Odd Carcosa - Session 3 - Dead City of the Primordial Ones

Ran some more Carocsa tonight! It was pretty fun, though I dreaded game time as I had zero energy for prep over the week - need to consume more media and spend less time studying.

Anyways, here's the charcters:

Morkoth, Blue Cleric of Oryx
Matthew Rattigan, Engineer from Earth
Big Eye & Log Breaker, White Fighting-Men (& Woman)
Turak, Yellow Sorcerer
& Myotis, Purple Pygmy (Lazuli's replacement)

What Happened
After strange dreams, the PC awoke in a cyclopean dead city inside an even bigger cave illuminated by strange amoeba-like insects.

• Following the sound of rushing water, the party goes north until they reach the "edge" of the platform the city is standing on. Down a huge waterfall they can see the flooded, collapsed part of the city. To the west is a gigantic hive with artificial illumination and to the east is a tall pyramid.

• They were interrupted in their musings by the screams of a strange old man, with sunburnt skin like that of the earth man, only much darker, with black hair and green eyes and a thick arabic accent. After helping the man with invisible, intangible bugs, he offered his help, revealing what he knew:

1. There are Bone Men in the Hive, and you could go through there and some cave systems to reach the Primordial Crater where the White Ooze the party is looking for rests.

2. There is another, slightly safer way through his old laboratory, though there is a Shoggoth in the Vault underneath...

The party decided to go with the Lab as fighting through hordes of Bone-Men might get boring or deadly.

• Going down a ladder, the old man missed a step and broke both his legs, but the party agreed to carry him to get more out of him.

• After going through a room filled with overgrown tropical vegetation and vines, the party met a killer robot with a brain-in-a-jar screaming "ERADICATE" at them, but with quick thinking and the use of a Quickening spell, Rattigan managed to get on the machine and deactivate it. Turak almost died under machinegun fire, but was quickly put back on his feet. Carcosans are sturdy like that.

• More exploring revealed a room full of fibrous pods containing humanoid figures, a flower-infested bedroom and a hidden path to the sorcerer's laboratory, which contained a door to the underground vault AND a fresh clone of the old man, younger and stronger. The party let him have his new body.

"Young" is relative for sorcerers though.

• The sorcerer having recovered his memories, was glad to reward the PCs with some more help - he lent them two of his killer bots in case they ran into the Shoggoth below, and after warning them, he let them go down the Vault.

• In the vault, the players went through a bunch of relatively unimportant rooms with stuff in them (frogs, bugs, some crocodile god alter...) while in the distant, the Shoggoth tried to lure them out with the call of a human infant, without success. With some luck and skill, the party eventually got through the vault without stumbling upon the beast.

• Deeper below, a colossal cave revealed a large crater filled with primordial white goo. Everyone resisted the strange compulsion to jump in there - yes that's the second one in three sessions, sentient goo is the equivalent of a Bugbear on Carcosa - and used the robots to get two full canisters of the stuff before going back up.

• Another safe crossing of the vault - except Morkoth found himself right in front of Morkoth right at the end! The two started fighting, with the beast immitating even the magic of the original, while the others immediately ran away towards the Sorcerer's lab (protected by an airlock). 

The struggle continued as both tried to kill each other until Morkoth had the great idea of sticking out his arm for the bot to scan and figure out which was the real one (the sorcerer took blood samples from everyone earlier to make sure no shapeshifting shoggoth would try to fool him into opening the vault for it). When the Shoggoth noticed that, it burst out into a great soup of black ichor and Morkoth barely got out of there while making use of his last Quickening spell. As everyone desperately pleaded the sorcerer to open the vault, the black ichor started cracking the airlock's doors, but everyone did manage to get through and close the door behind them before it could reach the lab.

Epilogue Matthew Rattigan got back home, surrounded by some very confused and bothered swissmen wondering why there was a smelly, weird, mutated dude in the middle of their otherwise great day.

Morkoth, the Grinding Stone of Seasons, joined forces with the Ocean of Mercy, having acquired an energy core from the aliens to power his superweapon, and using the goo to craft a new pair of arms for him through vivimancy. Whether his companions will follow him on his crusade against bone men or lead them to other adventures, we do not know. Yet.

The End for now.

Post-Mortem

I've some very "vanilla" stuff lately and thought it lacking, so I turned towards the weirdest, most high concept-yet-playable setting I knew of that I had at hand and did some Carcosa. Turns out it takes a lot of energy to prep for it, and I don't really have the time for that level of dedication right now. Or at least, only in small bursts. So I've decided to take a small break from it and go at it more safely, preparing one-shot adventures or strong situations for the players to deal with instead of inefficiently looking for all possible ways to prep and ending up stitching together 5 different adventures like a mad man. Into the Odd is still pretty cool - didn't really use most of its rules besides the lovely Luck Roll this time though.

Stuff I'm Considering Next:• Traveller Classic (some kind of space western type of deal)
• Tom Moldvay's D&D Basic Set (it's so well written!)
• "Regular" Into the Odd or some other good rules-light set.