Deep Carbon Observatory Play Report: Session 1
I've wanted to run Deep Carbon Observatory for years but never got around to it. The first vignettes of devastation wreaked on Carrowmore by the flood, the grueling trek upriver, and the bizarre otherworld of the titular dungeon all fascinated me.
"Cool," you might be saying just about now, "So why haven't you run it already?" Great question! I used to have an answer that went something like, "Well I'd need to find a group and time and I'd need to read the module and decide what ruleset I'm using so..."
And probably in the middle of that you'd get bored and turn around and start walking away but I'd finish with "But now I actually have the time and energy to do all those things so the answer is no reason, I should run it now!" And then I'd dart off to run it with a Looney Tunes trail of smoke marking my passage.
A word on the module
DCO is very dark. Cannibalism, child bones, drowned parents, animals growing fat on the meat of the dead, monsters that enjoy bending people into new and upsetting shapes, it's all in here. I'm running it in Shadowdark with an open table model (as in, whoever shows up gets to play, with the reasons behind characters flitting in and out hand-waved). I'm using Shadowdark because it sits in my brain better than B/X or any of its ilk ever has.
Hooks, character creation
The hooks in this book are very good and very funny. They range from getting weird nightmare dreams about the events in Carrowmore to being complicit in a sprawling pyramid scheme and needing to find unheard of wealth.
They're interesting and often funny, they tie into the module well, and they help steer the players somewhat through a module flush in detail. By the end of character generation, my players had the following characters:
*Tyvek, a dwarf fighter seeking answers to why an ordinary man from his hometown degenerated into a vicious serial killer after a trip upriver from Carrowmore *Rose, a halfling priest tracking the path of a cannibal who attacked them *Faral, an elf wizard with a fake name who is the scion of the aforementioned pyramid scheme *Norbert, a human wizard hopelessly lost after a series of mishaps that included being teleported by a sorcerer he gave all of his earthly wealth to
Fun group.
Session 1: The Intro
DCO has a really compelling opening sequence. I'm pretty sure I handled it completely incorrectly.
As written, it goes like this: the PCs arrive in the town of Carrowmore after an ancient dam upriver has burst. Various NPCs struggle to save themselves and each other amid the tumult, and the PCs have to make difficult choices as to whom they save and how. It's punchy, it's brutal, and it sets the tone super well.
Except as written, the implication is PCs can engage with as many of the events as there are characters. Here is the text as it appears in the book ahead of a flowchart showing off a sequence of events playing out:
"As the PCs approach the river they directly witness the three events at the top of the page.
Describe to the players what they see.
They must choose which event they will interact with.
If they choose to interact with different events they may be separated from each other.
When players resolve an encounter, when it becomes clear they will not resolve it, or after d4 minutes of in game time, whichever is sooner, describe the next observable events to each group.
If they refuse to interact, wait, go down one box and start again."
The arrows on the flowchart suggest that picking a particular starting event locks PCs into a specific sequence of events to deal with, but if there's three or more PCs, they can choose to deal with all of the events by splitting up, which slows things down to a crawl and robs the sequences of a lot of the tension.
If I were to run the sequence again, I'd let the group decide on one thing to react to instead, resulting in a series of five vignettes that wrap up much earlier.
After arriving in Carrowmore and witnessing the unfolding catastrophe, they accomplished the following:
*agreed to help a man bury his dead wife in accordance with the fate she foresaw *helped some children catch their mother before she floated away downstream, but ultimately left her on the riverbank rather than giving her a proper burial *saved a boat full of children and elderly people *discussed cannibalism with a creepy old woman *saw a very sketchy man try to lure a child into a dark cellar (as well as a group of even sketchier *dealt with two adolescent pickpockets and picked up a scholarly hireling *saved a sailor from a lynch mob *and decided property rights were more important than impending starvation and helped a boat captain defend his property, maiming some townsfolk in the process.
The boat captain — 'Snail Shell' Zarathusa — ended up hiring the PCs to explore upriver
Thoughts
The session did a good job of getting across the morbidity and desperation of the module and its setting, but it also dragged due to how I ran it, which is unfortunate, because the DCO intro is one of those RPG moments that I've spent a lot of time thinking about and hoping to see in action. Notably, I didn't do a Rose/Bud/Thorn questionnaire at the end of this one, though one interesting piece of feedback is that the players felt pretty removed from helping anyone in the town. One even remarked that it felt like whatever they did ended up making the situation worse.