Black, Blue, & Tentacled- Godbound/Cha'alt Pick Up Game Session Report 4/5

 If your gonna have gods & in a Godbound/Cha'alt campaign well its gonna be over the top folks! And your going to have out & out mayhem for the players. Now most folks would think utterly evil & dangerous dragon springs to mind then its gonna Tiamat from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition Monster Manual. And they would be right up to a point. 




Now any real old schooler who knows his Judge's Guild's Inferno module  knows that Tiamat unofficially has her caves & her hoard within Hell as its proper. Her hoards are safe & her cult is flourishing out in California in my Godbound campaign.Growing by leaps & bounds. Why?! Because Dante's Infero is not a religious commentary but a political one. And one based in history not religion. 1980 Judges Guild module Inferno. Written by Geoffrey O. Dale, is unto itself a whole blog entry. Which while it has been covered on this blog deserves another look see in the near future.  What my ears heard last night was that America does have any dragons. Any really good solid dragons of mythology like Europe has. 

What if the players were not only wrong but it could cost em their PC's. The Cha'alt wave in my campaign went around Earth. Not out a huge swath of the modern technology & the US has been forced to rely on any Cha'alt technologies they can get a hold of. But recently the West Coast military has been hearing rumbles from its East Coast breathern about the Snallygasters! This god like American dragon has been attacking, destroying, & absolutely descimating supply convoys across the East Coast of the United States in New England. Now unlike the Pathfinder version available here. This is a Snallygaster Lord or Lady. These abominations are a combination of dragon, bird, & aboleth birthed in the Abyssial underworld of Cha'alt. 

Snallygaster artwork provided by the expert hand of Thrilllander thanks to the "Lumberwoods, Unnatural History Museum." Link to http://www.lumberwoods.org/ 

They have all of the abilities of a standard  snallygaster but with the abilities of an Abeloth but in addition the Dragon word from Godbound. And they are absolutely nasty pieces of work understand Aklo & serveral other languages unnaturally. These things are engines of destruction & primal chaos. The profiles for snallygasters can vary depending upon the seven to eight chaos mutations that they are sporting. Actual dragons hate snallygasters considering them abominations & repellent. These things are vermin to be exterminated on sight. The gods will designate these horrors priority number one to exterminate. 
Why?! Because these things are summoned by Midnight Elves, & Serpentmen to act as engines of destruction! The dragon king in my campaign now knows about two  snallygaster Lords & Ladies who were summoned over from Cha'alt on the night roads. The dragon itself is tied up with matters of state and this goes right back to Adventurer,Conqueror,King's Heroic Fantasy Handbook guide lines. 

When it comes to down to dragons & gods there's always mythology in the mix. Dragons are essential ingrediants to the whip around part of a campaign. Dragons are the movers, shakers, & destroyers of a campaign. They exist to take on the gods & shake the heavens. They are the takers of gold, the hoarders of legacy, & the changers of reality. Dragons are never to be underestimated. Ever. But when it comes to the  Snallygaster Lords & Ladies the vagueness is on purpose. These things are gonna be a surprise to the players. 
They were generated partially using Castle Old Skull's Dragons book & a large heaping of Lovecraft! 

The second ingrediant that I'm throwing into the mix is  Adventurer,Conqueror,King's Lairs & Encounters book.  So I'm designing them with ACK's in mind and a fiendish twist on the guidelines for the Snallygaster Lords & Ladies. These things are utterly things of chaos that can give a godbound real anxiety.

Black & Blue in Arizona - Godbound/Cha'alt Pick Up Game Session Report Zero

 Isiri Arachnid Warrior from Reaper are a stand in for
 a Midnight Elven Drider available here. 

'Ancient enemies ask for help as one of their holdings is attacked & ransacked by alien unknown forces! The PC's must struggle to unravel the mystery of this horror!'



Dark Elf Queen on Throne by Reaper available here.
The Midnight elf queen whose holdings are in trouble.
Why isn't she taking care of this herself is unknown.

So due to the pandemic we've been on hiatus from our Cha'alt/Godbound rpg campaign sessions for months now. Needless to say that myself & my friends haven't been amused at all. So a bit of background on this game campaign. There are any number of spider goddess related legends in the mythologies & religions of the American Indianian nations. These midnight elves armies have absolutely nothing to do with those! In fact these are an invasive demonic species of humanoids! They've secured Flagstaff Arizona for a few months now but something worse has taken over.
 Now to really flesh out the feel of the Midnight Elves from Cha'alt I've gone back into my campaign notes & faded back into Adventurer,Conqueror,King's Lairs & Encounters book.  So I'm designing them with ACK's in mind.

These Midnight Elves of Cha'alt are not the usual Drow of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition but instead a fade back to their Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual II origins. These are unpredictable & evil demonic creatures of legend. Are the Midnight Elves Drow?! Not really these are dark elves that worship Atlach-Nacha in my games. 

Drider by MatesLaurentiu on DeviantArt is pretty much in keeping with my idea of
the Midnight Elves of my campaign. 

The PC's at the moment are working with & for the dragon king whose lair is within the Grand Canyon. There's a certain decorum between the party & their employer. Several things have cropped up that are troubling the party of Godbound. But what does this have to do with the Cha'alt wave that recently over taken the Earth some months back.. There are lots of questions in this campaign & its going to require lots of exploration.
So why I'm I using Adventurer, Conqueror,King rpg as my basis & not Castles & Crusades?! These are two very different game systems in a sense. Castles & Crusades is the better choice because of its placement on domain style games. This is a game campaign of vast  swaths of a modernish alternative Earth that's been traded back & forth between godlike & highly evil powers.



At this point I'm considering an all out war between the traditional Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Drow & the Midnight Elves of Cha'alt. This is going to depend upon where & what the PC's do from here!
Time to bust out the Q1 Queen of the Spiders Super Module & go from there but I've got plans within plans from here.

Lovecraftian Serpentmen & Canyons - Cha'alt & Adventurer, Conqueror, King Rpg Adventure Encounter With OSR & Old School Systems

With literal hours remaining in the Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise kickstarter. I wanted to turn my cold remedy soaked brain to Grand Canyon National Park . This works very well with my Cha'alt/Godbound campaign. 

 Not the real one but the 1903 serpent  men lost colony & city that exists within the Grand Canyon. The colony is the last place where a crop of 'white Zoth' exists. White Zoth allows the posessor to create double & triple the crop of the  drug, xanthium-183, is known to many on Cha'alt as fuchsia malaise. This white Malaise is worth 200,000 gold pieces bag & highly coveted by wizards because it allows the wizard to artificially raise their level for 1d200 days while the occult power courses through their veins. 

With the coming of the Cha'alt wave & warp, the lords of Elysium have taken to haunting their old Earth locations. The ancient & beloved home of the alien overlords is deep within the Grand Canyon of Earth. 

Right now there's an on going war within the Grand Canyon between several alien factions for control of the former serpent men city. Flying saucers buzz the Canyon & alien wizards have been crushed under the heels of a native American god of death.
All of this activity has unleashed the purple fog of power that once emminated from the sacred Canyon.


Reaper snakeman champion is available here.
 The inspiration for my campaign version of a serpent man.

Only recently have the lich kings of Yig begun to rise from the mummfied niches of their ancient ancestral home. The occult power has awakened them & they don't like the alien tresspassers within their city. What the invaders don't realize is the fact that there are other cities scattered throughout the Canyon.
Yig itself stirs in the bowels of the inner Earth!
"It seems that Yig, the snake-god of the central plains tribes—presumably the primal source of the more southerly Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan—was an odd, half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature. He was not wholly evil, and was usually quite well-disposed toward those who gave proper respect to him and his children, the serpents; but in the autumn he became abnormally ravenous, and had to be driven away by means of suitable rites. That was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country pounded ceaselessly week in and week out in August, September, and October; and why the medicine-men made strange noises with rattles and whistles curiously like those of the Aztecs and Mayas.

Yig's chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children—a devotion so great that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the venomous rattlesnakes which thronged the region. Frightful clandestine tales hinted of his vengeance upon mortals who flouted him or wreaked harm upon his wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turn his victim, after suitable tortures, to a spotted snake.

In the old days of the Indian Territory, the doctor went on, there was not quite so much secrecy about Yig. The plains tribes, less cautious than the desert nomads and Pueblos, talked quite freely of their legends and autumn ceremonies with the first Indian agents, and let considerable of the lore spread out through the neighbouring regions of white settlement. The great fear came in the land-rush days of '89, when some extraordinary incidents had been rumoured, and the rumours sustained, by what seemed to be hideously tangible proofs. Indians said that the new white men did not know how to get on with Yig, and afterward the settlers came to take that theory at face value. Now no old-timer in middle Oklahoma, white or red, could be induced to breathe a word about the snake-god except in vague hints. Yet after all, the doctor added with almost needless emphasis, the only truly authenticated horror had been a thing of pitiful tragedy rather than of bewitchment. It was all very material and cruel—even that last phase which had caused so much dispute." 

The Curse of Yig

H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop

Written 1928, published November 1929 in Weird Tales,
Volume 14, Number 5, Pages 625-36.

The children of Yig have begun to awaken hoards of undead warriors & skeletons whose remains dot the canyon. These have been attacked any adventurers who have been foolish to wander into certain forbidden areas of the canyon. There are rumors among the Cha'alt rabble, Nevv'ada rebel forces, & the scavengers who have sided with the Canyoners that there is another force in the form of the 'Master'. 
Skeleton warriors Reaper Miniatures 

There are two very different source of external Dungeons & Dragons & OSR goodness that I'd use for this adventure encounter. One is X4: "Master of the Desert Nomads" (1983), by David "Zeb" Cook, which is very easy to convert. This module has several NPC forces that can be converted to be used as one of the other worldly factions after the 'White Zoth'. 


The army of nomads is threatening to overrun the Canyon & its surrounding environs! They have come from off world through the Cha'alt rift. The setting offers some unique opportunities for the nomads to engage in raids & possibly resettle the Canyon for themselves. Because of the very diverse & dangerous nature of the Grand Canyon the other book I'd use is Adventurer, Conqueror, King's Lairs & Encounters. 

This is the perfect book to help fill in many of the other worldly locations & other areas that your player's PC's are likely to run into middle of a sandbox or location point crawl in the middle of such a setting. The fact that mant of the monsters are stand out encounters that count as adventures unto themselves is a bonus! The battles for the Grand Canyon are likely to be some of the most dangerous of the Cha'alt wave conflict.




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Some Thoughts On Adventurer, Conqueror, King, Rpg's Lairs & Encounters Book

"Lairs & Encounters™ is the ultimate supplement for fantasy RPG sandbox campaigns. Designed for use with the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ (ACKS™), it is readily compatible with other fantasy role-playing games built on the same core rules."


If there is one other book besides the Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg rule book that I love its the Lairs & Encounters book. I've used it more times then another book in the ACK's product line. The book is a two hundred & twenty nine page adventure tool kit for the Adventurer, Conqueror, King line. This is the same world setting that's fleshed out in the  Auran Empire Primer. But comes to far more life in the AX1: The Sinister Stone of Sakkara . 
"Over a millennium ago, when the borderlands were in the dark grip of the Zaharan Empire, the empire’s sorcerer-priests erected a profane temple to house the terrible artifact known as the Stone of Sakkara. Using the Stone, the sorcerer-priests could birth monsters and abominations with frightening ease and magically command the loyalty of chaotic creatures. The Stone brought its evil masters great power throughout the fell empire.
In the centuries since the fall of Zahar, the Stone has lain dormant and forgotten. Now it has awakened, and warbands of beastmen have begun to gather sacrifices to power the Stone’s birthing pools again. Local farms and hamlets have been sacked and pillaged, and entire families have gone missing. The local legate has too few men to even patrol the border; he has none at all to hunt down the source of the evil. Adventurers are needed…" 

The world of the Auran Empire is a pseudo-Roman empire with over arching aspects of a fantasy Europe caught within the dream of empire & conquest. This is s world that is badly in need of heroes and that's where your PC's come in. Again & again we see the themes of domain take a back see into the myths of the empire. The fortress is a homage to Gary Gygax's B2 Keep on the Borderlands but in  keep in an Ancient Egyptian/Mesopotamian culture that the Auran empire has conquerored. But there are far older ancient races & themes at work here. All of the parts & products I've mentioned mesh completely with the ACK's Lairs & Encounters book. 



Where ACK's is designed expressly for the purpose of providing interesting domain-level play, putting the "game" back into the endgame; Lairs & Encounters takes the domain level game applies that concept into the background of the monster. This means that the concept of the monster becomes two things one it becomes the competition, the horror, the mythological concept and antithesis to the PC's within their domains. The second thing it does is makes the animal or being that is being used within a game as much of a resource as any of the other natural game elements to be exploited by the DM. It means that those within your domains are going to be far more eager to seek the protection of those more powerful than themselves. This gives a whole other aspect to monsters as protection, rulers, etc. within those hexes that parties seem to continue to crawl through.
Another thing about Lairs & Encounters that's the 'encounter' part there is the gravity of history in many of the encounters that are created within this book. Many plug into the 'official' ACK's setting but they can easily be applied to your own campaigns for example:"
SKELETON
The ground here is torn up by the remains of nine ancient Zaharan scythed chariots, broken and partially covered by webs, dust, and sand. Here and there the jagged blades stick up from the scattered chariot wheels. Each character passing through or searching the area has a 1 in 6 chance of stepping on one of these partly-buried blades and suffering 1d3 points of damage. 18 skeletons (AC 2, Move 120’, HD 1*, hp 4 each, #AT 1 weapon, Dmg 1d6, Save F1, ML N/A, AL C), with rusted mail and jagged, broken scimitars, litter the ancient battlefield in clusters near the chariots. They will rise to attack if blood is shed. " This is something to keep in mind when designing your own encounters and this book has the tools, guidelines, and more to help you out with that. Something else to keep in mind is that Lairs & Encounters plugs into Domains at War, ACKS' expansion focusing on mass combat and how it relates to all other aspects of the game, from monsters in domain management to mercenary wages to mercantile supply and demand all centered around the aspects of the monster. By popular demand, they have distilled just the mass combat system itself to an ~8 page kernel which they are planning to add as an expansion but Lairs & Encounters slides right into the backside of this material. That means that all of those battle grounds, war fields, places of violence, ancient war sights and more have the real potential to turn into adventure locations unto themselves. This is something to keep in mind when running games after a party has passed through hex '5671' and they're entirely done with looting the bodies and the bandits, mercenaries are dead. Their foes can rise again to cause problems for the locals and you might have to back to clean up your messes. There are several reasons to really get into Adventurer Conqueror King System: Lairs & Encounters:
When you want a really well thought out lair for an adventure or hex crawl that not only blends into the setting but enhances the adventure material adding in another layer of adventure Sometimes competition is good & monsters can add an entirely unforeseen complication for those domain owners. Monsters domains can also be a readily made domain for PC's to take over(Lairs & Encounters can make that process very wily and interesting as well). Fast set up and lots of prefab encounters that can be dragged and dropped into your own adventure environments to serve as bridge gaps when you've got fifteen minutes before your players arrive and nothing written. Expanded war game ties for domains of war that make those war games an actual part of the adventure with monstrous tie ins. This book can be used to enhance, expand, and blow life into the factions and background of existing or classic modules to give new twists on modules or adventures that parties have already played through. Take Keep of The Borderland and suddenly it becomes more then a simple introduction adventure, it becomes an introduction to factional warfare with monsters surrounding a tiny island of humanity in the wilderness on the border of war! Drag & drop in some of the encounters and the entire tone of the adventure changes!

And this is exactly where the Lairs & Encounters puts the ACK's game in a another place. I think that ACK's as a whole works on a lot of levels & even given my checkered history with the game is still one of my favorite retro clones or is it neoclone?!