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| Cha'alt |
Cha’alt (2019)
by Venger Satanis
Published by Kort’thalis Publishing
Low to mid levels
* * *
Knee-Deep in the Zoth
Gonzo science
fantasy has a high pedigree in old-school gaming. Wild genre-mixing has been
with us since the campaigns of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the publications of
Bob Bledsaw and David Hargrave, and has more recently produced such gems as Encounter
Critical (2004, predating the earliest retro-clones) and the great,
unfinished Anomalous Subsurface Environment. For something
affectionately referred to as “retro stupid” (Jeff Rients), this odd
platypus-like mutt of gaming history has produced some remarkably excellent
materials, and the expectations have thus been set rather high. So we come to Cha’alt.
The book has often been dismissed as a vulgar display of bad taste, the
product of some fringe weirdo with bad opinions, or juvenile fetish material
not worth playing attention to. It has a small but dedicated cult following who
swear it has merit. More often than one might think, these small cultish groups
are right, and everyone else is dead wrong. Sometimes, they are just deluded. And
thus, we are here.
Cha’alt is a lavishly produced, colourful, 216-page hardcover printed on
heavy-duty, slick paper, with gold leaf embossing on the cover, and a psychedelic
dust jacket depicting something from a 1970s album cover. There is a generous
amount of colour illustrations and photos from Deviantart, most of them in
tremendously bad taste, from “photorealistic” fetish art to generic and
soulless colour pieces. As far as I am concerned, the art budget is wasted, but
production values do not really concern this blog, so we shall move on.
While layout is not
packed (white space and squiggly “magical glyphs” are abundant), there is a
surprising amount of material in the book. Where a significant portion of
old-school gaming has succumbed to the idea of minimalism, this is a rich,
extensive campaign book mostly focused on directly playable material. This is a
pleasant surprise: say what you will about the subject matter and the execution,
the book has its heart in the right place. It is not an exercise in creating
avant-garde literature, but giving you a rich grab-bag of stuff you can run out
of the book. More than that, it is actual, honest functional writing that
balances the setting’s peculiar flavour with the idea that information should
be accessible, easily understood, and of help to the tired GM. It does not go
into the weirdo formal experiments of presentation which have become
fashionable in recent years, but while the text will not win any writing
awards, it is competently edited, and does its job efficiently and
unobtrusively. There is even a functional, well-built appenix! In the realm of
ease of use, Cha’alt scores above much of the gaming field.
* * *
The Shores of
Cha’alt
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| Retro stupid rides again |
Cha’alt’s setting is a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland following a war
between the awakened Old Ones, and the planet’s highly advanced civilisation.
Various city-states and barbaric outposts inhabit the remaining land mass,
while interstellar opportunists have arrived to cart off the valuables,
especially the remaining pockets of zoth, the literal lifeblood of the defeated
Old Ones, and a main component of the super-valuable spice mela’anj. Of the
great dungeon-complexes that have risen over Cha’alt, none are as formidable as
the fabled Black Pyramid, a massive structure that has risen anew from beneath
the sands. This is a high-energy setting with a crazy and enthusiastic
anything-goes approach, from sandworms to space sluts, and from shameless
Cthulhu flogging to monster cults. Gonzo games live or die by the way they cobble
together their seemingly incompatible influences; the internal tension is part
of the appeal, and being a little crazy never hurts.
The supplement’s
first section is taken up by setting background and setting-specific miscellany
– a grab-bag of stuff for your Cha’alt campaigns. If you want a random, goofy
mutation chart, you will find it in the desert survival rules, while the
description of the Domed City has a cyberware table to juice up your
characters. This is a fun integration of rules and setting, and the section
where the supplement is at its closest to the fabled Wilderlands of High
Fantasy – a high point of creative, haphazard, play-friendly content.
Factions with their typical representatives, and desert critters are described,
although there are no random encounter charts (which would be one of the most
important things to have in a sandbox setting), and the monster roster is
rather limited with only seven new critters (there are several more scattered
over the subsequent chapters). The same is the case for some of the
supplemental material or random charts and rules, which are found hidden later
in the book – a table of simple psionic abilities, an NPC motivation chart,
random ability score arrays... bits and pieces that come up during play.
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| Here kitty kitty |
The core of Cha’alt
is centred around four adventure sites: two smaller dungeons (Beneath
Kra’adumek, 17 keyed areas; Inside the Frozen Violet Demon Worm, 23
keyed areas), a “home base” style location (Gamma Incel Cantina, 69
keyed NPCs), and a large, three-level “tentpole” dungeon (The Black Pyramid,
111 keyed locations). Unfortunately, it is the short intro scenario, Beneath
Kra’adumek, that is the really good stuff, and the rest have a growing
number of problems. But Beneath Kra’adumek is good, partly because it is
designed as a real dungeon. There is a decent, meaningful layout combining
caverns and passages; there are guarded sections to avoid or eliminate,
prisoners to free, mysterious stuff to mess with, weird monsters (the
centrepiece being the demon cat-snake) and duplicitous NPCs to kill, fool or
befriend; and it has a sequence of simple, memorable setpiece encounters. Ways
to poke at other dimensions and screw things up (including making 1/6 of
Cha’alt’s population disappear forever). Fanatical demon-worm cultists absorbed
in their evil activities. Cryogenic pods to awaken ancient pre-catastrophe
sleepers. Individualised treasure. It is a dynamic scenario that could go a lot
of ways due to the variety of NPC/monster/device interactions, and even feels
like a goofy sort of Star Wars locale – great for an action-packed intrusion
into the fortress-dungeon of an evil space cult, three “princesses” (well,
big-boobed space sluts) included. This is top-notch, and unfortunately, as good
as it gets.
Inside the
Frozen Violet Demon Worm is a great concept –
exploring the intestines of, well, you get the idea – but Cha’alt’s deeper
flaws start to emerge. First is the degeneration of the maps. An arbitrary
dungeon (Beneath Kra’adumek) offers good exploration potential, while
the demon-worm’s interior is an enormous fleshy tunnel with a bunch off
side-chambers in its folds. You approach the locations, you do the encounter. This
is the Monty Haul dungeon in its original sense – a series of “doors”
along a corridor to open for random stuff ranging from a young woman chained to
a stone column crying out for help (concealed Ktha’alu spawn with some really
god magical loot), a group of insectoids battling a flesh-sac detached from the
slowly thawing worm, or an enormous stone head worshipped by savage
brutalitarians (lazy Zardoz reference), a lost pirate ship, or a bunch of
skeevy guys playing high-stakes poker around a scrap metal table. Why? Rule of
cool, that’s why.
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Retro, retro
stupid, retro utterly
freaking dumb |
This is
super-arbitrary, and unlike the cultist lair, has no good sense of place. Why
don’t these encounters wander off a little? Why don’t they interact if they are
right next to each other? What happens if the party runs deep into the worm,
triggering them one by one (and how could the GM handle the logistical chaos of
juggling 8-12 setpiece encounters)? It is a mess, with little to connect the
random bits and pieces. It feels like a “ghost train” type deal from an
amusement park, with dioramas of animatronic monsters leering at you from the
sides. The structure is horrible, and whatever dynamism is present in the
encounters is probably going to be wasted. They are still rather good on the
individual level – the author’s skill for punchy, self-contained situations and
setpieces lifts up the material. If these were spaced less tightly, and placed
within a more interesting, better designed dungeon environment, this would be
another good one.
Gamma Incel
Cantina is the Mos Eisley cantina from Tatooine,
but on Cha’alt. If you have an interest in gambling, whoring, illicit deals,
information or odd jobs, this is a good place to visit if you know how to get
in (it is behind a cloaking field). The presentation is questionable, but the
content is good enough. Basically, you get a map, a brief description of the
cantina’s main areas (from loos to gambling tables to its VIP lounge), then 69
(tee hee) NPCs keyed on the map in colour-coded groups to make things a little
more accessible. This is, obviously, completely useless for anything other than
hitting up 1d6 randos and interacting with them, and treating everyone else as
a homogenous crowd. On the other hand, the paragraph-long NPC descriptions
offer brief, fun profiles so hitting up those 1d6 randos is going to get you
something. The list, appropriately enough for the author’s interests, starts
with P’nis Queeg (“Pilot; just parked his starship; yellow skinned
banana / penis headed alien with swollen ganglia. He’s holding a brand new
plumbus.”), and includes people like Treena (“THOT, human; blonde
hair, blue eyed space Muslim; smoking long, thin hookah; likes humiliation and
spanking”), Halvern (“Sentient chartreuse vapor inside
environmental suit; fake mustache painted on helmet visor; uncontrollable
giggling – that’s why they call him “laughing gas.””) or Bolo (“Droid;
bounty hunter; camouflage and rust-colored; spritzing WD-40 on plate of myna’ak
wings; head of engineering on nearby space station.”) You get the idea. The
sleazy truck stop/titty bar vibe is spot on, and it works decently as Cha’alt’s
Keep to Cha’alt’s Borderlands.
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| The Very Naughty Tetrahedron |
We now come to
the main attraction: The Black Pyramid rises from the wastelands, descending
into an underworld most mythical, or at least moderately horny. This is
obviously the campaign lynchpin not just from the size, but all the side materials.
We get a rumours chart, and random encounters complete with specific monsters (from
the dreaded night clowns to hunter-killer droids, fruit folk, pizza delivery
and bat-winged eyeballs) and unique NPC groups (lost Romans, alien looters, suspicious
hooded guys of all sorts). A “what happened while you were away” chart! A
“leaving the pyramid” chart (travel 1d30 years into the past/future and wipe
most of the campaign – woo-hoo)! Six new gods! A “you dumbass slept in the
pyramid” chart! And so on. So far so good.
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"Have we reached rock bottom yet, guys?"
"Not yet! Everybody, dance!"
"My anus is bleeding!" |
But then... yes,
the problems of the book come back in force, and are multiplied fourfold. The maps
are chaotic gibberish. Any semblance of structure or order (or even inspired
chaos) goes out the window, and what we get is a bunch of randomly shaped and
sized rooms connected by short, randomly patterned corridors (these seem to
have no distinct function, or the reference just fails me) between random
clusters of colour-coded rooms accessible with special crystal keys. This
childish mess does not look like a pyramid – even a severely corrupted one – lacks
meaningful height differences or even connecting stairs (what you think are
three dungeon levels are actually a single flat plain), has no spatial order to
accommodate orienteering or exploration, does not feature actual dungeon
navigation challenges (even less so than the frozen demon-worm), and it is
overall very repetitive in its formal structures. The room descriptions have no
relation whatsoever to the room shapes and sizes. To make it short, the map is really,
really terrible, lacking any redeeming qualities.
There is
something about the encounters that was grating. Maybe my patience was wearing
thin, or maybe it is truly repetitive, but one of the reasons this review is
overdue by several months is that I just could not press on with it. It is just
one pop culture reference setpiece after the other pop culture reference setpiece.
Now... this can work if there is some other kind of connecting material
to add variety (say, an interesting dungeon map to navigate, or challenging
combat/exploration situations and a few clever traps), but it is missing them
altogether. The lazy content also shows its limits. Sometimes, recognition
still elicits the Sensible Chuckle, but that well soon runs dry, and you start
to scrutinise these encounters with a more critical eye. And many of them do
not cut it – they are often static, convoluted for the sake of telling a lame
joke, or don’t offer much interesting interaction. And those lame jokes, they
are getting lamer and more one-note. Here is a room housing anthropomorphic
fruit (#13). Here is a stereotypical podcast guy doing an interview (#14).
Here is the Carousel room from Logan’s Run (#15) – all right,
this is OK. Here is a room with a clone of Rob Schneider trying to convince a
young woman to pay him for sex (#16). Here is a room with a statue of
Gonzo, of Sesame Street fame (#17). “Inspecting Gonzo's nose reveals
a tiny catch underneath, at the base. Manipulating it opens a compartment
located in his crotch. Inside is a battered trumpet. Playing Gonzo's trumpet
summons a Buddhist monk (appearing in 1d4 rounds) who walks into the room and
sets himself on fire, providing enough light and warmth for several minutes
before it goes out and what's left of the monk is carried away like sand in the
wind.” There was an opportunity with the Black Pyramid to present some kind
of otherworldly, metal-inspired, high-energy dungeon. If you’ve got a black
pyramid in your game, you kinda owe something to your readers. Well, Cha’alt’s
Black Pyramid is not otherworldly; it sells out all its potential at one
tired joke a pop. It is all so tiresome.
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| Here is another one for free |
Zothferno
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| Your dungeon is offensive! |
As the post may
suggest, Cha’alt is not an easy thing to review. It is a giant
collection of the good and the bad, mixed in with the happy medium of
“questionable”, and it is not easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. At its
best, it is high-energy gaming with a lot of personality, and a very specific
flavour (space/Cthulhu sleaze). It would be a mistake to write it off on the
basis of this content – like it or not, this is what it intends to do, and what
it intends to be. Those who call it skeevy or sexist are only doing the author
a favour, since this is what he wanted to do. To cite the late, great József
Torgyán, head of Hungary’s Independent Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and Civic
Party, “A lawyer with litigation, and a fine lady with a hard instrument,
cannot be threatened.” But does Cha’alt succeed on its own terms?
As far as I am
concerned, one of the supplement’s main draws is something that some may identify
as a flaw – it is not a thoroughly polished product, but something that shows
its origins as a bundle of the author’s home campaign notes. It preserves the
enthusiasm, and does not reduce the material to a dry treatise. It invites
questions and engagement. There is a definite sense of a dog-eared folder of faded
printouts, scratch paper, and session notes behind the book. It is charming,
and ironically, more conductive to actual use than many books that look more
smooth, but are not presented with table use in mind. It is as accessible as a
slightly cleaned up collection of GM notes, and a fun glimpse into a madman’s
mind.
There is also
something to be said about the modules’ ambitions. They are deeply flawed in
multiple ways (as detailed above), but they are not gated by level and do not
pull punches. You can easily meet enemies who are way more powerful than you
are. You can also beat them up and take their high-tier loot or obtain powers
beyond your meagre abilities. You can find yourself bargaining with major
demons, inadvertently unleashing planetary devastation, or pull off major
campaign-altering victories. Some of this is lolrandom stuff that depends too
much on die rolls or (un)lucky encounters instead of player skill or meaningful
choices that lead to logical consequences, but it is there nevertheless, and it
can be glorious even in this flawed form. It is writ on a large scale, and
allows the players to win big or lose big.
Third, it shows
variety and imagination on the encounter level. Things on Cha’alt are
unpredictable (to say the least), but they are always colourful, and feature
fun interactivity – NPCs and plotlines sketched up willy-nilly with a few broad
strokes, there are knobs to mess with (some of them blow up half the world, but
that’s OK), and a lot of the material is hand-crafted, specific – although the
magical treasure is also too plentiful; you can barely take a few steps without
finding a javelin +1 or a freeze-ray. Many of the pop cultural references are
lazy, but at least many of them make for a compelling set-piece.
Here is the
problem, though. Cha’alt is cursed by a curious sort of laziness that’s
apparent even if you consider this is a 200+ page hardback crammed with gameable
content. It falls apart on the levels above the encounters, and has little
discernible structure to it. Things are sometimes connected a little (albeit
haphazardly), but mostly, it is just throwing things at a canvas to see if it
sticks. Is there a pattern behind the random ideas, or is it just you? It is
probably just you. The trick works in the comparatively small and tightly
designed starter dungeon, but it increasingly becomes apparent Mr. Satanic is
bluffing. The lack of structure and the utter scattershot randomness of the
material makes it hard to apply player skill to the modules, to treat them as challenging,
complex problems or even real places. This is where the diorama/animatronic
monster issue comes back to take its revenge. The environment cannot be known
and mastered because there is no environment, only an illusion of one.
The amount of interaction obscures this problem, but never fully resolves it.
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Your Dungeon is a Cancerous
Growth of Intertextuality and
Postmodernism. REPENT! |
And it also suffers
due to the sheer excess of pop culture citations. Any conceivable part of
cult/geek media is digested and reconstructed in Cha’alt to form the
majority of its encounters. While surely one of the greatest collections of
genre and pop culture references, Cha’alt does little to integrate its
disparate influences into a greater whole, or at least give them its own spin.
The approach it takes is disappointingly literal, and often falls flat. When Anomalous
Subsurface Environment draws from He-Man, it adapts the material to its
setting, the Land of a Thousand Towers, and the result is always a great fit
which transforms the spoofed material just enough to stay recognisable, yet add
a new angle or a clever gameplay twist. Say, “Monsator, Lord of the Stalks” is
obviously an homage to Evil Megacorporation Monsanto, but he is also a fully
developed, compelling villain of a wizard who is interesting beyond the quirky
reference. Monsator is also one idea among many, most of them original.
When Cha’alt does
something similar, it mostly just plops down its direct references randomly,
and tries to skirt by on the strength of star recognition. Sure, Mr. Satanic
betrays an encyclopaedic knowledge of late 20th century cult stuff
and esoterica, but a Videodrome reference next to a Logan’s Run reference next
to a tiki bar next to a movie theatre showing Escape From New York does not
start living together without some effort to make a coherent whole out of them.
The city of “A’agrybah” is plainly Agrabah from Disney’s Aladdin, “just on
Cha’alt” with some surface details like a spaceport and a human sacrifice
tradition. Sure, there is supposed to be chaos and wild leaps of imagination,
but that is just part of the work. Here, the other part is very often missing,
and it is all just a post-modern mish-mash of citations upon citations. Is this
because the author knows no better? Far from the truth! When he makes an effort
to tie things together, as with the setting background, he succeeds fairly
well. It just doesn’t happen often enough, or I guess well enough to bring out
the sort of transformative quality which makes for a truly great gonzo
setting.
Ultimately, these
two central flaws are what makes Cha’alt only “good enough” and not
actually “good” or “great” – they are omnipresent through the book, and cannot
be easily fixed. There is something really good in the setting, and with better
structure, the basic concept could excel. Where Cha’alt is good – the
starter dungeon, many of the individual encounters, the no-nonsense
campaign-friendly presentation – it is deservedly good. As it is, though, it is
a deeply flawed book, although never without charm, or generously endowed space
doxies, bless ‘em.
No playtesters
are credited in this publication. It has apparently been very thoroughly tested,
although often in a fairly peculiar manner, as text chat-based random pickup
games over several of Mr. Satanis’ lunch breaks.
Rating: *** /
*****
