then I took what was then

Cal (07:06.382)
Just the Into the Odd Electric Bastionland Framework, which is a game again by Chris McDowell in which you play

sort of

Vagabond-like characters who experienced a steampunkish post-Victorian world. Very much not D &D, but the rules themselves were super easy and critically for me didn’t involve a lot of math while also lent themselves to what I considered to be the ideal OSR experience. I took those two things and I smooshed them together and that’s how I made Karen First Edition. I also, of course, made it Creative Commons. And

.

Yochai (07:24.618)
It was

Yochai (07:42.99)
as well.

I guess the rest is history now. I have a second edition, etc. But that is a very long version of how I got into CSR Play and running games. Karen, I can talk a little bit more about what it means to actually run games the OSR way, but that’s the long and short of it. Sorry for being so long-winded there.

OS like.

Fanch (08:03.371)
no, the interfacial stuff, it’s actually, you don’t mind expanding what else you have in mind in playing OSR and what it is.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, for folks who are like, what are you guys talking about? I’ve been playing RPGs for 30 years. I totally understand. It’s alphabet soup over here. me, role player, the of the old school revival, Renaissance, revolution, whatever you want to call it, was to emphasize a few pillars of play. Now, these are different depending on who you ask, but I would say the three that people seem to all agree on is

me as of an old school.

idea of

Cal (08:41.477)
Ruling over rules, which means I don’t really need to know how two players grappling looks like. What I need to be able to do is to come up with a ruling that works for my table and keep to that. That’s what rulings over rules means. It’s just don’t really focus too much on the granular. Focus on giving people a framework that they can then make up their own rules for their table. That’s number one. Number two is exploration is

And I would say discovery, if you want to mix those together, is the fundamental part of the game. Characters in the game are meant to venture out and discover the unknown. That seems very, I think, Pat, but to me it is you are expected as the GM to not actually know what’s going to happen. It’s not just about discovery for the PCs. It’s about discovery for everyone at the table. And there’s ways that you can achieve that.

day.

the

Yochai (09:25.484)
What it means is

Cal (09:40.262)
And then finally, number three is that combat is a war, not sport. Combat is not balanced. It’s not there to be a fun mini game. It’s not there to overly think about your unique character tactics and how they balance out against a matrix of combat variables. That’s not it. If you’re entering combat, that is a fail state.

We get.

Cal (10:06.638)
That means you have exhausted every other possibility because combat is not balanced. There is no such thing as CR DND where you would look at a combat rating for a monster on, know, quote unquote level one or beginning characters will face a dragon on the first level and they will all die if they’re not smart. So those are the, I would say the cardinal pillars. There’s some other ones folks will add like shenanigans, like a big part of it is shenanigans, you know, getting up to high jinx.

Another one, which is important for me, is the answer is not on your character sheet. Generally speaking, yes, your character sheet provides a framework for what you can do, but anything is possible. There is tactical infinity. Within the fiction, if you can make an argument for why something could happen, it does happen. Another is, you let the dice fall where they may. The world is not based around the characters being the heroes.

You know, you.

Cal (11:06.198)
The world is harsh and is not there to give the characters a sense of importance. Things happen whether the characters involve themselves in those things or not. It doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t react, of course it does, but if your party sees smoke on the horizon and decides not to investigate, later when they come back, that town is gone. It doesn’t wait for them to get there and save it, if that makes sense.

If you

Yochai (11:33.178)
It

If there are three doors, there are different things behind those doors. They don’t all lead to the same place. There’s no quantum ogres, that sort of thing. Now this is all my preference, but generally speaking, when folks talk about the OSR, they list one to all of those things as what they like to get out of OSR play.

Cal (11:55.488)
That means you have a community design scene focused on trying to find out, to use a story game turn. We are trying to create a situation for the characters to involve themselves in that surprises not just the players, but also the GM as well. You know, when I prepare a situation rather than a plot, I’m sitting down with some friends and we are going to explore a world together. And yes, I have stuff prepared.

way.

Cal (12:25.47)
anything is possible and I’m not forcing the players to do what I want. Another thing I forgot to mention that is probably equally as important as any of the original three pillars I mentioned is player skill over character skill. That means that you don’t really focus on how cool your magic user is. You focus on how smart the player controlling the magic user is. You don’t create situations that can be solved with a simple dice roll. You create situations

that rely on the player out thinking the GM, which means you have to design scenarios with multiple solutions. You have to design scenarios that will surprise even the person who designed them. That’s scenario. So anyways, I could say a lot about this, obviously, I’ve already done probably too much, but that’s the overall ethos of the old school. And there’s more too. There’s kind of a do it yourself punk aesthetic. You you get a lot of these

good always.

Cal (13:23.79)
Hey, I made this adventure. It’s a stapled together zine. Download it for free or $1. And then you also get these 200 page modules that are written and illustrated by one person who’s like God tier talent. And so you get this kind of wide range from the OSR. And it also doesn’t just encompass fantasy games. There are games like Mothership.

beautiful

Yochai (13:45.006)
of output.

Cal (13:52.922)
by Tuesday Night Games, is science fiction.

alien-like.

us our game where you are focused on a combat because it’s deadly you all of your wits to survive dangerous situations exploring a dangerous and harsh world you know those kinds of things are also part of this movement not just fantasy but yes of course there’s a shit ton of fantasy sorry there’s a lot of

Boiding. Using.

Yochai (14:20.248)
fantasy.

Yeah, that’s, mean, you you say you talk a lot, but that’s I guess that’s one of getting you in the postcast. Tell your piece. Giving time to Carl to say something, if you have anything. Otherwise, I’ll keep on with questions.

Yeah, you can keep on I’ll just interject when I can because I haven’t played it yet I do have the book and I’ve read through it and I my parents they were one of the proofreaders for when found to this translation and They didn’t understand the actual mechanics, but they did a preview translate. They said the translation was spot-on Anyway, that’s amazing. That makes me so happy Someone in that no, it’s it’s it’s amazing. So the game has been translated and I think 18 languages

And I tried to make that as easy as possible, but it’s not me. You I did help a little bit with the Spanish translation, but otherwise the majority of it is done by other people. And I was very excited to have the Scottish Gaelic one because obviously the word Cairn owes its story to that language. So to me, that was really exciting. But of course, I’m completely useless in that regard. having anyone say they want to translate it is just to me the greatest compliment I can hear. But the idea of showing it to

So.

Cal (15:39.522)
you know, folks who have no experience with this universe are, that’s just beautiful.

Fanch (15:47.817)
Following up on what you were just saying there about the of the OSR, ESOS and so on, before maybe we talk a bit more about Karen itself. As I was just mentioning, I see a lot of folks now younger than us, you said you started in high school. I did too, like 22 years ago. And at the time I wasn’t playing D &D either.

Fanch (16:15.52)
Loads of younger folks now, they’re really getting into TTRPG through 5e, right? That’s a big thing these days with critical role and these sort of things. And I noticed a lot of the YouTubers and influencers with them switching away from 5e to talk more about other games and especially OSR. What do you feel the stage for OSR is right now? And do you see a momentum yourself in the genre?

So my history with the OSR is complicated, and so my answer is going to be complicated, sorry. I do agree that there is a lot of interest in RPGs in general right now. I think that that peaked during the pandemic, but I feel that that’s a good thing. think fifth edition folks, more of them are, is a good thing. I like that people are doing RPGs. I do think it’s interesting because when they move to other systems, they bring a lot of the baggage with them. I’ll find this when I’m…

explaining OSR games to fifth edition players that they’ll start trying to imagine what I mean. And I can tell they just don’t understand until they actually play. There’s that. And then there’s also a history of the OSR that I think a lot of folks don’t know. You know, it started out largely in the Google Plus era where folks were playing. I think I can come back. We’ll just keep going. Carry on.

playing just the sponge. may have.

Yochai (17:43.96)
So.

My apologies.

Cal (17:48.876)
When I started playing OSR games, was in, I think, 2012 or 2013. What I found was that there were these communities, largely on Google +, that really

Really?

made it feel like there was momentum. And then when Google plus ended that momentum hit a brick wall because like many role playing game communities, they didn’t have a heart, a hearth anymore. They didn’t have a place to go. It’s taken a while for that to build back. A lot of the community is now on discord, which has its ups and downs. discord is not for everyone. You know, it’s very ephemeral. It’s a chat app. So when you get in there, you, you can’t really keep up unless you read every message and

It can be hard to navigate and it’s also not public. So you can’t just randomly discover it. Uh, so there’s this, there’s sort of a, a silo ization, uh, RPGs happening, not just OSR, but as we moved off of Google plus and found new homes in discord and on discourse and on Twitter and blue sky, whatever, um, there has been a silo ization of different communities. And I would put the OSR today.

as in a place that it has never been in, where it has essentially two groups of players in it. It has folks who played D &D in high school, but not when I was in high school, when they were in high school, which is like the 1980s or even before. And then it has folks who are literally discovering it while they are in college. So you have these two groups of 40 and 50 year old people, and then 20 and 30 year old people.

Cal (19:30.978)
both trying to play in this community of games and not really knowing how to communicate with one another. And you also see a major political difference in those groups where the older group tends to be largely one specific ethnicity and one specific sex and one kind of old fashioned way of looking at things. I’m not saying that there aren’t good players in there. There are amazing old school players in that community. And then you see another group which don’t have a lot of experience.

.

Cal (19:59.298)
but are really enthusiastic and are also far more progressive and a lot more flexible on the gender spectrum. And they’re sort of talking past each other. And there’s the natural toxicity of the internet has only further entrenched folks, which kind of gives OSR a bad name, honestly, because to me, the OSR is a beautiful, diverse, fascinating place. There are school kind of

Yochai (20:26.338)
these sort of old

folks in it who are unwelcoming, but they are kind of in their own silos and hovels now. They’ve retreated to their own holes in a lot of places. So I think the impression folks had of the USR for many years has been a negative one. And that is really inaccurate in my experience. I tried my hardest to build a community that was different than that. And I think it was largely successful because there was just a lot of people who wanted a kind of

that was.

Cal (20:56.502)
safe place to talk about these sorts of games without feeling bad about who they were or what they wanted to do. I personally ran into some pretty bad people who are now completely out of the scene because finally they’ve cleaned house. So I would say we’re in a very good place as a community with the exception that it’s very… there’s a diaspora or there’s a… I know someone who hates the use of this term but I don’t know what else to say. There’s been a balkanization of the community where you just have these little states, you know,

Grrr.

Yochai (21:03.95)
some

Yochai (21:22.082)
of community.

places run by different folks. Like I run a couple servers that people associate with me. One in particular, I’m not even on a mod on that server and people still associate it with me, you know, and I’m barely, I’m barely involved in it. And so I feel like, like there, it’s sort of, it’s, it’s not, it’s not great on that level. On the other hand, there is so much great stuff coming out. I mean, I run, I have a podcast that we review a module every week.

I’m not even a model anymore.

Yochai (21:54.478)
and we’ve

never even gotten close to running out of modules to review because we do and old stuff and that’s due to the fact that there’s just

functioning.

So the state of the OSR is good. There are people who would call it not OSR anymore. They would say it’s something else now because you no longer focus on compatibility with know, Cairn is not compatible mechanically.

with old school systems.

Yochai (22:22.2)
with the B2 key.

keep on the Borderlands. But on the other hand, you can run B2 with it. There’s conversions and it’s not hard and the philosophy is largely identical. So folks can pick up Karen and they can run B2 with it with a little bit of conversion. On the other hand, there’s over 60 or 70 modules for Karen you can buy today that are like published and I sell them in my store. You can buy them in all the places that you can run instead. is it OSR? To me, it’s about community. It’s about

play style, it’s not about compatibility. To others, it is. So it just depends who you ask. Many would say we’re in the post OSR era now, where it doesn’t have a name yet. Wrong. The OS. No. Your mileage may vary depending on who you talk to.

but it is from the SR, it’s good.

Fanch (23:14.35)
I know that that makes sense and kind of also I think we need to be a bit careful in in loads of for you know, you were mentioning how the internet can make things a little bit nasty. Sometimes I feel that this day and age it goes way beyond us, right? It goes way beyond fandoms or people playing OSR or what have you. It seems to just be a a trend. we have to be careful not to associate it with

What we do, think these kind of things would happen even if we’re like stamp collectors, you know what mean?

Yeah, the tribalism. Yeah, well, the joke in the OSR is would we have this kind of infighting about like recipe books if we were super into recipes? Would we would we say don’t don’t buy from that guy? He’s a Nazi. Don’t buy his recipe, you know, because that’s that’s the conversations we have. I do want to say, unfortunately, one of the side effects, keeping places healthy is saying no to some people. I’m not saying gatekeep. I’m saying if

of

Cal (24:14.242)
For example, a person is a noted sex offender banning the discussion of their work not only helps keep that person out, but also just stops people from fighting about it every single time it gets mentioned. like, like there are, there are folks who are fundamentally bad actors and make the scene more unwelcome to.

to folks who might otherwise.

Be interested in joining and if you just ban those discussions in one particular place It can lead to a healthier output now. There are those who say that this is a pack like this and it’s not for freedom of speech, etc Personally, I don’t give a shit like I try to keep communities healthy and the way I do that is by saying hey, this is a negative Conversation set piece have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here. That’s my kind of policy is like go ahead buy from people that you think

or docs and you should avoid.

Yochai (25:03.746)
that you

You say you don’t care if someone’s a bad actor, but on my in my spaces, the spaces that I control, I just doesn’t it’s not putting positivity on the world. And that’s kind of what I want to do, which is ironic because on my podcast, I’m like the asshole, not on purpose. I just am much more full of people’s work. And so I’m saying you can still be critical while also supporting and upholding your fellow designers. And that’s the community that I want to be part of. No, it’s.

So.

players personally.

And to see what you say about the how the diversity’s changed just in RPG in general. Like when I was in school, it was male dominated. And just today, Farnesh knows about this. We run our tabletop session here in Stornoway. And it’s three quarters woman now. And not only that, it’s young, very young girls coming along now, which is so good to see. They seem to be really taking on to this stuff. It’s just.

Cal (26:01.71)
It’s great to see like a nice diversity. it’s not just guys. They were always around. They were always around. We just made them that. Yeah, I mean, you can you can read about Gary Gygax and his biological determination. You know, the founder of D &D said my daughter didn’t play D &D, therefore women don’t. That was literally his argument. You can find these posts online that he wrote before he died. And they’re completely insane because some of the best.

still welcome.

Yochai (26:14.987)
is it.

Yochai (26:20.194)
like the Indies.

Cal (26:28.162)
War or WarGamer and RPG people in the very beginning were women and we just excluded them. And it’s not just women. It’s people who aren’t white dudes from the Midwest in the US. And that’s that that has changed. And the problem is that it’s not like anyone can stop someone from playing D &D or whatever. So you still get these people who show up sometimes and say, politics out of my table. And to me, the translation of key politics out of my table, that means

I’ll keep.

Cal (26:57.016)
key politics I don’t agree with out of my table. Because you already are, it’s not like your table has no rules. You have rules for playing the game. You’re not going to let someone bring, I don’t know, a loaded pistol to the table or something. I’m just saying you have rules. You just don’t agree with other people’s rules. And so again, I try to be welcoming to diverse perspectives, particularly those I don’t agree with. But I also think that there is this notion of no politics. And to me, no politics means

Let’s keep things the way that they are. The way that they are is not, it’s not been great historically. So, so we’re in a weird period now where you have, as you say, there’s some amazing.

And

Yochai (27:37.454)
new folks playing with us or playing openly with us. I always play.

or pl… since they were all… and that makes some folks uncomfortable and we will get past that. In 20 years, I don’t think we’ll be talking about it. I think it’ll just be… That’s my hope.

normal.

I definitely am. And at the end of the day, like, we’re here to have fun, relax and be with cool people. So it’s kind of weird when, you know, folks get really worked up and hurt, it’s not only hurt others, but they hurt themselves over it. you’re like, bro, we’re here to like, slay dragons and collect loot.

I want to hit monsters with my sword. And then later take their stuff. That is the goal. having to fight for it to be a welcoming space is actually a distraction from killing monsters inside of holes. That’s what I want to do. So I think you do. Unfortunately, there is this like, I think there is a movement where people just shut down because that’s all that’s what they want to do. They don’t want to deal with any of this stuff.

Yochai (28:26.808)
from

Yochai (28:42.478)
The two.

It’s often the case in communities where those are the loudest are really the minority. Like I think most people just want to be cool. Out people take up unfortunately the only way to drown those people out is to literally.

But the level, they have a lot of oxygen.

keep them out in some cases.

That is, I think, realization we will have move forward. Since the internet does not make this easier, it makes it harder.

Fanch (29:12.174)
All right, going back to the game now and keeping it fun.

yeah, please, sorry, sorry, sorry. no, no, Jennifer.

It’s that’s you know, those conversations are really important to have in our space as well. You know, it makes sense. But you’re going back to the game. So, you know, you’re talking about Karen and translated in 18 languages. It’s going quite well. You have a good community around it. When did you feel a second edition was needed?

And immediately.

because when I first wrote it, had always had the in mind being fleshed out backgrounds that mimic

Yochai (29:46.168)
this goal of creating

the backgrounds that you found in failed careers or in trade.

Fashionland, which were called career. Which is another weirdo OSR game. It starts with 36 backgrounds. I always wanted to do that, but I was frankly tired. It was during the pandemic and I had my kid at home all the time and I just wanted to get something out there that I could use in the games that I wanted to play. you can actually go and look everything that I wrote for Karen is and still is on the Karen.

That

Yochai (30:16.127)
in

Cal (30:23.98)
GitHub repository. So the game is not just Creative Commons, it’s open source. can literally download the game and my entire website with

You

Yochai (30:30.926)
with everything on it, is, you know, hacks and adventures and all that stuff.

venture.

find right after I released the first edition of Karen in October of 2020, there is a whole list of backgrounds, some of which I actually wrote at that time. So I always wanted to do this. I think it was good to wait for a number of reasons. I think I figured out how to explain my play style better once people had played it quite a bit and I had to keep playing. And it took time to play test. I mean, I play tested it when it was in its early stages,

answering questions.

Yochai (31:07.202)
like but

June of 2020. Playing it as my main game for years since allowed me to really make it as perfect as I can imagine. I don’t, I love the rules. There are things I would do differently for my own personal table, but as a state goal of having a generic or OSR style play that matches my expectations, I think it’s great.

did go a fairly fantasy DND equipped for.

Cal (31:35.786)
where it is right now and the backgrounds that that’s what really makes second edition the backgrounds flesh out implied world the setting of cairn which is a sort of forest fantasy eastern european what british isles inspired fantasy setting i was able

and some I able to flesh that out in a I think

more approachable way for folks who are new to role playing or folks who just don’t understand what. So to me, even though I wish I could have done it earlier, the journey was necessary and the end result was a whole bunch of lessons. And if you look at the second edition, which is two books, it’s the player’s guide and the warden’s guide, both of which you can download for free right now. You can read all of them on the website as well. You can see I’ve listed extant principles.

you

Yochai (32:26.158)
for both the players.

and the warden, you can see I’ve listed principles for how to make a dungeon, forest, how to make a setting, how to do what I think you need to do to run these kinds of games. It’s all there. having now when they ask me a question, I literally just link them to the part on the website that answers the question. That’s really the goal is to stop having to write the same thing over and over again on Discord or where have you.

how to make a

All the stuff that

Yochai (32:40.515)
folks.

Yochai (32:53.884)
So, so.

I’m very happy with where it’s.

resulted, I guess. And I’m glad that I had this journey to go on of playing and playing and playing and answering and playing and answering and so on.

I know that’s cool, that makes sense. Because reading through second edition, I could see that the DNA of the rules have not really changed. It’s really much what you added around it, the way you’ve dressed these rules, essentially, which does make a big difference, I guess, in terms of the feel you get from the game.

Yeah, so you are correct. The rules are 99 % identical. I did clarify and restate some of the rules since there was some confusion around how I use certain words and phrases.

Yochai (33:41.918)
confusion to be clear. Another could not understand why people didn’t understand but that’s just that’s part of the game. Friends later. But the are I play bonds and omens.

I’m sure as tr- so understand that.

Cal (33:53.56)
The main changes are added player backgrounds and bonds are basically getting detail that connect your character to the setting. When you roll up a random character, which most OSR games, you roll randomly to set up.

little bits of

Yochai (34:09.326)
your character’s background and stats or whatever.

You also roll a bond that ties you to the setting in a significant way.

gives you something extra to start with.

And then only one character will roll that and it ties them to greater problem in the world that the GM can choose to as a justification for what adventure they want. They’re kind of generic sort of, there’s a tree bleeding blood in this village. You know, if the person rolls that you might be able to dungeon them.

We’ve got news.

Yochai (34:31.574)
ever they’re going to go.

Yochai (34:37.346)
Is that if.

slot that into some weird land up exploring even if that wasn’t the original case work.

It does actually work. So there’s those things. And then there’s of course the backgrounds, which instead of rolling up random gear, like in first edition, all of your gear comes from the back. So if you, let’s say a fungal forage, which is this silly name that I came up with for a person who goes underground and gets mushrooms of them, you will start with a helmet that is also, you’ll start with weird stuff that is specific to your background and you’ll start with

Roll up.

Yochai (35:03.342)
weird properties and then sells them.

Yochai (35:13.326)
and you’ll start with a lantern or you’ll start with the mountains.

the rations, background tables, tell you who you are. That was sort of what I was running into with the original game. felt like there’s no way to ignore their idea of who their character is. Yeah, you have ability scores, but you only have three ability scores or attributes. You strength, have dexterity, and you have willpower.

You know?

immediately give players an idea.

Yochai (35:39.207)
as they’re called in second edition. have strength, you have power, and that’s

doesn’t tell you that much. Also, it makes you think that you are your stats, which in Karen, you are not your stats. If anything, your stats are the least interesting thing about you. They just provide a top and bottom and a floor. They don’t

you know, a ceiling give you your personality, you know.

Having a strength of five doesn’t mean you’re weak. Doesn’t mean your weakness. I wanted to give more meditative surface area, know, give them the ability to say, you know, the background of my character is interesting because I was abandoned as a child with this blacksmith who later abandoned me as well. And I have these abilities, but I never want to go back home. I liked having that random stuff just ready to go when you play the game, especially for one shots.

It could mean lot of things, it doesn’t necessarily. So give folks more textual.

Yochai (36:17.326)
but I grew up.

Cal (36:29.096)
So that was really the goal of second edition rules, clarification, slight adjustments and backgrounds. And that’s what the player’s guide is. It’s also the only place you’ll find the rules. All of the player facing rules are in the player’s guide. All of the wardens guide is non rules. There is technically rules for how factions work, but other than that, there are no real rule.

a

Yochai (36:37.251)
Bonds and Omen.

Yochai (36:53.646)
It’s all just nice tables for.

folks to generate their own settings. And one last thing I didn’t mention, the second edition players guide has procedures, dungeon crawling, wilderness exploration, you’re stuck between

and downtime. when you have of play, can say what your character does. The fit. Nice. I. You can.

The main, I think, benefit of those procedures is they just harmonize. I think the game should be run. Completely ignore them if you want. They’re totally modular. Unlike in first edition where I don’t tell you how a turn works in the dungeon. In second edition, you know exactly how a dungeon turn should work. And instead of being based on like every 10 minutes, this happens. All based on what characters do. Characters are the origin.

But.

Yochai (37:41.102)
of all activity done.

in the decision because they are messing with a system that already exists.

and that is dangerous to them.

So I could go more into detail, but to answer your question, those are the different.

expenses.

Fanch (37:55.254)
No, that makes sense. of picking up on something that came up in what you were saying. There are in Karen first edition, there are a lot of random tables. In Karen second edition, there are even more random tables. I also translated Naive first edition, which has a lot of random tables. And I have here Naive second edition, which has even more random tables. Essentially, that’s really much one of the DNA of D &D, right? Even if you look at 5e,

Even though the game is clearly not designed for randomness anymore, it’s meant to be very railroaded. 5e still has loads of random tables. It’s really part of the DNA of the game, In OSR, it’s a big thing. How do you perceive the role of randomness and these random tables in your own way to approach the game, essentially?

The thing about OST is that when you are writing a character randomly

are generally care randomly every aspect of who they are, their gear, their background. You if you generate, my dad was a farmer and I start with the pitchfork that provides very interesting scaffolding or playing characters that you are not comfortable and that tropes. And I think that is a good thing. think people sometimes control everything and that goes for GMs and players alike.

you

Yochai (39:04.59)
For.

Yochai (39:10.744)
with. Don’t fit into knee-

Yochai (39:17.557)
want to

Yochai (39:22.37)
But it really feels good to, I don’t know, put what you think play should be like, do it.

Push the boundaries a little bit about what because when you do that, you can more easily play to find out and hit those discovery and exploration. Talking about earlier, if I don’t even choose what my character is like, I won’t care as much when I’ll care to be clear, but I’m not sort of mad about it because I spent six months building up this character’s backstory and I have a bard from these black lands who’s

pillars that I was talking about.

Yochai (39:45.398)
they die.

Cal (39:58.296)
father abandoned them and all that. You still get that stuff in one or two sentences, but you don’t have as much personal investment, which adds to what I think is the, we’d say hidden, the secret. OSR play is highly valid. And I know I mentioned this earlier, how combat is war, not sport, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of it. For me, you can’t have fun exploration and discovery.

in motion.

the

sauce of

Yochai (40:21.336)
What?

Good.

and critical thinking problems.

and problem solving, if your answer is always a sword, you have to start avoiding combat in order to think outside the box because combat is ultimately a game that we all play within our RPGs, within our fantasy or games. We end up just saying, okay, different rules, folks, we’re gonna now do this thing where you might die or you might…

be defeated and then have to get rescued and there’s all this stuff that could happen. If you’re if you’re going into play because you want to play fourth edition or some tactical war game, you’re not going to have fun in an OSR game. You’re going to be constantly like, where’s the combat where I wanted to think about my tactics and my grids and I wanted to put a mini down and then say he goes, this guy goes five feet. This guy goes 10 feet. I’m going to pick this guy. know, that kind of stuff very much.

Yochai (40:59.822)
play.

Yochai (41:20.673)
is

Cal (41:24.248)
buries you in its conventions. When you play in an OSR game, if things are lethal, make it more exciting because you avoid combat because it’s scary and you do something else. You don’t say, let’s head on, attack those orcs. You say, hey, GM, is there a boulder on this mountain peak that we’re on? And the GM might say, let me see what the die of fate says. there is a boulder, but it’s really heavy. You have to spend this much time and effort to get to it.

They

Cal (41:53.548)
You might risk this. Do you still do it? That’s a much more interesting sequence of events than I run at them with my sword. And the only way you can make that situation happen in an OSR game is if you make death a big part of the game. It has to be on the table. Player character death has to be on the table, which makes games fifth edition, which do have TPKs, especially at early levels, completely incompatible with OSR Iran because it’s too hard to die.

Yochai (42:10.68)
be honest with

Yochai (42:20.526)
play later.

You spent 20 minutes in a combat session, people are looking at their phones. That’s not fun for me. That doesn’t happen in OSR games that I play. People are always focused on the combat because they avoid all costs. And if it does happen, it’s fast and brutal. And if your character dies, so be it. But if you have random tables to lead to character creation, it makes that so much the better because now you’re not as mad about this carefully crafted character.

to operate it at all costs.

Yochai (42:52.621)
You un-

Understand that the character is an avatar for your play not who you are and that isn’t what everyone thinks is fun I hope that answers that that’s the player side the GM side. There’s a whole other answer

Man, Dorothy was hanging.

Oh, sure. So on the GM side, random tables help you generate worlds you’d never think of. So I’m going to give you an example live. How do you feel about that? I’m going to give you a live example right now. All right. So, so part, part of the Karen Kickstarter was to create an open source character keeper for online play that had party management and character management. But one thing that I spent way too

you.

Yochai (43:34.136)
long on was the

Random dungeon and forest generator. So I am going to go into the random dungeon generator, which uses the tables in the Karen second edition wardens guide. I’m going to randomly for you all roll a dungeon right now, and I’m not going to read the whole thing, but I’m just going to give you an example of why I think it’s a important part of the game. So I’m going to go to the website, which is by the way, kettle right.com. But it’s free. I’m going to go to the dungeon settings. Here we go. I’m clicking roll.

I’m not going to spell it for you.

Cal (44:06.86)
Here it is. All right, so I just rolled the dungeon.

It is a…

Dungeon made dirt, mob family, no use was a hideout. There is a cliff door that is the it is shrouded in mist and the reason folks built the dungeon in the first place was to obfuscate some greater threat. Inside of the dungeon there is one faction. They are

of built by the original

Yochai (44:22.487)
is the entrance.

Cal (44:36.396)
largely a practical mob family made up of a stubborn leader and their goal is ultimately transformation.

of their own environment.

But they face an obstacle

some kind of opposition. I don’t say what I’m going to go.

bit more here. There are in this dungeon there are 17 rooms. I’m just going to read you one or two of these rooms.

Yochai (44:57.998)
One room that shoots lightning.

Another has a stable and the way you know that it’s a stable is because there are stains on the And finally another is a monster Which is in the process of dying and the kind of monster it is is a bone construct So that’s just a couple things I just read I could do four or five of these table rolls and I would generate a completely random dungeon that I

the

Yochai (45:11.118)
floor.

Cal (45:32.14)
would never come up with on my own. would never think of, know, two centaurs mating, which is what I got. It’s one of the other rooms here is, two centers meeting. I would never come up with that. So random tables give the GM the opportunity to expand and surprise themselves and come up with ideas that frankly, I’m not smart enough to come up with. I just steal a lot of great tables, put them all together and then see what happens.

Oh, you know what would be cool?

Yochai (45:44.526)
That’s awesome!

Yochai (45:50.51)
to it.

Cal (46:02.22)
And that’s the beauty of rolling random tables.

Man, I have horrible images now in my head.

Sorry, my fault. It is doing its job, though.

Yeah, you know, and that’s definitely the fact that you don’t choose, actually don’t constrain yourself in whatever you imagine a dungeon might look like. A couple more things in my head that came up through the conversation. Kind of going back on the lethality you were mentioning, one of the things I really like about Cairn is that it is lethal, but it’s not actually as lethal as some other OSR games because you have, essentially you have

HP in it, which for people who don’t know Karen, you don’t actually translate that as hit points, but as hit protection, which essentially is you getting tired of avoiding the enemy until you can’t take it anymore and you actually start getting wounded. Which I find it really nice because then at end of the fight, you get all of your HP back because you have a breather. And you get, when you get wounded, you actually lose strength. You lose your ability, which is

Fanch (47:11.758)
fairly realistic, actually. The results I find as a DM playing Karen that I enjoy that it is lethal, but you actually have a bit of room there to not kill your player straight away right in combat. What led you to move away from the hit point mechanic, which is such a staple of the genre, to have this kind of heat protection and taking into account tiredness to go into then losing skills?

Right, so I would say your definition of hip protection is accurate. The only thing I would add is it’s sort of a

gauge, you know, like a slow

decreasing bar of stamina, energy, risk aversion. It’s kind of all those things which I would actually make the argument. Hit points are also those. If I’m playing straight up D &D and I have, I don’t know, 16 hit points and I lose six of them, I’m not necessarily wounded. I might be just fine depending on how the GM wants to narrate combat. It’s always been that way. Hit protection just so

skill, re- in luck.

Yochai (47:59.566)
things in D &D.

Cal (48:18.158)
finalize that abstraction. I stole the idea from Chris McDowell’s Into the Odd. He is the, I think, most famous designer in this space. A lot of things really brilliantly. I did modify quite a lot of it for the second edition of Karen in that I clarified how I prefer to do things I came up with. The idea of abstracting hip protection that it is in Karen is 100 % owed to Into the Odd. I would make the distinction though

He does a lot of things.

Yochai (48:38.152)
the way that he can.

the way it

Yochai (48:47.842)
that for me, PE was just.

calling it HP. So that folks kind of get the idea. Chris, in his infinite wisdom, later went and changed it to guard in Mythic Bastionland, which is his sort

I’m

Yochai (49:02.382)
of evolution of into the.

the that he’s currently, he’s been working on it for a long time. It should be out to backers early next year, I believe, but it’s a sort of Arthurian fan with Into the Odd World combat. Folks listening to this podcast might

to see rules and lot more tactical.

Enjoy looking into that.

My argument keeping the word HP was because folks who played D &D sort of get it. There is the counter argument. They also get confused by how it’s not actually the HP they’re used to. You can’t always win. can I say? Guard is a great way to call it though. Guard or Stamina or whatever. Preference would be to keep HP as it is because when you get in the combat and I say, wow, you just lost three

Yochai (49:26.378)
have before.

That

Cal (49:51.222)
people generally know what that means. But it is really important to mention that the underlying mechanic that makes HP work and makes the whole subtract from strength bit work is that in Cairn and many other games of its ilk, there is no roll to hit. you roll, all the rolling you’re doing automatically damages your opponent. So if I roll a d8 and do 6 damage to my opponent, there’s no…

Roll.

Yochai (50:18.446)
Let’s see.

Succeeded it just succeeds. There’s no let’s roll first to see how your proficiency and attack bonus make you hit this person and then let’s roll their defense There’s none of that you just roll and it’s and it hurts the opponent end of story because you don’t lose in that There are two don’t like it because it takes away some of the tactics. But to me, it’s all granularity. It’s all arguing about the same exact Photographs that are slightly different, you know, I

anything about.

Yochai (50:49.582)
of removing…

hits from any kind of or rolls the hits from any kind of system. There are other games that do this. There’s a game called Vagabonds of Die Fed, which is a PBTA game where you roll 2d6 to hit and then whatever. If you are successful, the damage is applied automatically. Maze Rats does that as well. It’s not original to Karen. The way that it works in Karen though speeds up combat makes it super deadly because you’re always getting hit, but also you sort of a refillable gauge. The minute that combat is over,

As long as you have the frame of mind to take a breath, drink some water, be out of danger for a minute, all of your HP comes back because you kind of reset your endorphins are high, you’re in a full combat state, but once you’ve had a few minutes to calm down, HP returns. Strength does not return quickly. And so you really are punished for not being careful in combat.

Yeah, have that’s yeah, that’s basically that’s what I appreciate about it. Right. It’s you start losing strength and then it gives it adds to the story. It had to the narrative because now you’re wounded. You need to do something about it and you’re not just going to, you know, five asleep on it. yeah. Just lost my arm, but a good night’s sleep can fix it. Right. So I, it also adds to then the players are like, okay, two of us are actually wounded. What do we do now? It adds something to the game, which

is way more exciting in many ways. I have one last question that I had thought of a bit before this. And you kind of briefly mentioned it a little while ago. When you play Karen yourself, do you have house rules or do you play by the book?

Yochai (52:36.49)
as

of now, I would say I play almost completely by the book with second edition. There was a time where I used the Glogg magic hack I wrote. Folks who don’t know, Glogg is Goblin’s law of gaming. From the Goblin Punch blog, it’s an OSR sort of system where magic in it is super cool and original. I really love the magic in Glogg. So I for a while ran my own

completely

Yochai (52:50.222)
It’s

Yochai (52:54.254)
where the map is still visible.

Cal (53:03.832)
Karen one E as is, but I replaced the magic with the Glog magic because I love it. For folks who are interested in Glog, check it out. There’s also a really simple hack on the Karen website that lets you just drop in magic system if you want. As of right now, running it exclusively largely because it works. It’s kind of my end result. It’s my house rule is what I was playing. And I do some stuff that is technically not

I’m running with two E.

Yochai (53:25.55)
You know it to eat

in the book because it’s new. A lot of my adventures that I run I later publish and they are part of the kind of official Karen-Uva. I have like a Karen adventure series with two published adventures so far but so far and I’m working on the ninth. I just haven’t really published the other ones because it’s a lot of work. So I will eventually come out with three and four probably really quickly and right now I’m running an adventure for my group that is in this sort of

I’ve written eight.

Yochai (53:53.536)
so.

Yochai (53:58.798)
I’m right.

Cal (54:03.742)
space called the roots, which is a kind of vast underground setting that is in a different laws of physics and time. And I’m running an adventure right now for that that I want to sort of drop next year. folks interested in that setting, which is hinted at in the Worden’s Guide, will be like, hey, that’s how you do it. So yeah, so my answer to question is, yeah, I run the…

You know, it obeys different.

Yochai (54:20.942)
folks who are

Yochai (54:32.448)
it.

written.

All right. Cool, man. That’s neat. And yeah, to anybody who’s listening who hasn’t played Karen, I highly recommend it. Plus, can, even if you’re not convinced at the end, it’s a, you download the thing, you learn the rules in 10 minutes, you can run it, you see whether you like it or not. So, I don’t know. Thank you, man.

You’re welcome.

With that we are coming up for time there. So Okay, I know I’ve not said much but I’ve just been enjoying listening to you and fans talking and you guys are well into this but Just to for the listeners if they want to find you if they have questions for you or any information they want to be caring Sure. Yeah. Well first off if you’re interested in Karen as I said, you can actually download it for free You can also get the players guide print on demand at cost right now

Cal (55:26.13)
on Amazon or Lulu or DriveThruRPG or from my own Karen store, you can go to KarenRPG.com to find that. The warden’s guide will be cost early next year when backers get their copies. I’m kind of…

available also at

Yochai (55:41.422)
waiting for that. That said, you can

You can also find me at NewSchoolRevolution.com. I just wrote a post on how I do play-by-posts. So I play on Discord sometimes. Well, am presently doing it, but you both.

I post on it might be interesting to folks.

Yochai (55:54.587)
I do in person, online and on Playboi Post.

And then lastly, I have a weekly podcast with my co host Brad Kerr, who is a very

adventure writer in the OSR and has very different perspectives where we review an adventure every week. You don’t need to know anything about Karen to listen to that podcast, although it is between two Cairns.

which is a…

Completely silly name that I did not come up with that’s all Brad and it is not about Karen, but it is a

Yochai (56:25.314)
funny title, so we use it.

And that is a free to listen podcast with no advertising. We do have a patreon for bonus episodes and stuff, but we release a weekly episode. It’s about an hour-ish every week. We review modules find that at patreon.com slash between two Karens or on any, you know, podcasting platform if you really feel like hearing my voice more. Although frankly, I don’t talk this on the podcast. We’ll put all the links in the description for the listeners so they can find you. Fange, your final thoughts?

So since we.

or you can.

Yochai (56:48.354)
much.

Fanch (56:57.65)
Hi, not much. I’m glad we could actually talk because when I was translating Karen, we’re just chatting on Discord to get everything sorted. it’s really cool to have your kind of the background and your thoughts. I remember, know, when translating, Nave, Ben Milton put a lot of notes, you know, in it is like, yeah, that’s why I’m doing this rule. That’s why. And actually sometimes as a DM, especially, I find it so valuable to have somebody tell you like, that’s why I wrote it this way.

Great.

So, so yeah, no good.

It’s great that he did that. I love the designer commentary. Also inspired me to do a actual play a couple years ago where I recorded myself running a game of Karen First Edition and I did what Ben Milton did in his own run through of Winner’s Daughter. If you change these subtitles to, think, Klingon or something.

He also actually I

Yochai (57:47.15)
I

Yochai (57:52.878)
You can get my

I… DM notes as to why I made certain decisions at certain times in the actual play. You can find that on YouTube if you look up Karen Pye. A Barrow of the Elf King is the name of…

decisions at certain

Cal (58:08.812)
Adventure I Ran, so Karen Barrow of the Elf King by Nate Trinay, you can find that and you can either watch me run it and see how I do things, although it’s a bit different now with second edition, or you turn on the subtitles and read my stupid commentary that I wrote up. And Fáin Sharmá writes, does Tech Mobile still sell the GARC translation?

You can.

Fanch (58:31.97)
Last time I was there, they had it, yep.

Yeah, so if you’re after the Gaelic translation, it’s available in our tech mobile or local kind of geek shop here. And yeah, they’ve got the English version as well. And with that, we always do this for all our guests. Would you ever consider coming over for Ocon? I know it’s a bit of a journey for you. Absolutely. You know what I want to do is I want to go to Dragon Meat. is it Dragon Meat or Dragon Mood? No, I can’t remember. The one in the UK. I love cons, especially

Moot or which one?

Yochai (59:02.254)
like not and it was a nightmare but

Not giant ones. I went to Gen Con. I would consider it. Yes, is my answer. How we could make that happen, I don’t know. But you never know. You could join virtually or something like that. we can. the same thing. Yeah. OK. I think you would enjoy your own Con. It’s with a small convention volunteer run and we do it for the love of it, That’s the best kind. I mean, I just had a con in my town in Massachusetts.

and it was put up by volunteers and it was freaking amazing and especially I didn’t have to go anywhere but it was so great it was it was smaller quote-unquote small ones of like 200 people is an amazing experience. right okay well Ocon’s definitely the one for you then. Also I get to hear more lovely accents which I will say as an English as a second language speaker I struggle with some

on

Cal (01:00:01.502)
accents. Not well, maybe Gleswegian a little bit, but it’s more south though. It’s so. I’ll watch a movie with my wife and I’ll say what did he just say? And then show or I’ll turn on subtitles to try to like what did that? I know they’re speaking English, but my God, I can’t. My wife studied at St. Andrews, by the way, and as a very. She’s able to understand people with.

the others I have worked from.

Cal (01:00:31.342)
very thick Scottish accents of different kinds and the How do you say it? But have readies how do you say the? Island every day’s okay. I the one I have trouble with is um, I lost it. They sound like Norwegians to me. I’m sorry Shetland Shetland Isles, that’s the one I have time with

The…

Yochai (01:00:57.486)
you

No, but the accent you really want to hear is the northeast of Scotland, Doric. It’s its own, that’s nearly its own language that.

I mean, I call it in every language it is, it’s all language. Just saying.

Well, all these are varieties, right? So I try not to I try I I always say like, well, Danish and Norwegian, what’s the are they different languages or are they varieties? And in Yiddish, you say the difference between a language and a dialect is an army. That’s like the joke in Yiddish, which which Yiddish is a language. But people call it a dialect of German. And I’m like, no, it’s like it’s very old and it has it is.

Yes, Germans can understand it, but it is very… the fact that I can read it but not understand it to tell you enough, it’s not. Anyhow. All right. Anyway, thank you very much, Jochai, for coming along and we might have you on in the future. I think we’d be up for that. Yeah, I’d love it. And thank you, Farns, for coming along as a guest. As a guest host and I’m sure I’m going to have you back on at some point.

Yochai (01:01:44.343)
Fanch (01:02:04.946)
Will I have a choice? don’t think so.

Hahaha

All right, thank you everyone and take care wherever you are. Thank you very much.

Kitty.