Cha'alt By Venger Satanis For Crimson Dragon Slayer D20, O5R, & OSR Game Session Report Number One

"Who has the balls to confront this dark psychic force?

Cha'alt is the beast of a book (218 pages) I've been working on for the past year.  It's a ruined world focusing on a couple of introductory dungeons before getting to the main event - the megadungeon known as The Black Pyramid.  

The Black Pyramid is like nothing you've ever seen before.  Unique design, purpose, feel, magic items, NPCs, monsters, factions, motives, agendas, strangeness, the works!"

Well, actually we've got the balls to actually play a bit of Cha'alt  & its pretty massive megadungeon especially if your on the other side of the screen. DM Steve my friend & fellow dungeon master reminded me that I owed him a game today. So he's been prepping his own game of the megadungeon of Cha'alt. This game session goes all of the way back to last year when I got a chance to get down & dirty with DM Steve's Liberation of the Demon Slayer game session.  We died about half way through the module over the course of three 0r f0ur months of play. I would later gain my review on the Islands of Purple Putrescence. 

So I've with drawn my review of Venger Satanis's Cha'alt book from Drivethurpg.  And before anyone even starts with me about how there was any shenanigans between me & Venger. Well, he doesn't even know about me taking down the Cha'alt review. I was playing my wizard Shifty McManner & several of our group of players were using characters that I'd seen a couple of years ago in Revelry in Torth . So we're dealing with masked wearing bandits, warriors, & clerics from some of the most treasonous bastards to walk across the shifting sands. We had a sum total of five players & our PC's were bound together  by a mission to the Black Pyramid. We started out in a local bar & immediately got into a fight with a local map seller. He was a part of some sleazoid thieves guild & things started to go wrong right out of the gate. We used Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea with a mix of Venger's Cha'alt material. So tonight's game had a very heavy mix of Sword & Sorcery coupled with a miasma of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Howard, & lots of Lovecraft. We had masked displaced royals mixed in with former cultists turned cleric.
This wasn't my usual party of adventurers but a group of masked bastards Hell bent on getting to the Black Pyramid. All of our party were for the most part humans with some Elves scattered in. 

A sword thrust into the map maker made things very complicated for our party right outta of the gate. We fled into the desert as the crossbow bolts made us fleet into the depths of the Incel Cantina. We almost got set up by a crew of skeevers! The plan was to capture our two Amazon warriors & murder us. We got the drop on two of the bastards & my wizard cast a sleep spell on the rest making short work of them.  Then doubling back around we re entered Gamma Incel Cantina. The place is filled with the slime of several universes & we weren't about to let our guard down. We caught up with Yerck: Human; scruffy; stained overalls; tech specialist; has done side-work for sexual performance art and terrorist cell Tangerine Wet Dream. Again not an alien to trust. After a rather lengthy bargaining session we were able to secure passage on a caravan going through the desert. But then our cleric got into a fight with a demonic mercenary just outside the cantina. We got booted outta the place & luckily just managed to survive the bouncer thing that ejected us.
Outside of the cantina we picked up a strange albino wizard as a hireling. He was looking for employment & we could us an extra spell slinger. Chella the Amazing  was stranded on Cha'alt after the events of the Liberation of the Demon Slayer module.


We ended the session taking our place on some lizard thing mounts & a trading caravan we booked passage on as caravan guards. All together the session went very well & Cha'alt plays a lot better then it first read in my estimation. Personally I need to lighten up a bit when it comes to fifth edition games. Over all the Cha'alt setting plays very well & Glynn Seal of Monkey Blood's cartography was rock solid once again.
Overall I'd give Cha'alt a solid five for play, writing, and design after actually playing it.