Shut Down Cha'alt - Cha'lting Escalation Campaign Update!

 So over the weekend we took a quick look at the Cha'alt first edition hard back to see where the entries are for our current campaign.Why?! Because the Cha'alt trilogy is very expansive & there's a lot of questions that the players have come up with. 

The players at this point don't simply want to explore & clear the dungeons. They want a piece of the sleazy underworld action of Cha'alt for the Fall & Winter campaigns. So their looking to go back into the dungeons gather riches & grind then move on to the big boys of Cha'alt itself. 

We're playing with interstellar scum here within our White Star laden universe so it's not a huge leap to see these space dogs taking over key sections of Cha'alt as play goes on. The key here is 

Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shadows changes up a lot of the events in the Cha'alt setting itself. 

OSR Commentary - Actually DMing A Cha'alt Campaign

 

Now the Carocsa & the 'Cha'alt 'After Dark' blog posts generated some controversy on my table top with folks talking about how both settings are extremely dangerous to PC's. They actually very much are! Would I run either Science Fantasy setting as is?! Oh Hell no! In point of fact if I was going to run Cha'alt ( I will coming up but its a scheduling issue at the moment folks) then I would actually start with Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise. Why?! Because Cha'alt needs to be your OSR setting & not Venger Satanis's! Yup, I absolutely said that & Venger will agree with me here. You need to customize your OSR settings & make them your own. 

How?! Add or subtract what you want in the setting. This is one of the absolute strengths of Carocsa as a sand box setting. You have no idea what's around the corner as a player. Want to run Carcosa as 'Masters of the Universe then go for it. Next time as a primitive Lovecraftian horror fest. Sure, why not?! 
Cha'alt is very different in some respects & that's because its 'Brand Venger' setting & universe to some extent. And I believe it was Rpg Pundit who said, 'A little Venger goes a long way.' And while this is true don't let it intimidate you as a player or DM. The thing about it is that Cha'alt needs to be used and the players are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the setting through play. And this goes back to something else that needs to be said. Run the setting with whatever OSR rules system you want or the players want. Personally for this combo I'd pick Warriors of the Red Planet rpg & bring a healthy brew of Swords and Super-Science of Xuhlan to boil. These two together could help really make either OSR Sword & Saucer setting shine. 

If you want this campaign setting to actually work? Then Jason Vey's Age of Conan OD&D hack could smooth out the edges of the campaign. Don't write a damn script. Some simple adventure notes, some ideas, a few encounters, & set the game in the city of A'agrybah, let things go from there! 

1. Let adventure & campaign elements be completely alien and let the players find their own level of play. 
2. Add or subtract adventure elements as needed. 
3. Don't go overboard with OSR books let the hexcrawl work its magic especially with Carcosa. 
4. Its OK sometimes to have 2 dimensional NPC's just go with it. 
5. Sorcerers can be incredibly alien NPC & can be very dangerous let the players find this out. 
6. Run what you want with Cha'alt don't be constrained by the opinions of any author or game designer. 
7. Have fun! None of this is supposed to be super serious business let the play happen. 
8. Carcosa is very dangerous and death is frequent warn players to have back up PC's. 
9. House rule the crap outta of your campaign the way you want. 
10. Its only a game. 

Gods, Orcus, & Metal - Heavy Metal Ambush Session Report

 Things have really been moving in the  Godbound /Cha'alt game  out in the middle of the California desert.  Several of the cults of elemental evil, yes that Elemental Evil have cropped up. And they've been put down as soon as the PC's learned of their true nature. 

The party is now bound & determined to get a hold of the Rod of Orcus that's been moving from one owner to another in the Nevada desert. The artifact has been animating hordes of undead & zombies into a massive army. This thing has been like magnet of negative planar energy! 

The rod itself was guarded by a champion of Orcus within an otherworldly temple that had appeared on one of the night roads. 
About ninety percent of the party is convinced that the rod was the real deal. They've already dealt with & have almost had the floor whipped out from under them by the  champion of orcus himself! It took the combined might of seven player's PC to put him down! 

The party of foo erm adventurers is going back to the Incel cantina on Cha'alt to bargain for more high technology or occult weaponry. Because of the Cha'alt wave no real world technologies work any more. They were intercepted by the undead  heavy metal band 'Dripping Force' lead by a skeletal demonic necromancer of Orcus himself! A godbound named Hans Bonehands was the lead, he packed the word of death, several spells backed up, & he eventually called in two undead horrors from  Neoplastic Press's Teratic Tome. Because the undead & horrors in that book are really the 'big guns'! 


The band's skeltal manager demon took down the party's paladin/godbound with a craft dagger between the shoulder blades! The lead gutarist came through with a sonic guitar solo that shattered two of the party's ear drums after two failed saving throws. Don't worry they were healed later on. 

It took a combined push from all of the players to destroy these bastard rockers! And yes this was a full on push to get the rod back by the band! Then the party went on a rampage destroying the band's van, undead ghoul fan groupies, and any trace that they existed! 

Then the player's PC's  went back to make sure that there wasn't a single spec of the undead around there! The party checked for about five miles in every direction of the California desert. So all together I'd say that it had been a successful run of the Metallic Tome! 

One of my favorite OD&D villains - The Egg of Coot For Your Old School Campaign

 

Today on the blog a quick update & expansion from a blog entry that appeared in 2016. Now on with the show. 

The Egg of Coot is describe as;"Some scholars believe that it is one of the remaining servitors of the Outer Beings. In the Age of Blackmoor, these servitors are referred to as Elder Demons, and once dominated the entire continent. The Egg appears as a huge globe of mossy grey flesh and eyeballs and mouths randomly scattered across the slimy surface. The Egg is buried deep under ground and almost never moves. There are however tunnels leading to it which are used by its Keepers to contact and preserve the Egg. Its Spawn is of similar appearance. The Spawn of Coot has a relationship to the Egg as between Trees of Life and their Mother Trees. "

There are evils of the worlds of D&D and then there's the iconic, egotistical, weird, & downright nasty Egg of Coot. This thing has been around since the dawn of the original  Blackmoor campaign & its minions have cost me more then one PC over the years. My buddy Larry created adventures based on the mock up covers of Havard featured in this article.

Forget Strahd von Zarovich or any of the other iconic TSR era vile villains; The Egg of Coot is bio mechanical villain &  relic from Blackmoor's ancient era. The thing has been around since Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign from the early days of OD&D. My own interactions with the evil of the Egg came about when my friend Larry came across Harvard Blackmoor's 2009 Egg of Croot blog entry.

 Larry grabbed some of the concepts that Havard put out & we began to face down some of the ill breeded horrors that came from the weirdness of the egg.This was  after the appearance of one of the Empire's scout ships as a part of a dungeon that our party of adventurers were exploring.

What really got Larry stirring was when I brought over my copy of Astonishing Sorcerers and Swordsmen of Hyperborea (which is now counting down three or less hours for the second edition). The egg's minions began to appear popping up across the planes in Larry's, Steven's campaigns, and Peter's campaign all of them looking for pockets of caches of lost Beagle & Warden interstellar technology. The Egg was a completely evil entity that mocked the players at every turn with off color graffiti & all kinds of evil humor. The Egg is a hate of old times that has come down from the very beginning of D&D continues its evil to this day. The thing that it is insidious is the fact that in each & every Blackmoor city, settlement, and village is an agent of the Egg of Coot exists


Havard actually has a breakdown of the Blackmoor technology; he's done a really good job of dealing with some of the OD&D Beagle technology on his own website.

The sci fi technology ties back into the Temple of the Frog & it's so iconic for me.
"The Egg is the definition of Evil. It is highly intelligent and communicates with its fanatical followers through Telepathy. " You don't want to encounter its evil if it can be dangerous & very devious in its machinations."

The Egg's evil is completely behind the Temple of the Frog & has ties now to some of the events of today's Dark Albion game (a blog entry for another time). The game I played today has a deep connection to Return to the Temple of the Frog for third edition AD&D.   
The science fantasy aspect of the Egg of Croot is one of the iconic back bones of the Blackmoor setting. These seem to follow in the wake of the appearance of the Egg of Coot. There are several science fantasy devices that I came across today.

There is a really nice OD&D resource that Havard designed that's available through the Vaults of Pandius website. This has all of the background that a dungeon master needs to introduce the Egg of Coot into their own games. There are also several articles that have more technological artifacts from Bloormoor. These include The Technological Battlefield by James Ruhland from the Mystara Mailing List posted 25 December 1999.Additional tech weapons by Alex Benson, from the Mystara Mailing List posted 6 December 1999.
  & Sample tech weapons by Rob, from the Mystara Mailing List posted 3 December 1999.  As well as the Alien Devices from Blackmoor by Dave L. Arneson and David J. Ritchie, from DA3 City of the Gods.
Finally there's the light sabre rules that S.Lentz made; Light Sabre by S. Lentz, from the Mystara Mailing List posted 7 September 1999.



Note because the Egg of Coot is a higher dimensional being it has access to a wide variety of campaign settings including OSR & old school ones such as Greyhawk, Godbound/Cha'alt Earth, & even Cha'alt itself. Is the  Egg more powerful then the gods or Mystara's immortals?! No but it is a very definitive Lovecraftian menace across a wide variety of spectrum. 

 

The Egg has been imprisoned for eons & is using whatever means it can to expand its reach across the planes. This is one of the reasons that the other night when speaking with players for Castles & Crusades there was speculation about the fact that they were worried that the egg might show up again?!