Deep Carbon Observatory Play Report: Session 2
Session 2: The Drowned Lands
Part 1 is here.
Day 1
Tyvek the dwarf fighter and Faral the human wizard faded into the background in this session, with Rislem the Elf Ranger subbing in. Rislem is seeking the fabled Giant Platypus, said to live upstream of Carrowmore.
Once details of employment were hashed out with Zarathusa, he handed over his ship's lifeboat, the three PCs who were actually in stocked it with provisions, and the group made their way upriver, accompanied by the grieving widower Curtis Ghyll and the scholar Tzani Spilios.
After a few hours travel upstream, the PCs neared a bend in the river and spotted obvious signs of a wizard duel: two men seeming to stand on the water, kept aloft by their magical prowess. (Closer inspection with a spyglass revealed these men were actually just standing on a bridge hidden by the floodwaters.)
Lurking in the water nearby was a giant fish of some sort, but this creature fled after the water began to bubble and boil before some kind of massive dark hulk smashed the canoe of the wizards and mashed them both into bits in turn. The creature then stepped back into the water, evidently stomping along the riverbed upstream.
Not wanting to arouse the attention of the brute or the monstrous fish, the PCs used their spyglass to look upriver, where they spotted a mass of white toads fat on human flesh flocked near a ruined church. Deciding that wouldn't be a fun spot to check out, they pressed on upriver, eventually coming across two children floating along on what looked like a gray log heavy with water.
Further inspection that what they mistook at first for damp wood was stone. Using ropes, they helped the children climb aboard and then pulled the object closer, revealing inscriptions in the ancient language of the dam builders — the very language Tzani Spilios said she could read. The inscriptions revealed it to be a stone sarcophagus belonging to an ancient king known as Ambatoharanana.
With the sun sinking lower, the party decided to tow the sarcophagus behind them and find a section of river bank to camp out on. Nearing a copse of trees they had spotted, they realized the branches were filthy with squirming and snapping eels that writhed and occasionally fell out of the trees to the ground with wet thuds.
After erecting a rough camp, they decided to try to hunt the creatures, managing to take one down with an arrow and dipping it in water to overload the electric charges released as its nervous system went haywire. Rislem prepared its meat as rations.
Day 2
After a night's rest in the encampment, the party awoke to a visitor — a platypus the size of a bear, keenly interested in the camp and the food stuffs within. Thinking quickly, Rislem used half of the eel meat he had prepared to lure the creature away into the tree line. Realizing the fallen eels would be (relatively) easier targets than a camp full of larger prey, the massive monotreme decided to eat its fill, and Rislem returned to camp unsure if he had encountered the beast he sought or merely a lesser cousin of the creature.
Fully rested, the party decided to open the sarcophagus after much hemming and hawing, and warnings from Tzani that it would not be a good idea to do so. Even the entrepreneur, Norbert ignored her warnings and popped it open, revealing a mummy wearing an ornate gold mask and wielding an iron sword as well as a many-toothed key referenced to in the sarcophagus' inscriptions.
Deciding the key was a promising and potentially useful piece of loot, Norbert went for it, managing to pull it from the mummy's grip. A moment later, Ambatoharanana rose up, gesturing to ask for the key back. He emerged from the sarcophagus as the party squabbled over what to do, and in the chaos, both he and the wizard fell backward into the stone coffin.
After a scuffle, the mummy slashed Norbert and sent him to death's door. The halfling priest snatched up the key in the chaos and attempted to shut the sarcophagus on its inhabitant with the help of the children rescued on the river while Rislem yanked the wizard out of the coffin and managed to resuscitate him.
While Rislem practiced field medicine, Rose's plan backfired, with the mummy using its ancient strength to keep the lid in place as it swung down at the halfling and the two children aiding them.
The slash didn't hurt anyone, but it cut a few centimeters of lank hair off one of the children, and the close call was enough to send the pair running.
Without their aid, the halfling was unable to keep the lid propped up and found themselves pinned beneath it. Reflexively turning invisible, the halfling attempted to squirm free, but managed only to shift so that the edge of the stone lid rested on their belly instead of their neck.
Unable to see his foe but noticing the way the mud shifted amid the squirming, Ambatoharanana swept his blade across the ground again, slitting Rose's throat and revealing the key that had been invisible a second ago.
Satisfied, Ambatoharanana collected his treasure and began to head north in the direction of the ruined dam, leaving the party to lick their wounds and mourn their fallen priest.
Postscript
This felt like a really strong session. The sarcophagus stuff really interested the players and the fight with the mummy felt kinetic in a way I enjoyed: first they were outside the sarcophagus, then they were wrestling inside it, then the lid was being used as a weapon and an obstacle by both sides of the encounter. It felt very properly OSR.
The players also seemed excited to see more of the world: the mummy, the ... thing that smashed up the bridge and killed those wizards, and the platypus. (One of the players suggested there could be a nest nearby filled with platypus eggs. Certainly possible!)
The random encounters also felt good. Only one came up during the session — the platypus — but it arriving first thing in the morning was a cool moment. The PCs had setup wooden logs as a rough perimeter around the camp, and I got to narrate as one webbed foot mounted a log, then another, followed at last by a beaked head crowned with dark and beady eyes. Like Annihilation but with a platypus instead of a bear. Peak elf game moment.