Masters of Carcosa - Session 20

Another session with no treasure, which was starting to become a point of tension with the players. In my mind Carcosa was really grim and grotty: rich PCs didn’t make sense to me. In hindsight, I think we could have made it all work. Dark Sun imagines the fighters raising armies and becoming warlords. This was a direction the PCs had started to think about. We could have leaned into that more. Live and learn.

The session was another zany one, with a Godzilla-esque monster destroying a town and escaping into the wilderness. Of course the monster Yog would end up on the wilderness encounter table.

Session 20

• Alex: Bug Juice - Green Man Fighter
• Chris P.: Bone Crone - Bone Women Sorcerer
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir - Red Man Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia - Orange Women Fighter
• Dion joined late, and caught the end of the mayhem.)

Recap:

• The party heads west towards Torok, to investigate it’s relationship with the Slavers.
• The trip West is uneventful.
• They arrive in the evening, and decide The Bone Crone will play Queen Zelda, the Bone Men henchmen her guards, the rest of the party her slaves. 
• The towns people are willing to buy her story, and put up their illustrious host in what amounts to a fancy hovel.
• The party visits a nearby bar and proceeds to buy boozes for the towns people. 
• They learn about the strange creature Yog that lives in the centre of town, that it is placated by a steady diet of slaves and the sweet singing of maidens of the village, and that the town buys slaves from the Jale Slavers.
• That’s enough for the party to decide it’s time to burn this mother down!
• They pay some patrons to get the word out to the militia there are free booze going around at the bar.
• They investigate Yog and come up with a plan: they will torch the bar and hopefully a good chunk of the towns militia, kidnap the singing maiden, and book it.
• This more or less works out: they are stopped by 6 towns people, but 2 of that group are convinced this whole Yog thing is really dumb, the remainder are vaporized, with one survivor running off into the night.
• The party hops the wall and watches Yog destroy the town in the moonlight.
• They head back to Invak with two wandering monster encounters worth of complications!

Comments:

• Chris P. (2016-01-27 02:57): No XP, right? (Since we didn’t actually get any gold)
• Ramanan S (2016-01-27 03:19): Yeah … I need to see what people do for alternate / additional means of gaining XP. I feel like treasure hunting hasn’t really been a focus of the game for a while. Though the initial slaver animosity may have been due to the bounty on their heads.
• Gus L (2016-01-27 03:45): I would say Ramanan S​ that while treasure might not be the game’s focus neither is leveling. The rules are clear, the only thing I’d say is that when we finally sack these town we should get gp value for supplies and useful properties seized.
• Chris G (2016-01-27 05:26): How about giving an XP award for discovering a new settlement? Your game has a fair amount of exploring/getting lost.
• Chris P. (2016-01-27 20:03): Gus L  If the reward for the game has reflected something that is no longer the focus of the game, then the reward should either be removed or changed. If the intent is to stay first level/low power forever, then we should remove all pretense otherwise and eliminate the XP mechanic entirely.