An Unusual Game Night

Since two members of my usual gaming group weren’t able to make it to game night, I invited those who could make it to playtest the homebrew system I’ve been working on. I decided to playtest the system using the Black Pyramid, the megadungeon found in Cha’alt—the gonzo, eldritch, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic setting book by Venger Satanis. Since Cha’alt is fairly game system neutral, and more-or-less compatible with OSR/5e and Venger’s own Crimson Dragonslayer d20, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to get it to work with this new homebrew system.

The homebrew system I’ve been working on is based on something older than Dungeons & Dragons.

“What?!” you exclaim. “No roleplaying game is older than D&D!”

Ah, but as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. Perennial ideas are often lost and rediscovered. The principles were there all along, waiting. But that’s enough philosophizing. On to the playtest!

Character Creation

The players rolled up their characters on the spot: a rogue and a priest.

With this system, character creation takes less than 5 minutes. This does not mean the characters are oversimplified. So far, character complexity in this system appears to occupy a space between “arcade mode” (like Crimson Dragonslayer D20 or maybe Mörk Börg) and more complicated modes (B/X, AD&D, OSR, 5E). I won’t give away details just yet, but this allows players to jump right in without requiring a long character creation process or pre-gens.

Quick character creation also allows for quick replacement of dead PCs, which is handy if your sessions are rogue-like in their deadliness. Quick character creation is also a boon for game-masters who need to roll up NPCs quickly.

So after a few minutes, the party consisted of a gunslinging rogue and a priest.

Exploring the Pyramid

The way I ran it, the Fungi from Yuggoth abducted the PCs from Earth and dropped them into the Black Pyramid on the planet Cha’alt.

The priest prayed for light, and there was light, shining in this dark place. The rogue studied the obsidian walls and the phosphorescent paintings on them. They both read the strange parchment in the glass case, but what they read did nothing to reassure them.

The rogue examined and touched one of the iris doors and it opened into a strange translucent tunnel across a void. Cautiously, they crossed the tunnel and opened the next iris door.

Stepping through, they found themselves on… a beach. After exploring for a bit, they heard a scream and towards the shore they could see a woman attacked by a giant crab. The PCs jumped to her rescue, the priest calling down holy fire and the rogue raining a hail of bullets at the crab. The crab chased down the PCs, snapping at them with its massive claws, before succumbing to its injuries. After the fight, the PCs tended to their wounds and made a meal of divinely-roasted crab meat. With gratitude, the woman rewarded each of them with a silver locket filled with sand.

Through the sphincter door to the next chamber, there were some humanoids cowering and preparing for an atomic explosion. The PCs questioned them before proceeding to the next room, despite the protests of the humanoids.

In the next room, anthropomorphic strawberries, bananas, oranges, and a grape were planning their attack on the adjacent rooms. The PCs decided to join them on their fruity crusade to dominate the Pyramid, and even persuaded the grape ninja that they would be their allies. After a rousing speech, they charge through to the next room…

… where a podcast is in progress. The PCs and the fruities listen, perplexed, until a death squad bursts into the room and mayhem ensues. Man vs. Fruit. Fruit vs. Man. As the fighting reaches its zenith, from the deaths of the fruities, the room quickly fills with a smoothie tsunami. Somehow, the priest and the rogue manage to survive. They trek back to the beach room to clean the fruit smoothie out of their armor and clothes.

Enter Two New Characters

In order that we could playtest different classes, the players parked their current PCs in the beach room and rolled up two new characters. Again, this takes no more than 5 minutes. This time, they are a spy and a runesmith.

The Mi-Go dropped them into a random room, this time one with a giant frozen peach floating in it, where ape-men were hacking at it under the direction of a blue-skinned sorcerer. The ape-men get tired of hacking the peach and started to attack the sorcerer. The PCs decided to help the sorcerer. The spy put two of the ape-men to sleep with a mind trick, while the runesmith blasts two of them with lightning. The sorcerer dispatched the remaining two ape-men. After they discussed the nature of the peach with the sorcerer, the PCs assisted with breaking open the icy peach. But as they broke open the icy peach, the sorcerer betrayed the PCs and turned on them, only to be quickly subdued. After, the PCs rested and ate some of the peach. Tasty!

On to the next room in the Pyramid, where the PCs found two orcs playing cards at a table with a chest next to it. They asked to be dealt in, but the orcs ignored them. The rogue opened the chest and then the orcs attacked them. This was probably the best fight of the night… the orcs being evenly matched to the PCs. Lots of combat mechanics tested. When they finally killed the orcs, they looted the gold from the chest and a small black box from the orcs. 

The PCs exited the room, only to find themselves in a room with two orcs playing cards at a table with a chest next to it. I won’t go into more detail here so as to spoil the fun, but it took them a long time to figure out what to do!

Conclusion

All in all, we had lots of fun with unique strangeness of the Black Pyramid, and we got some useful playtesting done.