First, you've probably heard that WotC is bringing Dark Sun back out of retirement - even when many old-school experts believed that would never happen.
While I don't intend to give any money to corporations that hate me (and other "normal" gamers), it's aesthetically the most inviting move D&D could have made. Not at all gay woke commie fodder which 5.5 has become known for. Whenever folks mention new Dark Sun on social media, I hope you'll help me in mentioning Cha'alt, as Dark Sun helped inspire my campaign setting.
I also want our next session to be a Dark Sun / Cha'alt crossover that celebrates the dying world of Athas! If anyone wants to comment their suggestions, I'm all tentacles. FYI, I've already got Thri-kreen rape-gangs written down.
Normally, we wouldn't have gamed yesterday (as we're on an every-other-week schedule), but the wife and one of our kids is on vacation. Since I'm not a teenage boy in a John Hughes movie, I decided to GM our Cha'alt campaign rather than throw a raging kegger.
This session definitely felt more subdued, which on the one tentacle, makes me long for the truly fucked-up craziness that Cha'alt can bring. But given enough perspective, the realist in me knows that they can't all be bat-shit insane fever dreams.
Our 13th session in the 4th year of this campaign was a sort of mid-campaign reset, just coming off the big finale the last time we were all together (minus Strum). The stage was reset, exposition was doled-out, and travel plans arranged by a helpful NPC, the Royal Vizier of A'agrybah.
Weeks passed as the adventurers rested, recovered, and trained for whatever lay ahead. I had each PC come up with at least one thing they've been working on, and if that thing comes up in the next few sessions, they'll get Advantage on it.
Strum was managing his battle with addiction - the party's sorcerer had gone down the z-hole, as in zoth (chartreuse gold, Cha'altian tea... effulgent ichor). And that's also where he was during his absence. His player also asked me to come up with something to "game mechanic" his zoth addiction, so I'm going to put this right here...
Roll on the following random table when a zoth addict uses this uncontrollable substance...
- He goes into a zoth-induced coma and will awaken in 1d30 hours.
- His addiction has reached a fevered pitch; he must use zoth again within 90 minutes or fly into zoth-rage where magic is pain and everyone shall be made to suffer.
- The sorcerer's magic items become... 1) unattuned, and must be reattuned; 2) one item must make a saving throw with the same chances as the sorcerer himself, and if that save fails, the item self-destructs; 3) 1d3 powers are taken away from his magic items; or 4) one magic item gains a strange new power.
- Nothing happens
- The sorcerer has wild mood swings ranging from depression to mania to stoicism to obsession with cheese (yes, in that order).
- He must make a saving throw; if he fails, the sorcerer has zoth poisoning (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, body aches, etc.). But if successful, the sorcerer's spells are super-charged for the next 20 minutes, followed by a 40-minute crash where he can't cast anything at all.
Bishop Crane is in the process of building the church and another temple to the righteous redeemer, believing that the Old Ones have always been the Lords of Light. He's also keeping tabs on Vromka'ad's tower (which, for a very short period of time used to be their tower).
He discovered that the Federation have phase-shifted the tower slightly out of this reality, enough so that no one can go in or out.
Ug spent the majority of his time using the metal titan (so far unnamed) as a sort of Chat GPT, asking it questions in order to learn more about the world, while not fully realizing that it just tells him what he wants to hear and confirms any and all biases the lizardtaur warrior already had.
From our last half-session, Tinker has sort of evolved into Beigeizona, a valley-girl pixie-fairy who's looking for the missing pages and/or scrolls of a shadow assassin's guild book of dark magic that only the last survivor of the tontine gets to keep. How the completed or even separated tome knows what to do and where to go when someone in the tontine dies is anyone's guess. It's possible there's a "magical discord" handling all the behind the scenes stuff. And perhaps Beigeizona is tinkering with such a system.
If the Tinker / Beigeirona player wants to create a new PC for the Cha'alt / Dark Sun crossover session, maybe he can play a mul, half-giant, thri-kreen, or cannibal halfling? ;)
Speaking of behind the scenes, so the whole tontine thing came about in that previous half-session where I had the two new PCs (Beigeizona and the Golden Girls type character that temporarily replaced Ug) roll on the backgrounds table in my old How To Game Master Like A Fucking Boss, and she got the shadowy assassin book prize for being the last to die in the tontine - the tontine being a major plot-point in this old movie (The Wrong Box) that I watched with my Dad a couple times years and years ago. It was one of his favorites, and watching movies and tv shows together is a fond memory.
So, to anyone who thinks my Living Story approach to running the game isn't full or random weirdness that takes the game into unexpected quarters, yeah... random tables rule. I use them, and I run with them, completely changing the character of the campaign, from one session to another.
On the downside, I totally forgot to have the players determine what was different about this Cha'alt prime dimension, than where they were in the half-session. Next time!
While heroes who helped save Princess Lyssa (formerly known as the bastard princess), they're considered newcomers to the royal court and even have a direct supervisor in the palace named Damask. As soon as they reported to him, he called them dumbasses and asked if they'd filled out their TPS reports yet, cleaned the palace gutters, and defenestrated the black centipedes.
Bishop Crane stormed out saying that he saved the princess and had better things to do than wash the worm shit off the winery floor. Ha! While working on his own projects, one of his fruitie servants came to him with news - that fruitie has a friend within the CRD (colony resources department). He has information about the gigantic statue head of Da'agoth the dreaming god that the Federation found while scanning the desert belonging to the sand-swallowed Kingdom of Ira'ad. In exchange for finding and transporting the statue head all the way from Ira'ad to A'agrybah, the Federation asked for limited zoth rights, but then at the last moment switched their zoth rights to rare Cha'alt minerals which is much less profitable and requires big excavation machines for mineral extraction.
Speaking of Princess Lyssa, they were asked to visit her before leaving the palace. She is swollen with child, and made the adventurers beaded bracelets and her very own home-made double-filtered worm wine that tasted of strawberry and cactus-pear. Oh, because of Strum's zoth addiction, he's become even more devoted to the Old Ones and wants to help Crane with his new church. Strum is also very protective of the tentacled litter that Lyssa has in her belly. She also told them a dream she had last night about a glowing-tangerine dust that mutated and corrupted anything and everything it came into contact with.
Oh yeah, one last thing - the party's priest has that infernal glyph from the artifact Pa'azuk. It told hm the Archduke of the Black Flame declared an infernal jiha'ad on Bishop Crane and dispatched a Hell-worm to destroy the priest and retrieve his demonic magic items.
Upon leaving the palace and walking down the street towards the Z-Hole, a place for blatant zoth abusers and sorcerers who believe they have it under control. They saw dozens of protestors shouting and holding signs with empathy for the demons, kha'alestinians, and even the Federation. A few of them believe Princess Lyssa and her unborn spawn should be put to death.
Ug went to tongue-slap a few of them, and mostly missed. Meanwhile, Strum fireballed the lot of them, immolating every protestor there, and singing the lizardtaur for being so close to the rabble-rousing throng.
By the time they reached the nearest cantina, the Royal Vizier spoke to them on their wrist-communicator. The Federation has moved their biggest sand-mining burrower to the perimeter of sand-swallowed Ira'ad. It must be a big mineral deposit, but the vizier wants the PCs to spy on them and find out all they can, as something is definitely up. The vizier booked passage on the Orient Express, a sand-piercer class high-speed hover-train that crisscrosses the S'kbah desert. With the Orient Express, the trip would only take 6 or 7 hours; that would be approximately 22 or 23 hours by reptilian riding-spider.
Their train was leaving in a couple hours, so they wandered over to the golden city gates of A'agrybah. Overhearing a man cry out that his money pouch was stolen by a demon, the PCs went after him. The demon ducked into a mostly empty Federation warehouse and saw the demon waiting for them. He was standing in a circle drawn with infernal-glyphs of blood.
The pixie-fairy went in through a side window first, in order to get a sneak-attack in. He did minimal damage, which was actually good because the circle turned attackers' damage back on them. So, Beigeirona took 4 points of damage. Strum then cast dispel magic which ended the demon's chicanery. It wasn't long before the rest of the party destroyed him.
Hopping on the Orient Express, the PCs enjoyed their luxury suite on the train as it soon went into a mild sandstorm. Then, I took out 3 player suggestions from the Black Skull of Secrets - a blinding flash of fuchsia light, a 10-foot around steel spike fell from the heavens right before the hover-train and proceeded to dig its way through the desert floor, and a whole bunch of blue ewoks with little javelins demanded tribute before the hover-train was allowed to continue.
Ug negotiated a trade, giving them a Federation soldier who he convinced the blue ewoks was the conductor, and knew the various trade routes. The fuchsia flash of light was connected to a nearby psychic presence below ground - inside the hole recently dug by that giant steel spike that kept getting smaller the farther down it went.
Strum and Biegeirona were compelled to go down and investigate, as their mind was subtly dominated by a floating psionic orange. The orange was contained within a magic holding-field of teal hued energy. A total of 7 large floating amoeba, one of them being its blood-red leader were contained within this stone floored temple with altar and tentacled columns. Braziers (note to self - create a Cha'alt X-Card for when someone says brazier, players can play the Brazzers card and turn the scene into some kind of weird porn thing) pouring out indigo and violet vapor into the air.
Whereas the demon from earlier was dispatched relatively quickly, these things took awhile to destroy, paralyzing both Strum and Beigeirona (irony or fate... you decide). The transparent blooded creatures did not count as Lovecraftian abominations, even though they technically had tentacles. When only two remained, they double-penetrated the orange which Beigeirona had freed with his own dispel magic spell (in their minds, they could hear the floating psychic orange say that he wanted to take over Cha'alt himself, so probably not a good guy), creating an orange-hued ameoba that was slaughtered along with the remaining enemies.
Searching the entire temple, Strum found a strange and magical deck of playing cards adorned with women in various stages of undress. Taking that and deciding to get back onto the train (being held for them by the metal titan), instead of exploring the subterranean tunnels leading out of the temple.
After several hours of rest, healing from their wounds, a shadow assassin crept into Beigeirona's sleeping quarters, and stabbed him. He counter-struck, killing the creep. It was a member of the tontine, and the party's pixie-fairy took his encrypted scroll of shadow magic, which would take time to fully decipher and attune.
Finally, they arrived and hopped-on the food truck / tour bus belonging to Egg Chen of Qada'ath Chinatown. He told them a few wild stories of the place, relayed a rumor of an old Federation facility deep underground that created and still housed (even though the facility was destroyed) nuclear dust. Realizing that might be what the Federation were after, they asked Egg Chen, after paying for some tasty eggrolls, to let them off near the spice-mining machine, Federation basecamp, and tunnel sloping down into the sand-swallowed Kingdom of Ira'ad.
That's where we ended the session. Again, not a ton happened, and nothing that off-the-rails shocking or gratuitously weird, but I think it was solid.
Saturday, August 15th should be our next game. I'm looking forward to it!
Enjoy,
VS
p.s. Want some hardcover Cha'alt? Here's how (and they're currently on sale!)!! I'll do a big announcement when I have all the promotional images, but I'm excited to announce that VENGER CON VI: Belief is Reality will be happening next year (June 25th - 27th) in Madison, WI.
