Over the last two months or so, I've run Deep Carbon Observatory for the Tuesday Night game group. What follows are my thoughts on the module, the system I ran it in, and the way it went.

The System

I ran the game in a hacked up LotFP system, mostly using the base rules, but making some alterations. Specifically, since I tend to dislike Race as Class, I added in a barebones race template, removed Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling as classes, and filled in the gaps with the homebrew classes Assassin, Survivalist, and Nuclear Druid.

Assassin is a specialist variant, which gets fewer skill points, but automatic points in Sneak Attack, as well as bonus damage to sneak attacks. Survivalist is similar to a Ranger, with bonuses to ranged attacks, and some skill points in Stealth, Bushcraft, and Architecture. Nuclear Druid is an alpha class, which I was creating for a different game, but took the opportunity to make available to my players for testing.

My hacks worked pretty well. No class was an obvious over-performer or under-performer.

The group initiative system is great, and I'm using it in every D&D-like game I run from now on. Rolling a d6 for each side has inherent drama, especially if the fight is particularly dangerous.

I also used the Anti-Hammerspace Item Trackers for inventory, which I really enjoyed. I've never been a fan of ANY encumbrance rules, because they take up time and math. Having a super-quick tracker that not only shows WHAT you have, but WHERE it's kept, was real nice. Especially considering the frequency some of it was lost.

I killed fewer characters than I was expecting. They were clever and lucky, although they got banged around a lot.

My Preparations

This game was an interim game. Our Tuesday night group plays games in a rotation, and once a game finishes, we have a pitch night. Everyone interested in running a game gives their pitch for it, and we vote on the one we want to play. This time (a first, in our group), no one was ready. So we gave the out-of-our-asses pitches. I pitched DCO, which I had recently picked up. The ACTUAL chosen game was Dark Heresy, but the chosen GM wasn't prepared, as no one had planned on running, so he asked if I'd run my module in the meantime, while he got stuff ready. I agreed.

I had never run a module before. In years of GMing, I have only run my own content. I thought that running a module would be less work. Otherwise, why would people do it?

I could not have been more wrong. Likely, the difficulty on the GM side is unique to the module, but as soon as I began diving into it, it became clear that there were a LOT of moving parts, and I would need to take some steps to make sure it all went smoothly.

Step One - Maps

I made heavy use of a double-sided wet-erase mat for the zone area maps. This was super useful.





Please ignore the fact that I cannot draw.

I printed out maps from the PDF, including some after-market top-down maps of the dungeon proper.

I used a whiteboard for quick maps of small-scale areas.

Step Two - Cards

I started off with index cards for important NPC's and monsters, especially ones with existing artwork. I printed out the artwork and taped it to the opposite side of the card for easy display to the players. Other index cards contained the rules and tactics of The Crows, as well as a day tracker, with indicators of what happens each day if there is no player interference.

I also made a knee-jerk decision the week before running, that turned out to be the best decision I've made in a while. I bought a bunch of blank playing cards, and used them as Item Cards. Any item of interest in the module, I made a card for, with a shitty picture (because I suck at drawing) and an item description, that could just be handed to the player. Any item (or follower) that came up in play, I would make a card for and hand to the player. Not only is this pretty neat, but the question of "who has the ____________" is easily answered by "Who has the card?"

Seriously, item cards are something I'm using in other games where stuff is important. Highly recommended.

Step Three - My Framework

Since this was a one-adventure game, and it's not a very forgiving system, I elected to both create a backstory that explained the PC's bond, ensured their cooperation, as well as allowed for the easy introduction of new characters when accidents happened. I chose a busy, bureaucratic wizard named Blister. Blister has a lot of things he wants to know about. He can't investigate them all personally. And the loyalty of adventurers is suspect, as is their survivability. Enter...

The Eternity Badge

You must wear the badge.

You know who else wears them.

You should probably assist them.

The badge knows when you die.

Your next of kin will be compensated.

Maybe with a badge.

The badge must be recovered.

You should try to recover it.

If you don't, it will find a way.

This Is Not Free.



The badges also retained experience gain. So, when a player died, a new adventurer of comparable level would be thrown into the meat grinder, and without the complications of "We don't trust him!"

I also ran out to Walmart and picked up a bunch of cheap Moleskin notebooks, in order to present my players with...

The Continuous Journal

You know how to read and write now.

Write down what happens.

Pick up where the last author left off.

Return the journal upon completion.

The Journal was both a way to encourage note-taking (as DCO is complicated), but also provide an opportunity to develop your characters over the course of the game. Some players went more in-depth than others, which I expected. But overall, it was a solid system that allowed for fun characters, and the easy introduction of new ones.

I was amazed at how quickly everyone fell into the pattern of griping about Blister, an NPC who had never once been on screen, and bonding over their shared plight.

The Module

DCO needs a User Experience update. Badly. It starts out so strongly. The opening scene-setting table is FANTASTIC from any perspective. The players arrive in a drowned town, with chaos happening around them, and are presented with events happening at the same time. They must choose which they will interact with. The choices they make determine what events they can interact with next.

This table is great. I transferred it to a whiteboard and covered the lower part, asking players to place minis to indicate what they are interacting with. This whole bit does such an amazing job of setting the scene, that I bow to Mr. Stuart. Including character creation, this chunk took a whole session. It was pretty easy to run, and apparently very engaging to play.

After this, the game opens into a point crawl, with the players traveling up a drowned river valley, with many points of interest in the way, including the Three-Meter Pike, a village terrorized by a near-immortal witch swimming under the surface, and a strange golem tearing apart another village to build a terrible, terrible dam. This is where the UX issue really rears its head.

One of the problems of the module is organization. I think it would really benefit from some introductory paragraphs introducing the elements in an area in brief, and setting up the relationship between them. I found that I had to do a lot of flipping back and forth to get things straight in my head. There are some things that are additionally very hard to find at a moment's notice, or that are cryptically referenced long before they are explained.

The maps also need a clarity update, especially within the observatory proper. There is a cross-section of the dungeon, with numbered rooms and some drawn elements, but the only top-down maps are third-party, and don't include important static objects, or the all-important thing that everyone making a map should do, WRITE THE THING ON THE MAP WHERE IT IS ON THE MAP AND USE THE NUMBERS TO REFERENCE LONGER DESCRIPTIONS.

Ok. So. In DCO, getting to the dungeon is an adventure in and of itself. All of the problems that the players find here are consequences of the up-river dam bursting. They all make sense. Many people are starving. It's bleak, but also engaging, and it includes my favorite flavor text of any monster in anything I've ever read ever.



At this point, it's worth mentioning that Scrap Princess's Art is fucking awesome. It's like a scribble that's trying to crawl off the page into your brain (I think I read something like this somewhere but I can't remember where). This one is RELATIVELY unrefined, but if you like what you see, pick up Veins of the Earth. The latest Scrap-Stuart collaboration, it's my favorite book in recent memory.

Anyway.

Past the first zone, there is the broken dam, which my players bypassed with the face of a golem. IMHO, this was fine, as the dam seems to be...in the way. Like, you can cut the interior of the dam out and not really lose much of the experience.

Past the dam is the last zone before the dungeon proper. This was great fun. My players negotiated with a group of belligerent salamander-people, and then went ahead of them to allow some poor folk who had lived on the surface of the lake before the water level dropped, to escape the salamander-people's crusade. I had a blast running that bit especially. Even when the people they saved came back as zombies the next day.

Now might be a good time to mention The Crows. The Crows are a ruthless party of rival adventures that avoid direct conflict at all costs. One of them has an item that can raise the dead at the cost of XP debt. Bodies are resources to them, and this valley has a LOT of bodies. And they work, over the course of the adventure, to hinder and indirectly murder the players. They are a moving part that you, as a GM, always should keep in mind. In fact, the dwarven ranger in that enemy party scored the first kill against my PC's (although had they not been using Purify Food and Water often, that point would have come much earlier).

At the end of the last zone is the entrance to the Observatory.

The Observatory, the dungeon proper, doesn't care about you. This is one of the module's strengths. The dungeon is not there for you to explore. It is there, being what it is, as it has done for many long lost years. There is a set of scales in there that can weigh and balance strange esoteric properties of objects, with many dials and weights. It can accurately measure a creature's honesty in units of Innocence Years. In another dungeon, this would be a puzzle to open a door. Here, it is just what it is, lost to time. Interesting, potentially valuable, and not for you.

The Observatory is also home to a wonderfully creepy Giant that can squeeze itself through a mailslot.

This giant is hard to kill, strong, and terrifying. One of my favorite moments to run, was when I got to nearly kill a player, and then have the giant squeeze itself through a tiny gap of stone to escape, demonstrating that it is still here, and can come from anywhere.

To make a long story short, the players had gotten to the deepest level, discovered the observatory and its scrying abilities, gotten a pile of loot, traded gossip with the Salt Dryads, dropped a member of the enemy adventuring party on the Gravity Knife (a simple, effective execution device), and made a deal with the Tox-men for a poison that could kill the Giant. The final confrontation included them trying to escape, but finding the giant blocking their way. They poisoned it and fled (losing one of the barbarian's dogs in the process), and encountered two more of the enemy adventurers, who held them in place with some powerful magic, while they raised the giant from the dead to finish them off.

Unfortunately for The Crows, a Hold Portal spell ended up choking the undead giant to death, and after some interesting interactions with lamp oil, a doll that protects against mind-control, a magic throne, and a magic crown, the players came out on top, and fled the observatory with their loot, turning what information they discovered over to Blister.

One member of the enemy party escaped, with a book of considerable and eldrich power. She will use this to rule the area. Blister took control of the observatory. In some years, there will be war.

Observations

Some things I learned from running this OSR style of game is that our group is more generally used to things happening to them. I often found that I had to prompt for a decision on what to do next, which I did adapt to, but considering the run of fairly narrative-style games we've done recently (Trigger Happy, Cthulhutech), this should not have been surprising.

The players in our group can think around corners pretty well when they're paying enough attention. Sometimes we all don't pay attention. I'll try harder to be interesting all the time.

Running modules is a lot of work. Admittedly, DCO seems more complicated than most, but when I'm running my own stuff, a short collection of notes to jog things in my own brain is just fine. When I'm working with something intricate someone else wrote, I have to do homework.

This took longer than I was expecting. Probably due to my relative inexperience with modules, but I way underestimated how long it would take.

Some things I'm going to steal for future games: