Odd Carcosa - Session 1 - Grilled Wizards & Language Barriers

Today was the first session of my new Odd Carcosa Campaign, and I have to say, it went pretty well.

Our Heroes

• Morkoth (The Grinding Stone of Seasons), Blue Cleric of Oryx, the Flaming Pillar

• Lazuli, Blue Thief

• Mane (Exiled Prince of the Winds, Caller of Storms and Herald of Thunder), Orange Fighter

• Big Eye, White Fighter and his companion Log Breaker, a White Fighter

The Adventure Proper

Strangers found themselves sharing a campfire in the rocky wastes.
Language barriers (mostly) fell as interprets revealed themselves.

Awkward conversation was had, graciously cut short by shouted orders and war cries in the distance.

Two sides: hooded men riding lizards and wielding lasers ambushed by hoplites with spear & shield.

Our heroes decide to use caution and wait it out.

Careful observation reveals the hooded men to be Jale Men, the hoplites are Red Men. The latter party wins, grants a quick death (what passes on for mercy on dread Carcosa) to most but keep a prisoner for interrogation.

The Orange man, a warrior of noble blood, goes to hail the victors. They respond with purpose:

"We are warriors under the banner of the Ocean of Mercy, this land is his territory. We have been tracking these Jale cultists for many moons now, they are slaves to the Oozing Green Pool, and we are on our way to destroy this wicked sorcery and its spawns. Join us, and you may stay in our Lord's keep."

"This is a noble goal", says the priest, thinking back on the awful sorceries of the Bone Man they met in the past. The party accepts to help the Red Men.

On their way to the Jale hideout, the priest perhaps recklessly breaches the topic of faith with the troupe's leader - a man called Daikos, and luckily, he finds kinship in the Red warriors, who share their tale: they are also servants of the Elder gods and enemies of chaos, though their leader, a warlord formerly known as Ulthar. When he and his party reached the citadel in this area, it was inhabited by Dolm Men without a Queen to rule their Hive Mind, and so he took over by putting on a Helm of Telepathy which gave him control over the whole colony, but slowly burned his old spirit until nothing remained but the Ocean of Mercy. Forever loyal to their leader, the red spartans abandoned their former duty to explore the lands to defend the citadel.

The prisoner leads our heroes and the hoplites to an ancient gatehouse made of black stone, a doorway into a canyon at the foot of the mountains. There, Daikos reveals his plan:

The Red warriors will storm the gatehouse and butcher every single Jale cultist.

In the mean time, the party will carry a nano-nuke into the caves, find the Ooze, and destroy it.

[Referee stuff: at this point, I just drop the Stonehell Canyon map onto the players as I didn't want to spend too much time on mapping the area and also should have prepared more. It turned out to work well enough though and there was no real mapping challenge to be had in the areas visited.]

As soon as they stepped into the canyon, Lazuli noticed three naked bone men staring at the party from a ruined house. Operating on instinct and hatred, she peppered them with arrows. Everyone followed, and the Bone Men were soon massacred. Bones littered their hideout, but not much else.

First cave, some white lotus zombis, arrows and javelins took care of them with barely a scratch on the players' side. Deeper inside, a cenotaph covered in eldritch signs, under it is a hidden compartment with a strange pulsating fruit covered in electric blue cobwebs. Against his better judgment, Morkoth decides to poke at it, blowing it up and messing up half the party.

Second cave, the party throws a rock inside and gets assaulted by this thing:

Time for sanity damage! The orange man goes crazy for a little while, starts weeping and praying.
The others are shaken but still sane and try to run away (after Morkoth fails to turn the monster away).

Lazuli is the slowest, gets attacked, takes Critical Damage, loses her head. The party runs faster.

The monster loses interest once outside, delving into the woods below. Big Eye is scarred by the events for the rest of his life, while Mane regains his composure.

Second cave has a bone-man staring at himself in a large ornate mirror with arousal and a strange, ravenous hunger. Arrows and javelins hurt him a lot, he grabs the Orange man and gets one last javelin (which nearly misses the PCs) from Big Eye in the face. Deeper into the cave, the Great Ooze Pool lies, surrounded by green flames and with, at the bottom of it, a naked Jale sorceress looking like one of the oracles from Minority Report. She sends troubling visions in the minds of those present, trying to lure them in with promises of unspeakable pleasures. Everyone passes their save and goes like "heh, nah." Then Morkoth throws the nuke down the pit and everyone gets the hell out of dodge.

And the spartans one, so now the players have a place where they can go and rest, and meet The Ocean of Mercy.

End Session #1.

Post-Mortem

I still love Into the Odd, though there's a lot of D&D-isms (specifically OD&D) that I'm too in love with now. Classes, alignments, all that stuff adds color to the game and doesn't really make it that much complex, which is why I'm using my revised Into the Borderlands rules (see "Odd Carcosa" at the beginning of this post for link) for it. Seems solid, will need some time to see how well it holds up. Combat is brutal, with whoever holds initiative usually destroying the opposition, but that's fine, I think. Makes ambushes important. I'll definitely rely more on group intiative rolls in the future so that fighting is scarier and requires more preparation on the players' end, as I mainly went with "players go first" here by default.