Odd Carcosa One-Shot
A friend wanted a solo game and I wanted to do something a bit different than the usual game today, so I went and ran something in Carcosa for him. It was a 2h-ish game through Discord, mostly focused about the setting's weirdness.
For this game, I wanted something a little different, yet to still rely on the Into the Odd standard starting package, because they're great, but also because I'm lazy.
And so I decided my friend would play as Captain Nicholas Moreau and his men, all veteran soldiers of Napoleon's army during the retreat out of Russia after the failed campaign.
Characters
• Captain Nicholas Moreau, one-eyed grizzled leader (played by Jon)
• Lieutenant Pierre Petit, a giant and an alcoholic
• Corporal Gabriel Garcia, plagued by nightmares and hatchet specialist
• Sergeant Marcel Girard, doesn't talk ever since a wolf bit his face off
• Private Laurent, a sadistic brute wielding a medieval flail
• Private Lefèbvre, the heart of the squad and great at card despite having only one arm left
• Private Durant, whose leg was broken during the storm
• And Private Fournier, one of the few men that still had a musket and ammo for it
What Happened?
• After waking up in a strange place, Captain Moreau gave a rousing speech to his men and some orders to follow as to avoid a total mental breakdown on their part. Getting acquainted with the weird purple landscape and two moons was a difficult experience, but nobody complained about the lack of snow.
• Moreau, taking with him Petit and Garcia, went down to a strange field of tall purple grass to try and find some food or water after checking out the higher plateau of giant blue dead trees. Down there, they found a strange, pulsating brown thing the size of three bears and sent Garcia as a scout to take a closer look. The thing turned out to be some tentacled horror and tried to eat Garcia with its seven mouths from which a nauseating juice was trickling, emanating strange vapors that soothed the natural fear and repulsion these men should have felt when noticing the beast. Despite that, Moreau was quick to act and the men ran away back to the camp, not without losing Garcia's pack on a spiky rock while hurriedly climbing back up to where the thing couldn't follow them.
• Back to camp, the lookout declared that he had seen a red man, maybe an english spy,somewhere around the caves west of their camp. Moreau decided he'd handle that too, and went with his fellow officers, plus Fournier. There, they set up an ambush and waited in front of the cave, but whe the creature came out - a man with four arms, a hulking frame, no hair or clothes and entirely tomato red, skin and white of the eyes, that cared not for their puny "ambush" : he had apparently smelled the soldiers, and started yelling at them in a strange tongue.
Fournier shot "it". It looked slightly pissed, looked at the wound, spit on the floor, and kept yelling, while gesturing with increased anger at the trespassers. Moreau decided it would be wise to offer the Red Man all of his rations to see if that would please him. It worked.
It worked so well that the Red Man showed them inside his cave and led them to a great underground lake full of other Red Men and Women, all four-armed and huge and naked. After some culture shock, the Red people offered a strange milky drink to the soldiers, which turned out to be an extremely potent psychedelic drug. They then proceeded to party like it's -9999 and played drums and other strange instruments while the soldiers quickly started tripping balls.
• After a while, a very confused Moreau realized that something was wrong with the giant ball of something emerging from the lake in which he and his soldiers were swimming half naked and raving mad. Why yes, it was that same huge ball of leather with its barbed tentacles and seven gaping mouths! In a surreal panic, Moreau managed to yet again save his men from certain doom and somehow got out of the cave (mostly by running and bum-rushing the red men, which involved raw luck and boldness). Once home, they let out a sigh of released tension when they noticed the Red savage weren't following.
• The next morning, Garcia and Girard had disappeared! Moreau decided to go investigate by himself and followed their tracks to a small wooden thing on a rock.
There, he also met a robed women whose skin and hair color was something he'd never seen or imagined before, a color that could only be described by analogy as wild, and painful. She was also investigating the strange wooden talismans and despite the language barrier, they got along well enough and kept looking for clues together.
• After a few hours of searching, they arrived at the entrance of a yellow-ish marsh and found a huge tree that had a large bulge in the shape of a man. The ulfire woman, with the help of Moreau, cut open the tree and out came Garcia, uncounscious but alive, covered in yellow, syrup-like fluids from the strange tree. The woman explained something to Moreau who, oddly, understood a few words this time : help, ritual, portal. He didn't get the time to try and communicate though, as the woman suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, an arrow through her head.
We ended the session here, as a troop of raptor-riding blue men wielding bows and spears attacked.
Some Notes
• We had a lot of fun and I'm internalizing Into the Odd more and more, which is very good news for my long running campaign - I've had the terrible habit of switching systems regularly in the past, but I'm confident I can stick to ItO for a year or two now.
• Carcosa is WEIRD. It's super hard to improvise descriptions of a super weird setting that you haven't fleshed out prior to the game. I like weird though, and it gave me some ideas about how I want my main game's world to look like.
Coming up next: some notes about my home setting.
For this game, I wanted something a little different, yet to still rely on the Into the Odd standard starting package, because they're great, but also because I'm lazy.
And so I decided my friend would play as Captain Nicholas Moreau and his men, all veteran soldiers of Napoleon's army during the retreat out of Russia after the failed campaign.
This is your party.
During the march back home, a storm took everyone by surprise, leaving Moreau and his men stranded and cut from the rest of the army, then something happened and the next thing they remember is waking up in a strange, surreal land where nothing feels or looks familiar.
Characters
• Captain Nicholas Moreau, one-eyed grizzled leader (played by Jon)
• Lieutenant Pierre Petit, a giant and an alcoholic
• Corporal Gabriel Garcia, plagued by nightmares and hatchet specialist
• Sergeant Marcel Girard, doesn't talk ever since a wolf bit his face off
• Private Laurent, a sadistic brute wielding a medieval flail
• Private Lefèbvre, the heart of the squad and great at card despite having only one arm left
• Private Durant, whose leg was broken during the storm
• And Private Fournier, one of the few men that still had a musket and ammo for it
What Happened?
• After waking up in a strange place, Captain Moreau gave a rousing speech to his men and some orders to follow as to avoid a total mental breakdown on their part. Getting acquainted with the weird purple landscape and two moons was a difficult experience, but nobody complained about the lack of snow.
• Moreau, taking with him Petit and Garcia, went down to a strange field of tall purple grass to try and find some food or water after checking out the higher plateau of giant blue dead trees. Down there, they found a strange, pulsating brown thing the size of three bears and sent Garcia as a scout to take a closer look. The thing turned out to be some tentacled horror and tried to eat Garcia with its seven mouths from which a nauseating juice was trickling, emanating strange vapors that soothed the natural fear and repulsion these men should have felt when noticing the beast. Despite that, Moreau was quick to act and the men ran away back to the camp, not without losing Garcia's pack on a spiky rock while hurriedly climbing back up to where the thing couldn't follow them.
• Back to camp, the lookout declared that he had seen a red man, maybe an english spy,somewhere around the caves west of their camp. Moreau decided he'd handle that too, and went with his fellow officers, plus Fournier. There, they set up an ambush and waited in front of the cave, but whe the creature came out - a man with four arms, a hulking frame, no hair or clothes and entirely tomato red, skin and white of the eyes, that cared not for their puny "ambush" : he had apparently smelled the soldiers, and started yelling at them in a strange tongue.
Fournier shot "it". It looked slightly pissed, looked at the wound, spit on the floor, and kept yelling, while gesturing with increased anger at the trespassers. Moreau decided it would be wise to offer the Red Man all of his rations to see if that would please him. It worked.
It worked so well that the Red Man showed them inside his cave and led them to a great underground lake full of other Red Men and Women, all four-armed and huge and naked. After some culture shock, the Red people offered a strange milky drink to the soldiers, which turned out to be an extremely potent psychedelic drug. They then proceeded to party like it's -9999 and played drums and other strange instruments while the soldiers quickly started tripping balls.
• After a while, a very confused Moreau realized that something was wrong with the giant ball of something emerging from the lake in which he and his soldiers were swimming half naked and raving mad. Why yes, it was that same huge ball of leather with its barbed tentacles and seven gaping mouths! In a surreal panic, Moreau managed to yet again save his men from certain doom and somehow got out of the cave (mostly by running and bum-rushing the red men, which involved raw luck and boldness). Once home, they let out a sigh of released tension when they noticed the Red savage weren't following.
• The next morning, Garcia and Girard had disappeared! Moreau decided to go investigate by himself and followed their tracks to a small wooden thing on a rock.
There, he also met a robed women whose skin and hair color was something he'd never seen or imagined before, a color that could only be described by analogy as wild, and painful. She was also investigating the strange wooden talismans and despite the language barrier, they got along well enough and kept looking for clues together.
• After a few hours of searching, they arrived at the entrance of a yellow-ish marsh and found a huge tree that had a large bulge in the shape of a man. The ulfire woman, with the help of Moreau, cut open the tree and out came Garcia, uncounscious but alive, covered in yellow, syrup-like fluids from the strange tree. The woman explained something to Moreau who, oddly, understood a few words this time : help, ritual, portal. He didn't get the time to try and communicate though, as the woman suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, an arrow through her head.
We ended the session here, as a troop of raptor-riding blue men wielding bows and spears attacked.
Some Notes
• We had a lot of fun and I'm internalizing Into the Odd more and more, which is very good news for my long running campaign - I've had the terrible habit of switching systems regularly in the past, but I'm confident I can stick to ItO for a year or two now.
• Carcosa is WEIRD. It's super hard to improvise descriptions of a super weird setting that you haven't fleshed out prior to the game. I like weird though, and it gave me some ideas about how I want my main game's world to look like.
Coming up next: some notes about my home setting.
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