Crystals of Chaos [session report #7]

 

Before anything else, I just want to link a couple of Cha'alt reviews.  

This is more of a general appreciation for the first book and it's overall vibe.  Here is a fucking insane 2 and 1/2 hour detailed look at the entire Cha'alt trilogy.  Thanks to both YouTube channels for taking the time to appreciate my eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic campaign setting!

Ok, now to the session report...

You know when you look down at your notes and all you find are tantalizing fragments that leave you with little more than an aborted outline of what should be a fully fleshed-out game plan?  That's kind of what yesterday's game felt like.

Nevertheless, it was fun and I think, overall, successful.  One never really reaches the final goal endpoint that one might call "perfection" in roleplaying, game design, GMing, etc.  You just keep going.  Do your best and try to enjoy the moment.

The PCs, all but Gath the human priest whose player couldn't make it because of an out of town trip, were headed from Alpha Blue to Frigia, an icy penal planet where the Federation has a dude locked up that the resistance wants freed and set down on Cha'alt.  Which may or may not be a Federation trick or psy-op... which somehow involves the cunning machinations of actual cyclops... we're almost sure about that.

I asked the PCs what each of them was doing aboard their shag-carpeted leopard print starship.  Ro-Robard, being part crystalline now, was reading a magazine he got while on the space station of love "Crystalline Girls of Alpha Blue."  We spent about 5 minutes coming up with various aesthetics, concepts, and photoshoot pictorials of what might be in there.  Everything from crystals being rammed into hollow geode orifices to cross-dressing crystals to naked girls laying atop massive crystal shards. Pretty much the whole time we were laughing while coming up with wild and disturbing ideas.

 About 3 hours into their 8 hour flight to Frigia, the PC's starship (finally named Jefferson), came across a deserted medical and scientific research space lab named Quasar-7.  No life signs, but lots of tech, and a faint but strange energy signature.

The PCs went aboard and found out that the lab received a massive crystal containing a solidified emerald-green vapor that caused a severe case of space madness in one member of their crew.  The rest of their logs and whatnot were all wiped, and all escape pods flew the coop.  

Turns out that green gas within the crystal is evil and trying to possess humanoids - now, including the PCs.  Heighten Chancery Philthrop III and Crandol both tried to free the entity from the crystal.  The halfling thief blasted it with his laser (which bounced right off), but the half-orc warrior used his magical black sword to cleave the crystal in two.  

The gas escaped and started using its mojo.  It wanted the PCs to pilot the space lab to a heavily populated moon nearby so it could infect others.  I rolled a natural 20 for Ro-Robard the Red's saving throw at the very beginning, so he was instrumental in waking the remaining PCs to what was going on.  Someone had the brilliant idea of venting the emerald vapor out of an airlock hole and it froze in space.

Now that was over, the adventurers looted the place.  They got a medical droid, psychologist droid, physical therapy machine, the cure for venereal diseases (extra valuable due to its close proximity to Alpha Blue), a mineral sample rover, and salvage probe.

Frigia, they discovered, is protected by a phase-shift barrier, the same as around Cha'alt.  Put there by the Federation to control who goes in and out.  To get to the other side, Jefferson would need to open a rift into weird space... and so the ship's A.I. obliged.

The PCs found themselves in a purple maze of sharp angular corridors winding and weaving in confusing and endless directions.  Ro-Robard recognized the place from when he was zapped several sessions ago.  Heighten decided to pull out some spare zoth he had and wipe it on a purple wall, and a message appeared, in a handwritten scrawl "Wait for the sign, then all prisoners will be released."

They continued to walk around, then waved their special colored crystals around until a deep, resonant gong sounded.  They followed the sound as the purple hallway terminated into a circular opening.  Walking through it, the smooth artificial purple walls became a purple and violet organic flesh that led to a system of tunnels and caves.

The party's sorcerer wanted to cast invisibility, which struck me as the perfect time to roll on my fuchsia magic "chaos and mishap" random table found in book II of the Cha'alt trilogy.  A toxic ooze dripped out of the sorcerer's pours - pure zoth mixed with the sorcerer's own essence.  While everyone else thought it was disgusting, the sorcerer was being seduced by his own ichor and decided to drink it - three times the magical potency... if he survives.  After succeeding in a saving throw, Ro-Robard now had immense power.  

I won't go into all the "weird space" encounters, but there was the purple skull with tentacle, wallflower cave (the halfling got a +1 flower-shaped short sword out of that, as well as, his snazzy new purple robes containing Prince's weird purple sex symbol), tentacled worm (I don't mind repeating myself, but definitely could have used a unique monster here instead of staying firmly seated in my comfort zone), "These pretzels are making me thirsty" purple-elf watching Escape From New York - just like in The Black Pyramid, violet barrier, and subhuman creatures crawling around a purple-jade statue of an Old One or its spawn that was missing a tentacle.  The PCs had pepperoni pizza due to another roll on the weird magic table and threw that at the subhumans to distract them.  When the tentacle was attached, its mouth opened wide enough for the PCs to enter... which brought them out.

They woke up in planetary orbit of Frigia.  After landing, the PCs split up to find Garren Voy.  One group did while the other killed this carnivorous plant monster.

Garren Voy told them about a generator in Frigia's command center.  That's what's creating and maintaining the phase-shift barriers around various planets like Cha'alt.  For an extra 10,000 credits, the PCs decide to take on this mission - destroy those generators so the Federation can't block travel to and from Cha'alt.

Ro-Robard drinks what's left of his toxic, zoth distilled essence and almost dies, but doesn't thanks to several expenditures of Divine Favor.  Now, his sorcery is potent enough to cast invisibility on the entire party.  They sneak past multiple guards, sneak around a zedi laser-sword battle, and through a nature preserve.  As soon as they reach the generator room, they instantly become visible as an alarm goes off.  Only then do they notice a sign that reads, "Anti-magic zone!  Sorcery is forbidden here... we have the technology."

Because one of our players had to leave because of a family commitment, we decided to end things right there, a half-hour early, which suited me well as I need to plan the rest of that Federation facility adventure.  I have some ideas...

After the tentacled worm creature from that weird space cave was killed, Heighten decided to look inside the gutted abomination.  He asked, "Is it filled with little tentacles inside?"  I said, "Yeah."  He asked, "And teeth?"  "I said, "Yes, and..."  He responded with "Lasers."  I replied, "What else?"  "Jet packs?"  And I said "Yes."

Then we kind of all mutually agreed that only Heighten could see this (since he's usually on hallucinogenic drugs), everyone else just thought it was blood and intestines and such.  It was a small thing, but I found it hilarious, and that's the kind of thing I really, really like in my games and want more of.  Facilitating that can be tricky.  I don't think any mechanics can force it without making the whole exchange artificial.  But if I glean any insights, I'll let ya'll know.

What else?  I do have something in mind for the glowing crystals of rainbow hue they picked up their first time in weird space.  BTW, I think the party is divided on whether weird space is a thing they want to keep exploring or not.  Ro-Robard the Red would rather get back to Cha'alt without having to deal with weird space or the purple labyrinth again, whereas Jackal likes dealing with that place and would definitely keep exploring it.  

At the start of next session, I think everyone (except for Gath) will be 6th level.  Due to that and their new power armor, I need to come up with encounters that actually challenge them.

Alright, session 8 is happening in 2 weeks.  Looking forward to it.  In the meantime, I might run a virtual one-short (I meant to say one-shot, but that works since it'll probably top-out at 90 minutes) or eventual bi-weekly campaign for all the people who are liking what they read on this blog, but aren't liking that they're missing out on the Cha'alt action (I get asked all the time, believe me).  And there should be more Cha'alt webcomic awesomeness coming soon!

VS

p.s. Get your Cha'alt hardcovers now, before the Federation finds out what we're doing, confiscates them all, and then jacks up the price!  Also, get your ticket to VENGER CON before they're gone. We're just going to be roleplaying old-school, OSR, and traditional games all weekend.

Fairly Odd Entities

 

So, I was running another Encounter Critical III playtest in the RPG's home world of Cha'alt.  Not going to bother linking the Kickstarter campaign because it's ending in about 30 minutes (as I type this first draft).

A little over $2,600... not too bad.  Should be able to afford some cool artwork for that much, plus pay my layout guy.

As per usual, when I'm not running sessions over the weekend or at night, I only managed to get 2 players.  But that's ok.  2 players gets the job done.  One was a returning dude (whose game I respect), the other was a relative noob.

Got to introduce new character classes this playtest, so that was exciting.  The choices I offered were: warrior, pioneer, criminal, warlock, doxy, and psi-witch (or psi-knight).  Now, it's starting to feel a little bit more like Encounter Critical!

Still has a way to go, obviously.  I'd say I'm about 65% finished with it.  Next playtest will involve new races!

Anyways, one player took on the role of warlock, and the other a pioneer.  Both chose human as the race to make things easier, and for the extra hit-points.

I'm really glad someone played a warlock because the magic system was an area that needed playtesting.  I had this whole d6 dice pool thing going, kind of a riff on earlier versions of Crimson Dragon Slayer.  But then decided against it.  Too much fiddling around.  

Instead, magic works like any other class ability - it's a skill check with a 15 target number, but you also get to add your level.  Still pretty tough to do anything at lower level, which is why PCs need to accumulate Divine Favor... and you get that from roleplaying your character, primarily.

Speaking of which, I eased up a bit on backgrounds.  That's a lot of coming up with stuff and writing for such a short game.  While I mentioned that they might want to think about a drive, look, flaw, obsession, relationship, and other noteworthy things + personality quirks, I didn't mandate it.  I also took the time (twice) to tell players that they'd be rewarded with Divine Favor for roleplaying their backgrounds, and that Divine Favor could be spent to re-roll any die (has to be their own die, though).

The returning player made great use of what he was told / given, bringing details about his character to life with social interaction, personal thoughts, and action.  It may not seem like much, but stuff like that is one of the more rewarding things about RPGs in my opinion.  That's why I made it a design goal up-front.

So what happened?  Damn, it was a wild time!  The PCs were prisoners, abandoned with a dead cellmate because the city of A'agrybah was engaged in a bloody civil war - blue versus green (if you've seen The Tomorrow People, then you know what that's about).

But something found in the dead man's pocket made it just that much more special.  Recently, our twin boys have been watching Fairly Odd Parents on netflix, which means that I've also been watching Fairly Odd Parents.  Could have been much worse, BTW.  And those pink and green fairies gave me an idea...

What if I incorporated them into my game, but Cha'altified, of course?  Inside a small leather pouch were two smooth, shiny stones... one fuchsia, the other chartreuse. Tapping them together released wisps of vapor those same hues.  They coalesced into a pair of tentacled entities - chartreuse and fuchsia.  They didn't speak the common tongue, but the party's warlock, Shernoz, cast a spell that made them intelligible.  

But not before the PCs asked the vaporous entities to open the cell door and deactivate the anti-magic sphere preventing Shernoz from casting spells.  Two wishes gone, it turned out.  Only one wish left today.  But why would their third cellmate, who recently died, not have summoned these colorful, tentacled genies when he was alive?

Because they're psychotic cenobites, of course... probably from some Quor'toth-like dimension.  Officially, I'll be referring to them as zenobites or quorta'athians.  They are extradimensional demons who get off on pushing humanoids to the extremes of pain and pleasure.  When they're not granting wishes, they orchestrate mass murder, torture, rape, slavery, and other wickedness.

These entities could also talk to each other, as well as the PCs, so they added to the roleplaying immersion.

There was another whole subplot when a demon (traditional, this time) clawed his way out of Hell to make a deal with the warlock who failed his spell-check and was about to get killed by civil war guerillas.  The demon wanted those mystical fuchsia and chartreuse stones for himself.  I really thought the warlock would have gone along with the demon's offer since the true nature of their guardian demon genies had already been revealed.  

But nope, the demon got nothing and when he unfroze time, Shernoz wished the chartreuse and fuchsia entities to send them far away.  Seconds from being stabbed in the abdomen by a "green", Shernoz and Snare suddenly appeared in the open desert.

By then, we'd gone over our 90-minute allotment by about 6 or 7 minutes, so we said our goodbyes.  Both players told me how much they enjoyed the game, which made my day.

Rest assured, I'll be using those colorful tentacled entities again.  Oh yeah, I came up with names for them... Yazka'an and Dvorek.  Maybe I can get one of those A.I. art making programs to illustrate them?

Ok, that's the end.  Thanks for reading!  Hopefully, I'll see some of you next weekend at Game Hole Con.  I'm sure Yazka'an and Dvorek will show up eventually.

Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing!

VS

p.s. I now have a paid subscription to Midjourney, that program creating A.I. works of art based on user prompts.  The 3 images below the first one (Odd Parents) are my first results.  Pretty cool so far...