The Iron Coral Redux - One Shot

Audio Version (a bit late, sorry)

Last Thursday I got to run the new version of the Iron Coral (from Into the Odd 2nd Ed) and it was a blast! This is basically a guest post since Cosmic Orrery took notes of her own! I'm adding some commentary but appreciate the change in perspective from having a player tell the tale.
As thanks for covering for my lazy ass, I gifted her character some weird flavors of gum such as "octopus ink" and "turtleshell glue".

What Happened

We arrive on boat with some other would be adventurers and go in first, climb down into the coral, the first chamber has some fella muttering in the corner, Giza ambles over and pokes it with her musket prompting it to be frightened by her horrible demenour and take a huge clawed chunk of her muskets stock with its iron nails, she retreats in panic and it runs off down (I think the south way?).

The party decides to go the direction it didnt go, and wiggles through a crawlspace (having to push and shove jacks character a bit cause of his armour) emerging then into a transluscent walled room, which had a very soggy corpse which tyrmanda plunges her hands into (almost) barfing, and rifles through finding I think some iron nails?

Theres a grate in the south we peer through and see some kind of storage room the otherside, then we head to the east wall and carefully open the sliding metal door with a crowbar, then proceed to the next slimy room which has weird sculpted furniture and a slug baloon crawling on the wall. Squirmy Joe creeps around the edge of the slug baloon's detection radius (which gets goosebumps if you get too close)(Giza cautiously points her musket at it) to look through the glass window/wall thing in the south through which he sees a man, some pantomiming, friendly waves, and then the man touches the glass and it Vwoops up into the ceiling and lets in an EXTEREMLY loud mechanical noise from the other side of the door, this makes the slug baloon freak and it emits a phsyic scream. Giza frantically tries to shoot it but misses before it crescendoes and she falls limp, her brain being filled with visions of a terrible landscape with gaunt aliens reaching towards her. Everyone else is okay and quickly hack slash shoot the thing to pieces. After a short rest to coax the whimpering Giza back to lucidity, the party chats with the man, Marcus (who had his ears stoppered with wax) who reveals he's been lost in here for a while. Longer than the Iron Coral has grown out of the ocean, actually.

GM Note: Giza only had 3 CHA, and was now down to 2 after the psychic scream. At 0 CHA your brain explodes, scanner style, and it was a d6 of damage so that was a VERY lucky moment.

We head down the east passage, down some stairs, and into a room with a dome up top, we contemplate this for a moment then decide to move on, descending for real this time down a steep flight of stairs to the level below. Here we enter a weird garden made of alien coral which reminds Giza of the visions she had earlier. We peer at the weird blockage on the south wall; Tymandra thinks it'd be better to avoid the weird coral and so we beat a careful path to the west exit then enter a room with a metal door, which Tymandra crowbars open again like before. 

We enter a sticky sweet smelling room with a big white rock in the south corner... At this point we catch Marcus licking the wall and tasting it (he says it tastes like licorice) and suggest he lick the stone. When he does it comes alive! And forms into a spiky humanoid coral shape and starts lumbering forward!
(I think we shot at it first?) We shoot and hack at it, but oh no, our attacks just slough some chunks off and it grabs Tymandra's apprentice Marion and tears/dislocates her arm, leaving her screaming on the floor! (she was too close, attacking with like a dagger or something)
Tymandra chartges forward to avenge her apprentice and everyone else takes potshots at it, aiming for the center of mass and knocking enough chunks off that it collapses to the floor and starts to get reabsorbed by the wall.
Giza scampers over to tend to Marim while Tymandra viciously tears the heart of the dying creature out. The goo oozes off the creature and turnes out to be a jumbled mess of metal bits, dentures, wire, rust nails, copper wire, etc. We rest a moment and make sure Maion's okay (her arm was really roughed up but not ripped off ).

GM Note: because Critical Damage should be scary, but you can also kind of just get back up and be fairly capable after a short rest, I like to go with "it looked worse than it actually was", unless they die.

Then, we tentatively poke our way southward, where we find a room with two corpses on the floor and a violet suit of armour standing against the wall. Giza's arcanum senses tingle urgently and she scampers over (prodding the two corpses as she passes) to investigate the armour (which turns out to have a corpse inside) she bashes the corpse's head in, then takes the armour down and starts opening it up while the other two loot the corpses (which have some sewing needles and stuff). Giza tips the old corpse out then puts the armour on (neglecting to take off her own clothes) and feels it violently drill into her flesh and clasp tight - but afterward feels very safe and secure and protected!

GM Note: it's not coming off without some major surgery.

Everyone agrees to head back to the surface since we've now found a little bit of treasure and could maybe sell the armour, Tymandra snatches up some of the copper wire (bulky) from the dead white stone as we pass, then we follow our route back.

As we're climbing the stairs up a ghostly transluscent psychic spirit snake starts encircling us whispering something, but everyone just plugs their ears and ignores it much to its consternation and after a while, snubbed, it disappears into a wall, then we're in the slimy furniture, but as we reach the metal door to the glass walls room we hear fishy babbling like what the first creature we met sounded like. Giza's flashbang is suggested as an obvious solution and we debate whether to attack them or just run for it, but remembering that to get out we need to crawl through a crawlspace; we decide it's better to attack. The metal door gets wrenched open, we toss the flashbang in, slam the door, hear a bang and yells, then we throw open the door and rush in guns blazing and swords chopping and we dismember all the fishlings till there's only one left alive but injured. It quickly expires while we debate over whether to help it (it had a boot on its head!)

 

Art by Scrap Princess (Monster Manual Sewn From Pants)

We crawl through the crawl space and pop out, breifly spying the first creature we met who runs away again, then we climb out of the Iron Coral into the salty sea air, with sun peeking through the cloudy, rainy sky (I think it was raining when we first went down) and board the steamship we arrived on again

The End (for noowwwwwww) 

A Few Thoughts

It had been a long while since I'd run a game - Into the Odd is still extremely fun, especially interesting to see the kind of tension that comes with very low stat rolls (Giza and her CHA 3 came into play). I was originally planning to remove stats and simply assume 10 for PCs the same way I do for NPCs, but players rolled interesting stats before I announced the house rule, so we went vanilla-ish instead.

I was very happy with the pacing of the session, something I think the whole group agreed upon. I think it's mainly thanks to Chris's description format for the dungeon rooms. It's the Gavin Norman method of just using a few keywords to evoke a scene. It's easy to improvise on (I did a few time fairly naturally) but is also enough on its own.