It's the end of the line, hoss. With this session, we conclude the 4th tentacle of our in-person, bi-weekly Cha'alt campaign. 19 sessions from January to November, and it begins anew, God willing, on Saturday, January 23rd 2027.
We were fortunate to have all 4 players... Strum, Bishop Crane, Ug, and Mista Firestorm. All 8th level, and ready to rock!
I informed them the power of Keelta'anpa'adraj's mark upon each of them. It was good for a 2-in-6 chance of Divine Intervention once per session (once per day is just too often, I think).
As you may recall, the PCs had been transported by the just awakened Great Old One, Keelta'anpa'adraj, the new God of Athas. The PCs spent a good 3 sessions in Dark Sun, and they were memorable, but now they were all back on Cha'alt.
So, the PCs arrived upon the familiar dunes of the S'kbah desert, under the fuchsia sky, looking at a wall of shifting, inter-swirling colors that an elf wearing a desert camo trenchcoat and parachute pants said was a dimensional barrier. The elf was gazing at the barrier through high-tech binoculars. He'd been hired to find a way in and steal some stuff for which he'd receive 30% of its value.
The elf told the story of this dimensional barrier, how it had been created by Federation tech-wizards 3 years ago (this was now the year of the infernal jackal-pear), after it was abandoned by a small religious cult. Before that, it was known as Vromka'ad's Tower. Since then, weird interdimensional creatures made the barrier their home.
The PCs tell the elf that it's actually their tower and all the stuff in it belongs to them, assuming they can breach the barrier and claim it once more. The elf mentioned that such a dimensional barrier would burn through enormous power, way more than the Federation could spare on this backsand planet. Crane immediately realized it was probably being energized with the Loc-na'ar, which is the artifact they concealed within one of the strange rooms of the tower.
The back and forth discussion between the PCs and this desert-camo elf led to Ug correcting the NPC when he uttered the word "formidable," telling the elf it was actually pronounced "formida'ablay." From then on, the elf would use the word formida'ablay, which everyone found amusing. And then later, Ug's player informed us that it was actually how formidable was pronounced in French, except that it really meant great rather than how we think of formidable. But the way we were all using the word worked both ways, which delighted Ug and his player.
Realizing it would be nearly impossible to breach, the elf relayed an alternative entrance. Apparently, in the basement storage room below the theater in The Black Pyramid, there's a portal that goes inside the tower. And it just so happens that the elf had a secret way into The Black Pyramid. When the PCs agreed to go with the elf, he brought out a miniature pyramid of black that, when activated, created a portal inside The Black Pyramid itself.
One by one, they entered, finding a nearly empty room, except for a drunkard who told them they had to go through a nightclub room before arriving at the theater. Listening to the music from two doors opposite each other, they soon discovered which one led to the nightclub.
The music was a mix of Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Metallica, and Iggy Azalia... which, now that I think about it, might have been a sign from one of the Great Old Ones of Cha'alt, Igg Yig Ya'athak - some of the music was random, including her hit "Fancy." Weirdly, my eldest daughter was dressed as Cher from the movie Clueless today for school, which is copied in the music video.
Want to hear another weird coincidence? Today walking the dogs, I look down and there's a translucent green marble that had fallen into a crack in the road. I picked it up and carried it home with me like it was the Loc-na'ar itself. Synchronicity... which is something that develops as you're initiated into the Living Ultra-Cosmos.
The bouncer had a line to go in, just outside the club, but still inside the room, hopeful club-goers waited for their chance. A couple guys were talking about a zenobite with an axe embedded in his head, and how he sometimes went clubbing. A couple girls tried to bypass the PCs to get ahead in line when Strum knocked one of the women down, and did it again when she got in his face.
The bouncer tried to intervene, and Strum electrocuted him into unconsciousness. Another man, sort of an impromptu backup bouncer, checked the PCs for WMDs and asked if they were terrorists. You can't be too careful.
"Do you believe in a full-length penis and denounce in the strongest possible terms, a Kha'alestinian caliphate?" Haley Stevens couldn't have said it better herself. ;)
Eventually, they went inside. This nightclub was called Cages because there were a lot of women dancing in cages and plenty of club-goers either impersonating Nicolas Cage and hopeless posers caught up in "the scene."
Bishop Crane made a b-line for high ground so he could scout the place. Strum went to the bar. Ug and Firestorm strode up to the velvet curtain in the VIP section. They talked to a man with a dead-milky eye who asked if they had a Cha'angervation. Yes, Cha'ang Do'Urden was behind the curtain with his entourage.
Firestorm snuck himself and Ug in, then sat down and chatted with Cha'ang. The dark-elf warlord had a glittering red floating rhomboid near him that had super-intelligence and could sometimes predict the future. It advised Cha'ang to sell the PCs some cyber hand attachments, so he did. Both Ug and Firstorm traded some of their stuff (which they'd been keeping since the first few adventures) for a buzz-saw for Ug and a rocket for Firestorm.
Strum overheard two men talking at the bar about one man claiming to be one of the best cyber-surgeons on Cha'alt, and the other calling him a quack. After hearing their dispute and believing the cyber-surgeon was more believable, Strum invited him to join the party.
Meanwhile, Crane noticed some cultists dressed like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho with the transparent rain poncho covered in blood.
Pretty soon, a terrorist attack broke out. The PCs couldn't hear it, but someone shouted about Admiral Ackbar just before there was an explosion, yelling, and a yellow gas creeping throughout the nightclub. Cha'ang Do'Urden showed them a way out, where they could avoid the yellow gas. Everyone hightailed it into the VIP room and through the back door.
That led to the zenobite room with a dozen of his followers. The PCs were friendly, but the zenobite wanted a bloodbath. You see, before becoming a zenobite, this guy was the head of a suicide cult devoted to the spotted cow [yes, a callback to one of Ug's player's former characters].
Strum incinerated all of them and did a lot of damage to the zenobite himself. Before the zenobite could do much at all, the other PCs brought him low, leaving a black box with gold inlay. The PCs were extremely hesitant to touch it - but then a balding librarian entered the room from a side-door with slices of cheese. He placed a cheese slice upon the box and walked out from the door the PCs had entered.
Intrigued, Ug took the cheese slice [which reminds me, I need to make a random table of cheeses]. I came up with 4 possibilities and rolled randomly, getting mauve cheddar... sharp, but not too sharp, with a purple patina that really took the appearance and flavor to the next level.
Speaking of sharpness, Ug also opened the box and a blade suddenly came out of nowhere and sliced off his hand. The danger over, he looked inside to find a small shrunken head of a blonde woman, probably liberal. Not wanting to take any chances, Ug plunged a dagger into the diminutive head of Gwyneth Paltro.
After all that excitement, Ug wanted the cyber-surgeon, Dockeley, to fit the buzzsaw onto the stump of his severed hand, which he did. Meanwhile, Mista Firestorm wired the rocket launcher into his droid's crotch-unit (just have to remember to turn "masturbation mode" off. That's how he got the nickname Rocket Nuts Firestorm.
After that, the PCs got to the theater. A movie was already in progress... it was about a desert planet and sandworms, but the sky was all wrong. The viewing public had commemorative sandworm popcorn buckets with sandworm mouths stretching out towards the hungry moviegoer. And there was one guy with a Cha'alt popcorn bucket that was red and white striped like a KFC bucket of chicken, shaped like a banana with a fleshlight sticking out of the popcorn.
After a bit of asking around and being shushed, Bishop Crane went to the front of the screen asking if anyone in the whole entire theater knew how to get to the basement storeroom. One guy shown his flashlight, the outline of a door could be seen amongst the shiny black surface of the wall. They opened it to find a little room with a stairway leading down. Along with dusty shelves, a mop and bucket, rafters and concrete floor, there was a dimensional portal.
The elf the party had been traveling with bid them adieu, and they entered, finding themselves in the central "control room" of the tower. Now, I wanted there to be something in the room already when they arrived, but not necessarily a combat encounter... something else... something different... something special.
Flipping through my Cha'alt book, I happened upon the page talking about the black unicorn. Something I've only used once or twice since creating my eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalypse, humor, sleaze, pop-culture, and grindhouse exploitation campaign setting. This was as good a time as any. Ug went in first and noticed the black unicorn, but by the time Mista Firestorm joined him, the black unicorn had mysteriously wandered off.
Nevertheless, I asked each of the four players to come up with one thing that was now different about Cha'alt than it had previously been. One said the sand of Cha'alt should be purple, another said it should be purple rock salt, a third said the people of Cha'alt should be really nice, and the last said the room colors were mixed up.
Boom! All that stuff had now changed. The most immediately impactful of these was the the spheres hanging in space, determining where the main tower doorway would take them, were completely different. Now, there were 7, and different colors like bone, blood-red, orange, day-glow leather-brown (which we all thought was hilariously stupid-gonzo, I rolled for that one on the d100 color random table in How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss).
They had to go through all 7 rooms to find both the Federation generator that was creating the dimensional barrier and, at the last room, the Loc-na'ar being held captive in a force field by Za'argon - a massive tentacled demi-god, based on the creature of similar name from The Lost City module.
The generator was almost self-destructed by a Federation trooper. Luckily he was stopped, and Strum got to bring out a little glass box that went over the self-destruct button that read "Do Not Press" on it. He was happy to finally find a use for that thing.
I populated the intervening rooms with suggestions from the Black Skull of Secrets, like giant riding spiders mutated by a huge glob of zoth that exploded over them. Periodically, Mista Firestorm would pick-pockets of individuals he came across, the most notable was a small book on man's possible evolution bookmarked with a used condom.
Also, Strum battled his zoth addiction, (nearly) flying into a zoth-rage.
After slaying Za'argon (got to use my d100 table on beefing-up Big Bad End Guys that the PCs tear through like warm butter) and rescuing the Loc-na'ar, Crane asked it to bring all their people (friends, supporters, allies, and one-eyed whores) back to the tower, which it did. Reunited (I played "Lady in Red" for Strum getting his woman back - after she finished servicing a small group of sand-sailors, of course) and determined to further the church they started building years ago, they all celebrated with food, wine, and merriment.
And that's how we concluded year four of our Cha'alt campaign. Good times, hoss!
We'll reconvene with new characters on Saturday, January 23rd 2027. Also, I updated the Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer rule-set (pod softcover should be available on Amazon by the end of this week, assuming the proof comes back ok).
Enjoy,
VS
p.s. Want some hardcover Cha'alt? Here's how (and they're currently on sale!)!!
We've got virtual VENGER CON V.5: This Shit is Going Down in Cyberspace happening Friday, January 8th - Monday, January 11th. Join the Kult of Kort'thalis community on X for more details.
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