Lots of stuff going on, in real life and gaming. This will not be an exhaustive summary, only the barest of details shall be provided because I'm falling behind and have to prepare for Saturday's restart of our face-to-face Cha'alt campaign going on its 4th year. Let's get to it...
Session XXX... you know what, I'm just going to give you the story so far, rather than break it up into session chunks. I'm losing track, but want to maintain the rhythm
Huey Lewis and the News was playing just off-screen pretty much the entire time - especially their song Pineapple Express.
The PCs managed to wander into a Chinese restaurant and were told to come up with their own ha'aiku before they'd be shown the slut-glyph carved upon the floor of their fine establishment. ST came up with a good one, and then they saw it...
The pimp who showed them threw a special sand on the glyph and it glowed with magenta fire.
Then, they found a really big room containing a giant spider that was sleeping on the floor glyph they needed to complete the ha'aiku. Since they still had that dreaming insect that would allow them to enter people's dreams, they figured why the Hell not and squirted that jale-hued dream juice everywhere, temporarily trapping them in the giant spider's dream.
There were other, smaller spiders in the room too. After a trip to the women's restroom and emerging with a pair of panties, the other spiders got excited and started to spider-jack as the PCs got sleepy, entering the giant spider's dream.
They're in some kind of cave with a spider-woman who looks a bit like Sydney Sweeney. She asks the PCs to kill a man. Intrigued, they follow her to see what's going on. Oh yeah, ST, being a droid, doesn't dream like we do and so the sleep juice wouldn't work on him. But he had an idea of creating an interactive simulation with computers and stuff that would allow him to also enter the dream, albeit virtually.
The PCs see a snake-man viewing the interior of a magic portal. That portal shows the PCs themselves drinking and watching strippers dance in an A'agrybah cantina. Curious, the adventurers watch as Ka'az is stabbed by a stripper.
All Hell breaks loose as the PC doubles are in combat and the actual PCs are fighting people, and it's chaos. Plus, Ka'az had sex with another woman that looked an awful lot like Sydney Sweeney, but not at all like a spider. Afterwards, he pulled a small Cthulhu idol out of her vagina, adding that to his written list of treasures... as one does.
By the time they saw the little-person riding a tricycle, the dream was ending and they were back in that room with the spiders. All the little spiders were tired from their exertion, and the PCs wrote down the entire ha'aiku...
Pussy tendrils
Sickly sweet
With pungent fish taco meat
Had a new player. During the back and forth of trying to figure out what character concept he wanted, I thought of black-elves, like the drow depicted in old-school D&D modules. Not dark skinned but pitch black, but their name and character is derived from black metal... although, their skin is just as black as the unquiet void.
Still thinking about that racial special ability. What I wrote later in the session was that black-elves consider all other "dark" elves to be a bunch of virtue-signaling pussies.
It's been a common theme lately that we get a new player and have to tell them that this right here, talking back and forth, me describing stuff and you guys telling me what your character says and does, that's the game. There's no character sheet, no long process of character generation, no map or tokens or any of that. It's just communicating what's in our imagination.
Sometimes, that blows peoples' minds; other times it seems obvious, freeing, actually quite liberating. That's how I run my game, at least virtually. But, really, that's what it's like in real life face-to-face sessions, too.
So the gigantic spider moved off the glyph on the floor, so the PCs could read it. He was in the corner of the room making fuchsia and chartreuse balloon animals with the smoke from his bong that was carved with intricate arachnid-glyphs.
Now, they have the full ha'aiku, and their guide, A'ahkmed, asked if he could take them straight to the magenta door. He was acting very anxious and shifty, so the PCs kept an eye on him. As they traveled, A'ahkmed walked faster and faster, like he was determined to get there first.
The PCs tried to stop him, and that's why their guide revealed himself to be some kind of insectoid. There was a scuffle in the race to get to the magenta door. A'ahkmed tripped and lost his glasses, ST jumped on his prone form and interrogated him, learning that he was offered amnesty by the Fraternal Sect of Insectoids to get on the other side of the magenta door first so he could turn on the death-field on the other side.
The jig being up, the PCs entered into Cremza'amirikza'am through the magenta door and found the lever which activated the death-field. And we learned there's a word for "hate-boner" on Cha'alt, and it's queur-thode.
As the adventurers explore the tunnels and caves of this cinnamon-infused underworld, the sorcerer Niccolo creates a sand-imp named Sandy who can scout ahead and do light manual labor.
Sandy leads them down a path that gets brighter as they go. They eventually back off from a huge sandworm with a luminous crystal brain. The PCs have a cunning plan - they don the pantomime sandworm costume and hope for the best. Sure enough, the crystal-brain worm passes by them without batting its neck-penis. Well done!
They keep going and can either head lower down the tunnel or up an escalator. They choose the latter and find themselves in a kids' chain-restaurant pizza place. There are large pizza-spiders with pineapple topping crawling all over the restaurant.
After some exploration, a green portal appears and some guy named Xem gets out and asks the PCs if they've seen any Federation soldiers around. They say no, and Xem tells the PCs that the Federation are coming and to prepare themselves. Then 7 red portals appear, surrounding them.
From this day henceforth, I declare the 13th session of a campaign shall include a flashback to an earlier time in the PCs' history. For this session, we started with 20 years ago. ST was a wealthy zoth baron sitting in his 70s decor office high above the desert with a big breasted secretary taking dictation.
Ka'az was late for school. He slept in and his stepmom was feeling naughty.
The other two guys, another noob (meant in the best possible sense) and Dirk were trapped in a locked room with only colored popsicle sticks to work with.
Eventually, The Saint entered a duel with a rival who was upset about ST winning yet another award from the zoth fracking achievement committee.
Oh yeah, while the PCs were still at the pizza place, there was a shootout between them and the Federation (who were also humanoid bugs, like in Rick & Morty). ST rolled a critical hit and so did another PC, which whittled them down. I rolled crappy and did minimal damage. The last 2 escaped. Remember last year when I came out with Fairy Dust just after Gary Con 2025 and before VENGER CON IV?
Basically, if the PC wants something, they have to carry the narrative load by justifying the thing they're carrying, experience they've had, someone they know or something in their background, etc. I ask them 3 pointed questions and if they can answer them sufficiently, then they get what they wanted... within reason and subject to limitations and possible backfiring.
Check out Fairy Dust right over here!
Well, the new guy wanted to be an expert pizza maker so he could throw that pizza pie really well as the Federation goons were escaping back through their portal. I asked my questions, and he answered. Boom, working in the pizza industry for years before becoming an adventurer is now part of your backstory - congratulations, hoss!
I was quite pleased that it happened and I got to try out a mechanic that I hadn't really utilized since about 10 months prior at last year's Gary Con. Yes, he smacked that Federation soldier in the face with piping-hot pizza. Ouch!
And Nicollo used his detect magic to find a soft drink cup half-full of zoth. Score! The sorcerer, for some reason, wanted his facsimile pixie to drink it, knowing that could go bad. Sure enough, the entity inside the purple pixie shell grew more powerful... but not so powerful that he could break out.
But then, Ka'az's player stimulated the ELDRITCH Cha'alt X-Card. The entity had the Innsmouth taint and opened a portal where an image (maybe the real thing, who knows?) of the entity but as a frog-man was in a black space, sitting on greenish soapstone cyclopean masonry and playing the harmonica.
As the PCs are chit-chatting, the frog dude whips out a thermal detonator and throws it through the portal at the PCs. Quick thinking and even quicker reflexes sent ST's foot on a one-way mission to thermal detonator town. He kicked it back through the portal and it exploded.
What was left of the frog-man was soon no more as he took out a dagger and began stabbing himself in the belly until finally death claimed his amphibian ass... perhaps as some half-assed, metagaming way of robbing the PCs of experience points?
That's where we'll end it today, my friends! Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing this where other gamers will either love or hate it.
Until next time... enjoy. ;)
VS
p.s. Yes, weekend badges are now available for July 2026's VENGER CON V: The Will To Power. Want a great new TTRPG community where you can hang out with other gamers, get ideas, advice, and training in order to improve? Look no further than the fastest-growing group on X - it's the Kult of Kort'thalis. Want the hardcover Cha'alt trilogy? Here's how (and they're currently on sale!)!!
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