Carcosa Mission Creep (Cha'alt campaign, session 16)

 

Only 3 players this session.  It's summer, and stuff happens, but I'm happy we got to play.  Anything less than 3 players, and my current mindset is to cancel the game.  However, maybe I should have a little RPG something something on the backburner in case of only 2 players... might be the perfect time to playtest a new thing?

Anyways, we have Nix, Jua'an, and Gorra.  As the PCs and their purple-people + orange dude entourage left the caves for the Nameless Plateau, the muddy purple sky darkened and it started to hail.  Seeing black waters on their left and jungle on their right, they sought shelter under the canopy of the jungle.

One of the Carcosa natives suggested that everyone secure loose belongings just in case one or more lemurians sneaks up and grabs a piece of their gear.  Who or what are the lemurians?  They're a vaguely humanoid species of lemur that live in the jungle.  Smarter than the average Earth monkey, but they can't speak and are slightly larger than our lemurs.  

As a decoy, one of the purple-men picked a vegetable or fruit that was a cross between an eggplant and a banana from a nearby vine and had it sticking out of his open fly.  Sure enough, a lemurian soon grabbed that, while others got a colorful silk scarf from a purple harem girl, and Nix' power ring.

The lemurians were easy to chase as that one had the colorful scarf in his hands... leading the PCs straight to an ancient temple rumored to have been built by the snake-men thousands of years ago.  After getting their stuff back (without having to resort to violence), the PCs ventured inside.  Fears of lethal guardians inside did little to dissuade the adventurers.  

Before I forget, a few of those shining tetrahedrons were not that far away in the sky, revolving around an even larger shining tetrahedron.  Strange and disconcerting...

The temple had Carcosa-glyphs etched into the stone on the outside of its cyclopean masonry, but none of the adventurers could read it - especially without their sorcerer companion.

No sooner did a newly promoted orange-man scout ahead than 3 ethereal shoggoth-worms appeared.  The orange-man went over to greet and negotiate with them, but a shoggoth-worm bit off most of his shoulder and also the poison weakened him to the point where he was just lying there, asking for help... which would not come until after the ensuing battle.

The blaster was barely affective, but Jua'an's sword could damage them.  Gorra, being a priest, hadn't (ever?) used his eldritch beam power and this might qualify as a Lovecraftian abomination - just because you don't see any tentacles doesn't mean they're not actually there.

Yes, his scorching beam of lavender light seared the ethereal shoggoth-worms.  Meanwhile, Jua'an got a telepathic message from his sword, or rather, the eldritch-eye that was part of his new magical blade.  It told him to call upon the blade's power, uttering the name of some Great Old One or other.  Jua'an became super-charged... fuchsia (still crystal, though)... with a third eye... and his personality was different.  He was still Jua'an, but also someone completely new.  I'm going to have Jua'an's player determine aspects of this other fellow, named Zeno, before next we game.

Now, attacking with Advantage and doing double the damage, Zeno made quick work of the creatures.  Once vanquished, the lemurians worshiped the PCs as gods.  Thinking it might be handy to have 4 monkey-people on the "payroll," they took 4 along with them into the further gloom of this snake-men temple.

They encountered a couple humanoids, jale-men, hiding behind some rock formations.  These were warriors of an entire jale tribe living in this temple.  They accessed the temple from a different way than the main entrance and have been living here for about a year.  Meaning them no harm (yet), the PCs asked these two to bring them to their people.

I read the description of the color jale and speculated that the hue might look slightly different to different people, which caused Jua'an to wonder if their coloring looked different to each other, and if so, how do they tell each other apart from others?

The jale-men introduced the PCs to their people, showed them the grandest point of interest in the cave system, a golden pylon.  However, that area of the temple was infested by creepers (half spider and half man from the Beneath Kra'adumek adventure).  After killing a few creepers (though 2 of the 3 PCs were paralyzed during the fight), they reached the gold pylon.  Unfortunately, the gold pyramid key that opened the pylon was missing.

Assuming the pylon key was somewhere in this temple, the PCs began to explore, intending to eventually make their way back to the creeper caves in order to smoke them out and search their lair.

Their exploration led them to a gigantic eyeball that was attempting to absorb several jale-men into its pupil.  They hacked away at some of the tentacles, saved all but one of the jale-men, and then decided to leave well enough alone as the eyeball attempted to force itself into the mind of a PC.

Then, they found a hunting party of yellow-men who found their way into the temple (no one asked, so I didn't provide a reasonable explanation).  They had cornered a large demon-rat which Nix shot for them.  They went away in peace.

Next, there was a jale-shaman digging at the base of this corroded metallic monolith carved with Carcosa-glyphs.  The shaman divulged that the purple-men were weakened by their recent ordeal and ripe for attack, which is why he was digging for clams.  He found 3 by the time the PCs had heard his story.  Inside the clams were tiny worms known as verma'aqua.  Once you remove their poisonous egg-sac, swallowing a verma'aqua yielded psionic powers within 2 or 3 days... and when the swallowed worm fully matured in 18 months, it bursts out of your chest (occasionally, the host survives - save or die).

Being composed of sand, Gorra took one, and I think the PCs took the 3rd one with them.  In exchange, the shaman got that trident +1 Nix had been carrying around for awhile.  The shaman took a handful of jale-men with him to attack the purple-men in their caves and reach a lower system of caves which only the purple-men chief knew how to access.  The shaman also gave the PCs a "book," which was really several parchment pages strung together, revealing the mystery of the Carcosa-glyphs so they could be understood.  

The monolith warned of the forbidden zone and toxic levels of radiation; however, that message was already thousands of years old.

Heading back to the creepers, the PCs narrowly avoided a mauve worm that was burrowing through the cave system.  The PCs fired a flaming wooden spear tied with peatmoss into the creeper cave, started a fire at the mouth of their cave, and covered that recent worm hole with a blanket from the jale-men.

After awhile, all the creepers were dead, allowing the PCs a chance to thoroughly investigate their lair.  They found the gold pylon-key, a laserdisc of Rochelle, Rochelle: a young woman's erotic journey from A'agrybah to Za'arnath, various high-tech parts, and 8 hexagonal coins of turquoise.

We stopped the session just before the PCs went into the pylon.  I got to use one of my new maps, as well.  Not my favorite, but it's weird aesthetic suited the oddball environment.

A few choice phrases heard 'round the table...

• "Would a sleaze-based weapon have it's own +5 bonus?  It definitely has a strange Cha'altian logic to it."
• "Like being touched by God... or a God."
• "Our healthcare plan includes a cyber-surgeon for lost limbs in the call of duty, but passage to the cyber-surgeon, that's not included.  There's a co-pay for that."
• "Carcosan men hobbies include running for their lives, trying not to be sacrificed by Old One worshiping sorcerers, and fucking like crayola rabbits."
• "Fat chicks come from aliens."
• "Go to your happy place while we commit atrocities." 
• "Bad mojo is our business."
• "By the time we get back to Cha'alt, I bet everyone will be drinking New Gods soda."

Next session will be Saturday, July 6th.  We're so close to VENGER CON III: Revenge of the OSR that I can smell it... If you want to game with us, get yourself a weekend badge right over here.

Enjoy,

VS

p.s. Need your hardcover Cha'alt books?  I got you covered, hoss.  Also, in a week or so I'll be launching another Cha'alt-related Kickstarter campaign.  Stay tuned!