[Review] Cha’alt II; Fuchsia Malaise (O5R) Pt. I; For My Sins…

[IT’S CHA’ALT II]
Cha’alt 2; Fuschia Malaise (2020)
Venger As’Nas Satanis (Kor’Thalis Publishing)
Lvls ???

Disclaimer; Threatened Content

As the year approaches, the purple nano-explosives attached to my carotid arteries start shrieking and buzzing threateningly and that can mean only one thing; My review of Cha’alt II is due!

231 pages, most of it fully gameable content, the Appendix containing rules for Crimson Dragon Slayer, which you may or may not want to use (but at this point I’d damn well recommend it). After the stunning and overwhelming success of Cha’alt, Venger, buoyed up by Silver Bestseller awards and glowing reviews from across the internet, yours truly not excluded (I mean I fucking consulted on the thing so why not at this point) put his purple fucking money where his mouth is and decided to write a sequel that he claimed [1] was ‘even sexier and more eldritch then the original’ and I think as spiritual liege of the first part, the onerous burden of judgeing its successor, created entirely without any feedback or input from me, could fall on no more suitable, or indeed knowledgeable man.

Fuschia Malaise bears a closer resemblance to the type of general purpose expansions Venger shits together for games like Alpha Blue then a full on megadungeon expansion for Cha’alt (DAMNIT) but you will find among its grabbag of ultra-gonzo weirdness, demon-worshipping mosques, musky-smelling Mos Eisley bars, pop-culture references and ill-conceived political commentary plenty of adventures, dungeons and seeds to extend the lifespan of your Cha’alt campaign for a good XXX sessions or so.

Don’t bother reading the introduction. It will only confuse you. The themes of this second part are included only to trick you into believing there is some grand overarching design to the unrestrained almost Van Vogtian torrent of ideas detonating off the pages with the rate of an overclocked Vulcan Cannon.

Cha’alt is getting…even drier? The Federation (the space civ from Venger’s AB setting) is harvesting Cha’alt of its supply of Zoth like in dune, only Zoth is the compressed remnants of Dead Gods. This inevitably turned into a shit show and the Feds pull a Great Britain and start addicting the local populace to Xanthium-113, locally known as Fuschia Malaise because of the color-changing effects. The drug is made in a facility known as Elysium.

This is maybe a thousandth of the crazy shit going on in this setting but to Venger’s credit Elysium is indeed one of the locations in it. Venger experiments with Meta-plot as Elysium is new, and apparently its enhanced mining has emptied the Chartreuse Sea, unveiling its many sunken treasures. Ignore it. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is some new races. With each iteration Venger picks up some game design practices which means that all these races have appropriate drawbacks and hindrances, as well as being kool. You can play as Velvet elves, sand construct men, reptile-bird men [2], obscene lovecraftian outsiders always wearing golden masks and actual stats for half-elves and humans! Normally I hate the sort of anime-land travelling humanoid clown circus 5e has degenerated into but FUCK THAT SHIT THIS IS CHA’ALT. I expect something stupid and in bad taste! The benefit this time being that the rules governing the damn races are actually functional. Well done.

Then comes a small section that essentially re-iterates OSR rules for Morale, Hirelings, Alignment and Encounter reaction so you can do them with a single D6. Maybe superfluous? I think its nice that its there but it might have been easier to shift a bunch of these to the appendix for people who want to run this using CDS. We can bitch on how a single D6 doesn’t give enough of a spread but this is the wrong game for this type of argument. This is a game of weirdness, pizazz, breakneck speed and one you can play within 4 hours and have an interesting, if somewhat superficial, time. Gourmet meals are great but sometimes I want a big mac and sometimes that big mac is laced with peyote.

The rest of the tables; GOOD. Venger tries. Not the limp-wristed d6 tables either. Nice, firm d8 or d100 tables for the most part, a scholar’s choice, for determining everything from the motivation of NPC henchmen to the background of Cha’alts many spacer scum.

Shortly after graduating from the Federation Training Academy, you became close friends with an eccentric humanoid named Malcolm Dune. After he was caught selling secrets to the zendra’asi, your reputation took a serious hit  

Mister Roboto – Mysterious droid from the future – possible connection to The Black Pyramid god Vok-Yurd.

Drug addiction tables. Tables for NPCs that come after you after you nick some eldritch shit from one of Cha’alts many weird locations. Dehydration tables. We get it, it’s nice, but fuck that stuff in the appendix and give me the meat and bones. D100 NPC traits. Robust and raucous.

Zero Fucks – Not trying to get himself killed, but at the same time, just doesn’t care one way or the other. Undaunted in the face of fear

Nietzschean Moustache – He’s got the bushiest moustache of anyone you’ve ever met

Gold Mask – He never takes off his golden mask… an unsettling visage normally reserved for human sacrifices.

Never a boring moment in this already riotous cacophony of non-boring content. The art is hypnotic, dreamlike, congruent, seemingly generated by the very weirdness that gushes from every page. It’s good for the most part but there’s stuff that seems superfluous. Yet another hallucination table, a demonic bargain table, an NPC true motivation table. We get it we get it you like to make it up as you go along, where is the real deal?

Murder Hobo Regrets. See? An optional rule that forces your players to pay lip-service to the idea that their characters have some sort of conscience. A nice, flavorful list of acts, everything from saying a little prayer to marrying the deceased’s spouse, will prevent wracking guilt from denying any advantage to the PC the next day. Interesting idea.

Tucked near the tail end of the appetizer are a bunch of magic items, ALL of them at least decent, NONE of them taking more then one or two sentences to describe. Also a d100 table so all spellcasting in Cha’alt now has a Dark Heresy style random side effects that range from devastating for the enemy to utterly crippling. While I can do with about 75% less random fucking tables, this is a PERFECT choice for Cha’alt. You want to MINIMIZE preparation and strategy pixelbitching AND HYPER-CHARGE QUICK, DYNAMIC ENCOUNTERS THAT REQUIRE BOLDNESS, DARING AND LUCK.

Radioactive – For a minute or so (1d4 rounds), the sorcerer exudes potentially lethal radiation. Those touching his glowing form must make a saving throw or die.

Gone – Everyone within 50’ of the sorcerer must roll a d6. If the result is a 1, they must succeed in a saving throw or vanish from existence

Fruitastic – A gang of anthropomorphic fruit unceremoniously enter the sorcerer’s field of vision and challenge him to a fight for the supremacy of… wherever they currently are.

Setting proper. The City of A’grybah is fleshed out with, for Venger, admirable precision and restraint. A crude monetary system is included in an attractive red bar underneath NINE MILLION HOOKS TO DO SOMETHING DO YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING.

It happens to be the Day of Unendurable Suffering. Throughout the city, citizens pay homage to this monthly festival by fasting, self-flagellation, and committing heinous crimes against those of a lower station than yourself.

A’agrybah is a bat-shit insane crossbreed between Mos Eisley, Stygia and Agrabah and comes complete with warring noble houses with nefarious agendas, demon worship and assorted strangeness. You should be able to throw something together that will last for half a session from the six billion different plot hooks that compose it but you had better be quick and snapping your fingers to the tune of Chaos Court fluting while you do so because there are coming at you hard and fast.

A merchant from within an emerald-green tent shouts for passersby to enter and gaze upon a rare three-eyed serpent that was found in the desert a few days ago. A bite from this snake is said to bring death within the hour [save to avoid]. The merchant will only trade it for a high-tech or magic item.

The tax collectors are near the palace doors, filling out scrolls that account for all the money taken in. One tax collector, Qa’an, gives a PC 100 gold coins to bet on an upcoming gladiatorial contest (The Orange Annihilator). If he wins, the tax collector will split the winnings 50-50. That’ll mean 500 gold for the PCs.

An assassin droid at the bar is regaling humanoid patrons of his valor in the death-pit of Kla’arth. Y-2K is waiting for his next assignment from House Verran, but he wouldn’t say not to a little side action

Resurrection is also introduced, because why not, for 1000 gp you can place your dead friends in the blue flames that burn in the temple of Eternal Recurrence, and before you know it they are back and none the worse for wear. As is often the case in Cha’alt, what would be an overpowered mess in any other game is likely to be only minor solace in Cha’alt, where half the opponent roster comes packing save or die and most of the other half is likely to leave you with little left to recover.

At this point you are reeling, your mind already travelling along the branching pathways, what the fuck do I do in A’agrybah and how do I make sure I spend less then 2 hours working it out? WHEN BAM D100 TABLE FULL OF INTERESTING EVENTS IS SLAMDUNKED DOWN YOUR GULLET BY SATANIS.

A blood-elf is hoping to trade his petrified fruit-loops for gold. He assures any would-be buyer that such currency is exceedingly rare and valuable beneath S’kbah. In the subterranean tunnels and caverns of Cha’alt, a handful of petrified fruitloops would be as a chest full of gold above

Humanoids wearing black robes with a green three-eyed symbol solicit various individuals and places of business for tribute. These are worshipers of Zarga’an collecting gold, jewels, magic items, and technology for the ravenous titan within The Black Pyramid. They each own hexagonal coins that subtly pulse with violet, radioactive energy.

Look at yourself. You probably think you are pretty good at D&D because you read a lot. Well this is Cha’alt Nerd! Nobody reads here! Venger Satanis doesn’t care if you have memorized Gygax’s advice on monster and treasure placement and your 100 pages of setting notes, if he isn’t killing a tentacle cyborg raider in 10 minutes from session start, you are going into that locker. You have a game in 5 minutes with a hot babe and you have to take a massive dump so you don’t have time to fetch your mint copy of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks that you kept for a rainy day from your piece of shit Honda. Bam! All of it is written in that breakneck, off-the-cuff practical style yet its all over the target, with the exception of the foreword, which you can tell because your attention starts to wander.

And on and on it goes. 70 pages. A place where anything can, and does, happen. What does one do in such environs?

Continued in Part II.

Cha’alt is here;

[1] Allegedly
[2] Explicitly not dinosaur men