Deep Carbon Observatory Play Report: Session 3

10 Sep, 2025

Session 3 Logistics

PC Roster

Egot and Igot, the Human Priest(s)

Faral, the Elf Wizard

Tyvek, the Dwarf Fighter

Norbert, the Human Wizard

NPC Roster (Accompanying the PCs)

Tzani Spilios, the Scholar — Wants to learn more about the dam and the people who built it

Curtis Ghyll, the Widower — Wants to bury his deceased wife, Sorla, in the family tomb

PCs Not Present

Rislem, the Elf Ranger

In Memoriam: Dead PCs

Rose the Halfling Priest (Slain session 2)

Synopsis

The battle with the mummy Ambatoharanana left the party in disarray. The ancient noble almost killed the wizard Norbert and easily slew the halfling priest Rose before marching away toward the dam. While the ranger Rislem was able to stabilize the wizard, he could do nothing for the priest. Upon the halfling’s death, the children Igot and Egot divided up her priestly vestments and took up her holy accoutrement, apparently inheriting the blessing of her god.

Their first act as servants of the divine was to attempt to cast healing magic on Norbert, who was alive but unconscious. When their first attempt at magic failed, Tyvek instead roused the wizard by feeding him hard tack soaked in wine. Once this was done, the party broke camp and set out, Rislem opting not to join them to instead follow the alpha platypus as it journeyed off into the wilderness.

Less than an hour upriver from their camp, the party came across a fishing skiff jammed onto a tree branch, held loosely in place by a net that held two other dubious prizes: a dead man who hung by his foot into the water and a 20-foot-long electric eel that thrashed violently as it attempted to break free. Six bodies bobbed on nearby debris.

As the party examined the scene and considered their options, a conspicuous glint of light in the river bank some 600 feet away caught their attention.

Realizing that the slightest motion could tip the balance of the skiff and release the eel, the party decided to bring their boat up to the bank and drag it upriver with ropes. But as soon as the group disembarked to begin hauling the vessel, a crossbow bolt shot out of the reeds where they’d seen the glint and slashed through the net, freeing the massive eel.

At the same time, the dead bodies in the river shuddered into motion, splashing mindlessly toward the boat and its crew.

The party prepared to face the dead, clambering back onto the boat and ignoring the distant glint until they could deal with their attackers. The child priests Igot and Egot deployed holy magic that destroyed one of the creatures outright while the rest were cowed and forced to flee. Only one of the creatures was left, but a dagger into its heart delivered by Faral was enough to send it tumbling off the boat and down the river, where the freed eel was feasting on its compatriots.

During the battle, Norbert recognized three of the animate corpses. In life, they were three boisterous adventurers who had hassled the head woman back in the village. It was unclear how they had died or what they were doing in this section of the river.

After recovering an axe the dwarf managed to lose after a careless swing, the party investigated the spot on the river bank where they’d seen the mysterious light. They found signs that a humanoid about Tyvek’s height had hidden themselves here and then left during the skirmish, with indications that a small concealed boat aided in the escape.

After about another hour upriver, the party spied a windmill on a hill crawling with white crabs a meter across. Numbering in the dozens, the crabs gripped onto the slowly tuning vanes and rode them up the structure so they could attempt to clamber into an open window. A woman clutching an oar managed to bat them away.

Deciding to help the woman out of a mixture of altruism and an interest in finding out what the crabs wanted, the party left Tzani and Curtis to watch the boat and started up the hill. After an hour’s travel, a dark shape emerged from the eel-infested trees to their left: a huge monster carved from stone. The thing stomped toward debris deposited on the hill by the flood waters, smashing through the ruins of boats and houses as if in search of something, occasionally pausing before entering another frenzied rage.

The party was able to avoid the creature by taking a long route around it and eventually came upon the windmill. Up close, they could hear the sobbing of children who had taken refuge there and feared the crabs would eat them alive. Egot and Igot recognized the woman as Dorothy, a local to their nearby hometown of Pollnacrom.

As Norbert approached the crabs, 75 of the 100 massed by the windmill turned toward him — which was perfect, because it meant 75 of them were close enough for the Sleep spell to take effect. The party then spent a few moments murdering the everloving hell out of some somnolent crustaceans. By the time the living crabs noticed them, there were enough decapod carcasses scattered about that the survivors decided to abandon their quixotic fixation¹ in favor of scavenging.

Dorothy thanked the party for their assistance, though she grew irritated when Faral asked if she had any gold and threw the contents of a chamber pot at him in reply. Faral washed himself off and then scaled the windmill to get a view of the Lock Valley before the party led Dorothy and the children back to the boat, once again taking the long way around to avoid the raging stone monster.

As the group reached their boat and set out for the graveyard near Pollnacrom where Sorla Ghyll’s tomb lay, the stone creature set its sights on the windmill, demolishing the structure with ease as the party departed.

The party reached the cemetery after an hour. The floodwaters had exhumed countless bodies, and translucent cuttlefish skimmed below the surface as they feasted on their rotten bounty. On the opposite bank, a parliament of carrion birds held court in a copse of trees studded with corpses, and leucistic crocodiles² waited for them in the waters below.

The party set out for the tomb, the children Egot and Igot carrying the dead halfling Rose overhead while Ghyll carried his wife on his back, her arms thrown over his shoulders as if she were still alive. When they reached the tomb, they found the door had been forced upon in the flood.

Inside, the gigantic pike that had waited for the wizards upriver from Carrowmore feasted on a cuttlefish. A small ceramic statue trimmed with gold sparkled in the muddy water beneath it.

Norbert slew the beast, plunging a dagger into its eye after subduing it with his Sleep spell. Ghyll then interred his wife, revealing a message carved into the underside of the lid by his wife before her death. Her message warned of an awful giant within a “pit” that would attempt to trap the party given the chance. The children then interred Rose in a small sarcophagus intended for a child who met an untimely end.

His task at an end, Ghyll offered to assist the PCs on their journey to the dam however he could in recompense for ferrying him to the graveyard. He demonstrated his willingness to help by carrying the pike back to the boat and bringing it below the deck to prepare it as rations.

Returning to the boat, the party spied a pair of canoes about an hour’s rowing behind them. Each carried three people. Deciding to ignore the copse of trees, the party hurried on to Pollnacrom. There they found a village in shambles, devastated by the flood and some greater tragedy beyond it.

Surviving denizens huddled on rooftops and cautioned the newcomers to avoid the dam that “it” had built. The far off sounds of a building being torn to pieces and people screaming as they were cast down into the black water punctuated the message.

The party decided to construct a raft for the survivors to travel downriver to Carrowmore while Faral, Tzani, and Curtis took the boat to tail the canoes. The party placed the boat near the raft construction to make it seem as if their vessel was out of commission amid repairs.

As the canoes passed by, the party saw that one was led by the man in the village who had tried to convince a child to accompany him to the cellar, while the other was led by the man who Rose had seen emerge from a pile of corpses and drag a body into a dark cellar.³

Trailing the canoes, Faral and his companions came to a stop as the boats reached a string of rubble stretching across the river in a pitiful imitation of the shattered dam that loomed over the countryside. A small gap in this shambolic construction allowed a trickle of water to pass through.

As the people in the canoes considered what to do, the water in front of them first began to thrum and then bubble as a massive shape lurched to the surface and brought its head against the gap, buzzing like an agitated insect hive.

Apparently unnoticed by the creature, the canoe crews rowed to the left bank of the river and then hauled their boats up onto their shoulders. Attempting to sabotage one of the canoes with the spell Magic Missile, Faral succeeded only in firing off a flare that drew the attention of the people carrying the boats. For a moment, their eyes caught the light of the magical firework and glinted green like those of a nocturnal predator. But the moment passed, they continued on their way, and Faral headed back down the river to report what he’d seen.

The party continued their work on the raft. After a few more hours, the stone monster that had destroyed the windmill stomped out of the drowned woodland and onto the bank opposite where the crew worked. The creature seemed lost in reverent prayer, raising its hands over its head for a time before carrying on with its habit of annihilating objects and rifling through the remnants.

This odd behavior continued until the monstrosity sighted the makeshift dam upriver and charged toward it, intent on dismantling the structure and continuing its fruitless search.

As the creature clashed with the dam builder and the sounds of stone striking stone echoed through the ruined town, the children Egot and Igot asked the scholar Tzani Spilios if she knew what the stone creatures were. She recalled an ancient legend that spoke of indestructible guards and recited it as if in a trance…

*“Once there was an Empire of unspeakable wealth that traded in secrets, dark wonders and death, and many of the strange things now on earth were theirs.

They drew their power and magic from a gate within the earth.

But, as their kingdom slowly died, they locked away their treasure within a lake, and set there sleepless and indestructible guards.

Everyone knows where it is, on the Lock, upriver of Carrowmore.

No-one who goes there has ever come back.”

Postscript

This session didn’t “pop” as much as Session 2, but there were still some good moments.

My favorite was the bit with the legend at the end. It comes from an “opening crawl” in the introduction meant to serve as information that everyone knows. I love it. I read it as we start every session to set the atmosphere and the mood at the table. It was cool getting to see it become a diegetic part of the game, and I love Patrick’s prose enough that I want to read out other bits like that whenever I get the chance.

This session also made me realize that I might not like how spellcasting works in Shadowdark. Instead of being able to cast a spell once per day or having spell slots, each spell has a set DC. If you succeed, you cast the spell and retain the ability to cast it again later on. If you fail, you lose the spell and it doesn’t go off.

This rule makes magic much swingier, which seems to be the intent, but it also had the side effect of allowing one of our two wizards to keep crushing spell rolls and putting creatures to sleep and killing them with a well-placed stab wound.

I’m not set on changing how I run spellcasting in the system but it is an interesting dynamic — old school wizards having exactly one spell that they get to cast once per day can feel pretty restrictive, but I also don’t know how I feel about the wizard essentially having a better than 50% chance to knock a creature out and murder it whenever things get hairy.

I also got to try the old “bury a PC to inherit their XP” trick, which felt like a neat little sidequest that dovetailed well with the themes of the module and how events were already shaping.

I also really like that the two child NPCs from last session were upgraded into a PC. Egot and Igot have their stats and HP split evenly between them, which is a hoot. It’s the kind of housewavey house ruling that would feel bad in a more complicated system, but it really sings with Shadowdark.