Cairn puts magic entirely into objects — a spellbook is one slot and a Fatigue to read, a relic
is one slot and a recharge condition — and then caps a character at ten slots, of which filling
the last drops you to 0 HP. That makes the interesting question about an item not what does
it do but what does it do per slot of pack space. Which is a question the
encounter oracle can answer, because it already prices a fight:
give the party the item, run the same fights on the same dice, and see how much of the toll
goes away.
The party doing the carrying
Value is measured in toll averted — the same unit the oracle uses for encounters, the
expected fraction of the party that doesn't walk away — averaged over a fixed basket of six
fights: five goblins, four skeletons, three bandits, three wolves, one ogre, one troll — with
every creature's abilities switched on, so the troll gets back up. A mixed basket matters:
armour is worth far more against the swarm, a blast bomb against the crowd, a bigger die against
the big one.
Every item, by value per slot
The cliff
The same shield, offered to the same party carrying more and more junk. This is the number that
makes Cairn's inventory a game rather than a list.
How to read this
Zero does not mean useless. The simulator sees armour, damage dice, carrying
capacity, the nine spells with combat mechanics, and the handful of relics with a curated
effect. It does not see a relic that swaps two people's minds, a spellbook that charms a
guard, or anything resolved in the fiction — which is most of Cairn. Items the model cannot
see are greyed out and scored 0.0000 exactly, and that number is a statement about the model,
not the item.
Spellbooks are priced now. Reading one costs a turn and a Fatigue — a slot — and the
model charges for both. Sixteen of the hundred spells are simulated; the rest do nothing in a
fight, and putting them here at zero would misrepresent what they are for.
So are the bombs. Cairn's one-use blast items are the sharpest things in the game per
slot — a blast sphere is a d12 across the whole room, once — and they sit at the top of this
table. Their single use is spent in the fight, which is why an ordinary weapon eventually
outperforms them in a long one.
Both runs use the same dice. Value is a difference between two simulations, and they
are seeded identically, so an item with no mechanical effect measures exactly zero rather than
drifting around it. Any non-zero reading is therefore a real effect, however small.
"Best holder" is the party being sensible. The average column is what a random piece
of loot is worth; the best column is what it is worth once the party works out who should
carry it. The gap between them is the value of thinking about it.
This is a stand-and-fight model. Everything the
oracle's caveats say applies here too. An item that helps you
avoid the fight entirely is worth more than anything in this table, and scores nothing in it.