So for the last month or two I've been running for my first time the legendary Deep Carbon Observatory.
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Deep Carbon Observatory cover art
by Scrap Princess |
There were definitely some difficulties or things that went wrong or that I would do differently if I ever run it again, but overall it was a really fun module to run and the players also claimed to have enjoyed suffering through it.
Patrick writes a lot of pretty prose for his works which makes it really enjoyable to flip through and peruse in your own time more out of interest than with game prep in mind, but at least for me personally that is a style that rarely works at the table since I get nervous about getting details of things right in my descriptions so that I don't possibly ruin something else down the line later on, and scanning through the text takes a lot of time since you need to filter out the "fluff" to find the details that you need for the game at a given moment.
But, without further praise or grievances, here are play reports from our sessions that I shared with the LotFP discord server for them to follow along with our experiences with the module and now I'm laying them out for all of you guys to read as well. Hope you enjoy!
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First actual session of DCO done, party picked up the little thief kid as a guide by buying him off with food, got very intriqued by the chapel and the meaning of the spoon, were assaulted with crossbow-fire and someone trying to smoke them inside the chapel by setting it on fire, and on their way back to carrowmoore where they left their caravan after the situation at the chapel they dragged the sacrophagus with them.
We ended session with the mummy being stabbed through the chest after it refused to hand over it's treasures and it casting fear on five of the six people messing around with it.
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DCO update:
The party almost lost one of the two platemail fighters trying to get the sword and key from a mummy whose sarcophagus they had found.
They steered clear of the arguing wizards and watched as the two started to fling spells and rapiers at each other, leaving them to solve their own problems as the three metre pike crashed through the wooden bridge on which the wizards were standing to grab one of them.
Later on they decided to start following a smaller stream coming through a patch of woods rather than going upstream via the larger main current, incurring the wrath of several crows whose meal they interrupted in doing so. The solution they came up with was to struggle up a tent on their raft as a cover from the swooping corvids, barely avoiding their beaks.
Arriving at another smaller thicket afterwards, they chose not to mess around with the eel stuck in a net and the fishing boat sitting stuck right next to it.
The following night they caught their first sight of zombies as one wandered towards raft that was now covered by a tent. The people on watch as this happened ended up frantically pulling and pushing the raft away, relocating it and managing to lose the less-than-intelligent corpse in the night.
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DCO update #3
PCs got to the windmill, catching most of the crabs in a Web spell and laying a tarp over them in order to create a makeshift place to stand while the crabs were struggling to free themselves. They then threw some rope up to the woman they saw up in the window, only to find out that there were also over a dozen hungry children up there with her.
Deciding to help the kids, the party stepped down from their raft to push and pull it forwards while having the children clamper onto the raft and started heading to a village in the distance.
Upon arrival they started to unload the children to a rooftop with some adults, noticing a large stone golem on the far side of the village scooping up large chunks of a house with it and waddling off into the distance.
Deciding to see where it was going they followed the golem from distance, wading their raft through mud as they were making sure to stay well away from the main stream coming through the makeshift dam the golem was building. They then came to the conclusion that leaving the golem be would be the wisest decision they could make and continued forwards, although not getting far before nightfall.
Spotting a handful of surviving trees, they decided to tie the raft onto one of them so that the group won't wake up somewhere completely different from where they decided to rest. Amidst the trees was also a corpse clinging onto one of the trunks, with a beautiful amber ring in one of it's fingers that, obviously, wasn't staying there for long as one of the PCs jumped off the raft to go and pry it off. This very same man then came back to the raft with several large eels biting onto his leg.
During the night a steady stream of zombies kept people on the edge, denying some rest from the group.
They'll likely reach the dam next session.
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And in today's episode of DCO:
Party had made their way up to the damn and climbed inside from the room that was exposed by the dam cracking.
A few rooms later they arrived at the boulder + animated statues trap, quickly picking on the fact that the statues are bad and the jars are to be broken. Only problem there being that they smashed the brain jar so completely that they didn't realise it had a brain in it and reasoned that the heart jars must be what will give life to the statues.
Thinking that they had disarmed the statues they pressed on. All twelve of them going as one group into the short stairway connecting to the next room. As they pushed open the door leading to the stairway and heard rumbling up above they joked between themselves about an Indiana Jones style boulder trap only to have the rumbling grow louder and result in a large boulder dropping from the ceiling on top of their point-man.
Everyone being cramped in this small stairway it was impossible to get out of the way as the people at the back failed their paralyze saves, tripping from people suddenly pushing back against them and trampling over each other.
The result?
Four out of eleven dead after two of the victims having heroically defied death, including poor Wit Tamdoun that they had picked up as a local guide from Carrowmoore who now laid flattened and crushed on the stairs.
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This time on DCO:
Previously the party had re-armed the pendulum trap in the first room they had entered into from the crag in the dam.
Now, as they were scraping up the bodies of their dead friends after a run in with a boulder trap and starting to haul them back the way they came in order to give the bodies at least some kind of burial by dropping them off the dam, they heard a scream from they way the group had come. Sending on of them to scout ahead, the scout saw the Crows all converged at the doorway of the first room in front of the pendulum trap that had gone off.
Zolushika was standing there, absolutely furious and cursing at the other members of the Crows party after almost having been cut by the trap.
Deciding that this was a great opporturnity to ambush them, the scout retreated back to the group and everyone moved in closer in order to set up an ambush in the second room. Only by the time they got there moving all sneaky there was no more sound coming from the first room.
The scout moving in again found Echo and Höolloch at looking down the crack in the dam with back turned and signalled the rest of the group to creep forwards and fire a volley of arrows and bullets.
This of course broke out a fight, but the PCs having a numbers advantage it ended up in Höolloch getting overwhelmed and stabbed to death while Echo managed to scurry away by strangling one of the PCs to death and using their body as a mobile cover while retreating backwards and dropping down into a pyramid of zombies that Zolushika had climbed down the dam to rise up to swarm after the filthy adventurers who dared to nearly take her life with a cheap trap.
What ensued afterwards was a sniper duel between one of the PCs and Ghar as rest of the party was tossing rocks at the horde of zombies climbing up the dam.
This resulted in Ghar actually dying from taking several crossbow bolts as the raft he and Zolushika were on was pushed to cover behind a cliff face by clever use of zombies.
End results?
Two of the Crows dead, along with one dead PC and several wounded
the remaining two will now be out for blood
In retrospect the crazy dwarf should have just jumped into the water from their raft and submerge Rambo-style to save himself, but you always come up with the best ideas afterwards
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This time in DCO:
Rather bland session as the party barricaded a few doors inside the dam to slow down the swarm of zombies and proceeded to go through the last two chambers without really an incident. Finally pushing their way back into fresh air they emerged from a side of a cliff onto the top of the dam, found a replacement PC of the player who had lost all their characters and tried to push and pull their way in through the very obvious fake doors.
Hearing the groans of the zombie swarm from the crack in the dam they decided to pick up the pace and keep on pushing forwards into the night and descended to the lake floor.
Passing through a small coral forest (with no eels because they felt like just a random tax on the PCs for no reason) they decided that it would not provide enough cover through the night from the remaining Crows if they made it to the top of the dam as well as not being safe through the night from the zombies and thus they pushed further northwards.
A small chessboard-like arrangement under an old rusted bridge caught their attention so they investigated, finding a squid expiring in a shallow pool of water and decided they wanted to put it out of it's misery but soon gave up on that as the animal trashed about trying to defend itself.
Next they arrived at the pufferfish field, decided to pass around it rather than go through even though it cost them a bit more time in terms of going forwards and arrived at the Roc bridge where they didn't dare approach the bird close enough to see what was up with it since it was middle of the night and they only had one lantern to illuminate their journey as they went.
We ended the session as the party heard several popping explosions from the pufferfish-field behind them along with groans of the zombies.
So far it has definitely felt that almost all the overland encounters in the module have simply been "You come across a thing, do you wanna interact with it or keep going?" with almost no reason for the PCs to interact with anything they find, and on top of that a lot of the things would simply cause them pain if they interacted with them
the Crows have certainly been the highlight of the module for me so far, and if I were to run this again at some point I would try to create more varied terrain and visual cover to both of the overland travel sections for them to exploit and try to use them even more actively than I have in this game so far.
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This time in Deep Carbon Observatory:
The heroes, chased by a zombie army raised by Zolushika in blind rage after her two companions had died, were frantically making way to the back of the dried-up lake. Where we left off last time they had just reached the roc bridge in dead middle of night and were hearing popping explosions of the pufferfish-field and groans of zombies behind them.
The party promptly decided to head east, cross the small stream that was oeft of the lake and go for the few light shining in the distance. The lights turned out to be a handful of campfires set up by fishers who had cobbled together makeshift shelters on the lakebed after getting stranded there. (I decided that we just wanna get to the interesting part, the observatory, and cut out the people of the reeds scenario happening here.)
With the groans of the zombies having faded behind them, the party decided to rest here for the night.
This went about as well as one would expect as early morning before the sun was even properly up yet the massive shriek was heard from the direction of the roc bridge, and few hours later a horde of zombies had closed in to the temporary camp along with one giant eagle dragging it's way on the ground with it's mangled wings.
The party decided very wisely to book it at this point, but did wait for the zombies to get close enough that Echo managed to snipe one of the PCs dead with the crossbow he had picked up from late Ghar Zaghouan that the PCs had managed to previously kill along with Höolloch. At the sight of this, a mad cackling could be heard and the party spotted Zolushika riding on the back of the giant reanimated eagle. Retreat ensued, but not before taking few unsuccessful potshots at Zolushika.
Running ever northward, as that was the only direction with no zombies, they came upon the giant pit leading to the observatory itself.
Fiddling with the door they managed to open the way in just as the first zombies started to trip down into the pit. Diving inside the metal gate slammed shut behind them and the party did everything in their power to jam it shut for good.
Inside the observatory they found the room leading to the slave pits, explored those and found the weighing station without really being able to understand how to operate it or what it was used for. They did not dare try cross into further rooms from the weighing station.
An attempt to scale to upper levels in the first room was promptly cut short as one of the PCs was attempting to use the statues to climb up and when reaching eye-level with them they all turned their heads to look at him.
Deciding to follow the only way left for them, they headed down the hole in the floor of the first room, circled the side of the stalagmite and back inside. The party had just gotten past the stairways where space seemed to warp and directions were night-impossible to make out when a gut-wrenching screech that could only be produced by the frayed vocal chords of a dead egle echoed all around.
And that's where we wrapped up. The giant zombie eagle is coming down along with the rest of the surviving Crows, and the Giant is now awake due to it.
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On the final session of Deep Carbon Observatory:
We last left off with an ungodly screech of the reanimated giant eagle echoing throughout the observatory, waking the giant and driving the PCs to hastily descent even deeper into the complex.
The party kept going further down towards the tektite lens, coming across the aktazimoth reflectors and grabbing one with them on a whim after examining one and looking through it, determining them to be some sort of magnifying glasses or spyglasses.
Few more rooms down and another series of screeches accompanied by a faint hint of a woman's scream echoed throughout the caverns and corridors as above them at the entrance the undead forces of Zolushika clashed with the stone statue guardians and the awoken giant. And then, silence.
The PCs pushed on downwards, finding their way to the control room for the tektite lens. A circular and arched room covered in assortments of gears within gears that culminated in a comically small handcrank, which took a considerable amount of time to whir the rest of the gears into motion as the party started to work the machinery.
Few minutes of cranking later a loud rythimic THUNK THUNK THUNK echoed from below as unknown to them the spherical cover around the lens of the observatory was peeled back and shook the floor beneath them as it was now wide open.
Descending down deeper into the stairway spiralling deeper into the earth, eventually it's walls transformed from stone into an oily metal, then just a loose metallic mesh around the stairwell revealing darkness in every direction, and ended in a metallic pod that had harness and all kinds of straps and bars inside it almost like some bizarre and convoluted pilot's seat.
Being naturally curious the party investigated by cramming a person into the pilots seat which brough them to be sitting in front of an enormous lens, pointed downwards into the darkness at a slight angle. Peering into the lens rendered the darkness into almost blindingly bright light and the lens showed them a vision of these lanky, elongated moth-men gathered in small groups in a white landscape against which the waves of a sea black as tar were hitting. The person sitting by the lens watched as these otherworldly moth-men kicked one of theirs onto the ground to their knees while another one procured a large axe reminiscent of flowing molten glass and beheaded it's kin that was brought to kneel in front of it. The rest of the moth-men solemnly closed in and started to stab and tear at their now headless companion.
Then the person by the lens tore themself off of the vision.
But curious as PCs are, another one had the idea of placing the aktazimoth reflector they had been carrying around in front of the lens, and peering through that. As the same scene was still unfolding in front of their eyes, the new person now saw it as clear as day almost like beiing there in person. He tried to touch the white sand but his hand grasped at nothing but loose straps and metal of the cage he was sitting in. The white "sand" was bones, grinded to fine dust but still recongiseable.
Having decidedly seen enough, the party started to head back up the spiralling stairway only to find out that where there had once been a corridor was now pale and bumpy wall, almost like translucent stone. Then the very same wall started to tip towards them, the bumps separating into finger-like appendages and cluthing onto the ground. Behind this weird hand occupying the whole corridor a heavy dragging sound scraped forwards. Then another enormous hand wormed it's way past the one they had seen, again grabbing onto the floor and dragging something behind it. More of the same mass of something slowly coming towards the party.
Assessing their options, most of the party decided to start falling abck to the control room, whereas one brave specialist ran forwards and climbed over the extending hands to squeeze through the thin gap that was left of the end of the stairway in order to escape behind this thing. As he did, a single white eye opened up from the mass the hands had been dragging behind them, watching him go as he slipped into a side-passage and into the relative safety of not being right in front of where this creature was heading.
The rest of the adventurers however were now holed up in a dead end and were quickly coming to realise this themselves. A last ditch effort was put into motion as a magic user started mumbling a spell and tearing a veil in space itself as they used one of teir companions as a sacrifice for a Summon spell. Whatever he tried to pull forth was too strong however, keeping the rift open for much longer than one is supposed to and letting several of it's kin pour out into the world. There was roughly twenty seconds of panic and screaming before the demons had made their way through the puny humans and started to engage in a battle with the giant that had driven these unfortunate adventurers to use the spell.
The lone surviving specialist ran, climbing up ladders and making a hasty retreat to the best of his abilities in the dark corridors of the observatory all he had was a single candle. Eventually he made his way back to the entrance hall of the observatory, candle blown out and now relying on a few metres of match cord that he had packed initially for his pistol. The cord didn't light his surroundings too well, from somewhre in front of him in the grand hall a low moan could be heard.
Imagining the worst and preparing for zombies, he thought to use the jars of hearts he had collected from the canoptic guards while inside the dam to rub an ungodly stench on himself in hopes that it would allow him to slip through zombies. What he saw in the dim light of his match cord as he entered the entrance hall proper was devastation. Mangled bits and pieces of corpses strewn about everywhere. Broken pieces of stone statues. And next to the long stairway up to the surface, an enormous eagle laid dead on the ground. One of it's wings ripped off and it's insides spilled on the ground everywhere.
Stepping into the dark stairway and readying to make his ascend, something gripped around his ankle. An arm without it's owner, easily stomped and hacked off with few kicks.
And then he becan the climb up.
Eventually the match cord burnt out before he reach the surface, leaving him to stumble on forwards in darkness with one hand trailing on the smooth and cold stone wall, feet kicking against every new stair before raising his feet one in front of another.
By the time he got out, it was midday. Light shining almost blindingly towards the great hole in the ground at the bottom of which the now pried-opn entrance to the hellish observatory was located.
Only he had survived.
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