[Review] Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered); The Grievous Miracle and the Beautification of St. Patrick

[Adventure]
Deep Carbon Observatory [Remastered] (2020)
Patrick Stuart & Scrap Princess
Lvl 3-5

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 with 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.”
– DCO Introduction, P. 10

I speak today of the father of the Artpunkmen and what I have to say will shock thee. It is true the man we have come to stand in judgement today is unorthodox, even strange, that he does not follow the Credo Gygaxiam as we do, that he cannot tell the Year of the First Coming from the Second and that the outpouring of filth coating every inch of itch.io and Drivethru would not have been possible without his creation, yes, it is all true.

Nevertheless, I say to thee, the Stupatrick is not a Heretic. I have come before you today, Lords of the Council of His Holy Inquisition, to state that his work is not only greater in merit then it is in pretension (albeit by a narrow margin), but that, indeed, its very existence is a monument, nay a deeply personal love-letter to the hallowed works of St. Gygax. Given that the Stupatrick cannot have read the hallowed G3 for he, on all accounts, displays the knowledge of D&D that is comparable to an ignorant child, storygamer, leper or drunk, we can only conclude that Deep Carbon Observatory is a miracle of the Holy Gygax, and that the spirit of St. Gygax worked through the Stupatrick, to absolve him Ex Ante Facto for the affront of the Artpunk movement he would beget with a single sublime module, the remastered version of which, created at the staggering price of 75000 britain money, is one I review before you today.

First, what is one to say of this new edition? In comparison with the old manuscript it is considerably more verbose and makes occasional concessions to gameability but the added bulk has rendered the whole unwieldy and despite almost compulsive hyperlinking, which is very much appreciated, the information is often presented unevenly or occasionally maddeningly unintuitive. One also cannot feel that some of the elements that have been elaborated upon serve to clutter up the original, which is at times elusive but implies more then it spells out, leaving much ambiguity to cover up any transgressions of continuity, verisimilitude or scale the module is want to commit, whereas the more girthy remastered edition spells everything out in greater detail, diminishing some its poignant mystique. On the bottom line; the remastered edition is more or less a net positive, as it is easier to use in actual play.

 DCO Remastered retains a cautious adherence to the LOTFP system, with some of the anachronisms (like the ranger class for one of the Crows) rubbed out. It flirts with system-neutrality in some its notation, particularly with the singularly irritating use of the C for (coin) but never quite breaks out the snipper, a small mercy. There is a page-long explanation about the meaning of statt-blocks, a task generally regaled to the Core Book one is using, and a startling illustrations of the evils of a consumer-based society. This to illustrate the occasional bouts frustration for a seasoned reviewer when absorbing this otherwise remarkable creation. The editing is subtly fucked, with mystifying decisions involving the six-fold reprinting of identical golem statt blocks in service of the art, to haphazard placement of random encounter tables, to a bipolar relationship with using numbers, letters or nothing at all for keyed maps. It is never catastrophic or unworkable, merely grating. 

Let me remind the Council of the initial premise of DCO; The PCs, nay, Le PCs, for this is Artpunk territory, are propelled in medias Res to the backwater village of Carrowmore, which has just suffered from catastrophic natural upheaval. A great dam, built by a terrible empire long gone, has finally broken through, flooding the whole valley below. Faced with a lavish bouquet of all the flavors of human misery, they become embroiled for some reason or another and gradually travel upstream, through a mud-and-water logged hellscape of ruined buildings, giant river fauna, death and decay. The tour becomes a mystical torture odyssey into the literal underworld as they venture into the ancient ruins of a tomb-dam, across the alien landscape of a dry lakebed and finally into forgotten depths long since sealed off, where vistas of terrifying alien splendor await.   

Thirty hooks, an excessive amount, have been added to the reinassance of DCO, subdivided by motivation, ranging from Serious Heroism junk to the more atavistic and based Gold! Category. The more obvious and thus serviceable candidates include treasure maps, inheritances, bets with rival adventuring parties or just rumors of gold, with the more esoteric ones including madness, natural philosophy or the desire to escape an impending global economic meltdown (you and me both buddy). Overperformance, even if done recreationally, is not a sin, and thus follows my favorite one, the marvelously laconic “A crazy old coot sitting on a log traded you a story for a meal and told you of a king who dug to the middle of the world and came back with friends made of shadows. He was mad and they were bad so his brother pushed them back under the ground and built his tomb on top to keep them down. You have nothing better to do with your life than to investigate this old guys random story.”

DCO still begins in medias Res. The Characters are confronted with 2-3 crisis situations, and can respond to only one, with death or disappearance a likely result to any NPCs in the other situations. This repeats several times. UNLIKE the previous edition this time many of the events DO translate into more explicitly gameable results. Rescueing, say, Hans Gökul, results in him imploring the characters to find out a reason behind the catastrophe (with a handsome reward if they do so). Henchmen, quests, snatches of information or the attention of enemies can all result. This section introduces bold text to specifically indicate Possible Hirelings and Employers. Some of the rewrites are a bit dodgy; We no longer know Hans Gökul’s fortune is buried out of sight (PCs are bastards after all), and the formerly terse henchman descriptions occasionally slide into comedy or farce, ruining something of the cataclysmic atmosphere of the opening. Or to put it differently; The opening of DCO feels like the Road, the opening of DCO – Remastered occasionally feels like a One Piece episode. 

There’s something about this:
9. Wit Tamdoun. Has a knife, a chipper grin and a Dex of 18

That is not present in this:
Possible Hireling: If treated well, Wit could be an effective, if irregular henchman. In fact, if treated well, the PCs may have no choice but to make him an employee as he will follow them around. 13 years old, he is brave, competent, deeply anti-authoritarian and a high-functioning alcoholic. Though he obsessively steals small items he is loyal and reliable in every other respect, so long as you keep him off the drink. DAMAGE: d4 knife MORALE: 10 DEX 15 STEALTH: 3 in 6 SLEIGHT OF HAND: 2 in 6
The structure of DCO is a…squarecrawl? terminating in a dungeon. Most of the budget for the new edition seems to have gone into producing legible maps, a considerable segment has gone into upgrading Scrapprincess’s Art to levels where it is not just tolerable but downright desirable, perhaps a single pound disappeared into editing with the remainder being funneled into Stuart’s annual allotment of crumpets, uppers and guiness. An excellent feature is the party of rival NPCs that travel on ahead of you and are meant to turn your journey there into a living hell. The Crows, an unlovely quartet of psychopaths serving as scouts of the guys you think you are going to be having a wholesome race for the treasure at the end with end up killing them and using their bodies as bait, and generally fight you in the most irritating and unfair ways possible, with access to an inexhaustible supply of raised dead, poisoned crossbows, hit and run tactics and all manner of shitbag tactics. Perfect. Weeb factor over 9000 but perfect.

Flavor text remains very much on point, even if the additional verbiage once more serves to diminish the impact:
Two siblings shaped by moments of coldness, linked, repeated and deep. Whatever hell they fled from left its mark, now they carry it with them, in action and in thought. The Crows survive. Their names are whispered respectfully in crypts where nothing lives. Rumours of them run through jails where none escape. Their use is questioned in courts that condemn without appeal. They are secretly spoken of, and feared, in the dreams of the damned and the whispered speech of fearful kings.

This section has been improved considerably, with anything from the Dwarven sniper being given engagement ranges to round by round tactics and a list of schemes, tactics and tricks that they employ. I would say this is the first genuine improvement to the older edition. I don’t quite know why their AC is listed as Plate and it says (Dex) or why their movement speed is 35, somehow inhabiting the liminal space between an unarmoured human being and a lightly encumbered human being (with the exception of Zaghoun) and I am VERY skeptical about the decision to change Zaghoun’s poisoned crossbow sneak attack from x3 to the staggeringly lethal x5 albeit with a slower reload. One assumes past playtesting.

As the characters venture up the river, which now has been divided into different terrain with different effects on movement (!), they come across several situations, each one very dynamic, giving the impression of a formerly peaceful place caught in the current (geddit?) of events. A man atop a great mill assailed by giant crabs. Two dueling wizards in a canoe. A church surrounded by giant toads, lethargic, some so stuffed with corpses that the limbs poke from their sides. Starving children burning ancient spell scrolls that have washed down with the floodwater for warmth. In this landscape transformed by catastrophe roam six slowly dying automatons the size of buildings, each the key to passage further up the river. Villagers huddle on their rooftops, seeking solace from some terrible evil that cannot be remembered once it is no longer seen, and that has been killed many times and each time by a different weapon. Atmospherically it is striking. There are hints of a greater design that can be peaced together from individual encounters but this is never explicitly spelled out, which makes it all the more powerful. In this DCO’s choice for Lotfp is fitting, an atmospheric powerhouse. Tying the Witch to the Things from Below, Patrick’s nightmare re-imagining of the Drow, not as sterile corporate cartoon evil, but as horrible nightmare beings of terrifying legend, whose mere proximity is enough to inspire unimaginable pain and torment, only increases the power of these terrifying beings.
It is tempting to continue in this histographic trend because so many of the encounters are memorable or interesting or have some idea or visual aesthetic that stands out.

Second section: The DAM, constructed by the ancients, part Egyptian tomb, part, well, dam, no height given (booooh) but presumably high enough to present a serious fucking obstacle. Multiple methods of bypassing it, with the tombs inside being essentially optional. Now is also about the time I start complaining about one of the major additions in DCO Remastered: the additional parties that follow behind the PCs that are not the Crows. I can’t quite put my finger on why I’m not entirely convinced. Is it that one random encounter would turn them into vapor? The cannibals setting out to free the Witch AND THEN the Things In The Crypt (in the dam) COULD be a good complication but it feels…cheap? Superfluous? And the Observatory proper actually works best if there ISN’T anyone there to distract people from the murderous cartilage giant that squeezes itself through its claustrophobic environs.

Giant digression; The Dam proper is nice, maps are rudimentary, linear affairs, but the multiple methods of surmounting it and the option to either explore or leave be as one sees fit is appreciated. What is not appreciated is the abstract difficulty curves for various climbing tasks. I have said it once and I will say it a million times. It is often just as easy if not easier to just write things down for a single system and then convert it to its equivalent value in a different system then to kowtow to this inane, everyone-gets-a-prize system-neutrality. 99.9% is either going to run this for 5e (in which case it doesn’t matter what you do) OR run it for one of three highly similar retroclone games anyway. 

The Dam is where the pseudo-naturalistic environment of the Disaster-area is replaced with the perils of a tomb but here too there is this sense of transition and motion; a once ancient place has been violated by catastrophe. Formerly secret doors have been hammered in or are flooded. The undead and constructs of the Tomb are appropriately grotesque, and even here there is the occasional secret to discover or guardian construct that rewards interaction. The undead are all fantastic; Canoptic guardians whose jars may be smashed, mummified bureaucrats whose assault is unimpressive and of course the terrifying THINGS IN THE JARS, who point to the true nature of the place that the PCs will be visiting without ever spelling it out hell yes. Murals hint at the true nature of the dam and what it was meant to contain. The whole serves to instill an ominous foreboding that never quite pays off the way one thinks. Almost no treasure unless one is present to invest a year of study, and thus some gold piece values would have been nice.

The codification of movement speeds over different types of terrain and the inclusion of notes of day and night ARE A FANTASTIC ADDITION to DCO because EVERYTHING in DCO is BRIMMING WITH VISCERAL DETAIL or attempts to tug at your heartstrings and thus getting IMMERSED is its primary focus, and these types of mundane factors eliminate abstraction and create a much needed grounding.

Le Troisieme Acte: L’auteur utilise des insultes homophobes!

I feel my mind is moving into different spheres to facilitate the proper analytical level and this can really only be a good thing THANK THEE GARY GYGAX FOR THIS BLESSING FOR I AM MEANT TO SOAR AND BREATHE PRISMATIC FIRE UPON MY ENEMIES AS THEY SCREAM FOR A MERCIFUL DEATH THAT WILL NEVER ARRIVE NOT BE CONFINED TO THE RUDIMENTARY STANDARDS OF NONLINEAR MAP, PROPER TREASURE PLACEMENT, VERSIMILITUDE, SHORT-EVOCATIVE DESCRIPTION, FACTION PLAY AND ANTI-HITLER DISCLAIMERS THAT MAKE UP 95% OF THE OSR CATALOGUE.

The third part of the odyssey takes the player across the reed bed and has, in the Remastered Edition, actual damn elements of faction play in addition to the hideous giant fauna random encounters that is our bread and butter. The landscape is surreal and inimical, petrified forests filled with eels, fields of expiring giant pufferfish, bioluminescent fields of anemone’s clinging to the skeletal bodies of long dead armies.

That being said, the Remastered edition has turned this into a possible, full-on pitched battle between the newt-people and the indigenous Reed-People, with the possibility of getting their pyritized marsh mummy ancestors embroiled in the conflict, or you could, alternatively, steal their shit. This is ONE area where I would have liked to see some sort of reward system if you either A) save the villagers or B) broker the unlikely peace the adventure mentions but doesn’t really go into, and it would have been nice to have a reason to side with the Newt guys. Otherwise, there’s rudimentary tactics so the pitched battle can be arbitrated properly.

This is the weakest part of DCO because it feels very empty and incomplete. There is no treasure, there’s barely any encounters save the newts and the villagers which one can elect to skip, and even if one decides to interact, there isn’t really any reward for doing so. But this is forgiveable because we soon arrive to the actual Deep Carbon Observatory Proper, down a shaft in the earth bombarded with light by gigantic mirrors, meant to hold lamps so they can keep up their barrage for an aeon. Hell yes.  

Part IV: This Is What We Came Here For

The conclusion of Deep Carbon Observatory, where we die in a hole, suspended over a great void. A vertical 40ish room dungeon, ambitious, burrowed out of an enormous stalagtite. Inside, finally, vast treasures, sparse enemies and an all but invincible, but slow, monster, a cartilaginous giant, silent, crawling and deadly, that stalks the players through this great maze and seeks to crush and devour them.

Map legibility has been improved, which makes the whole much easier to actually run. There are bottlenecks and shafts and the whole forms a rough vertical circle, making extended chase scenes possible. The giant pursues the PCs inexorably and will try to block off avenues of escape. Its most disturbing feature is its ability to force itself through spaces much smaller than its head. A smattering of ancient weapons (clearly belonging to the NotDrow) and odd objects can be hastily weaponized against this terrifying threat. There are a few other perils, and I am unsure how to take the suggestion of all the rival parties arriving after the PCs. On the one hand it could prevent a leisurely looting after the giant has been dealt with, on the other hand it might disrupt something of the purity of the chase. They are, however, a good addition, as giving the PCs leisure to cart off all the riches of this place will propel them into the stratosphere, minor dragon’s hoard my ass! [1]

Nearly all the other encounters are interaction based, very good, from a captured slave kept alive by a hideous lock to a slime-ambassador inhabiting a body of glass. Where the psychic dinonychus fits in I have not quite managed to discern, but my scientists are working on it.

What DCO excels at, surprisingly on a reread, is to inject this bizarre environment with an odd type of verisimilitude. Everything seems to have been created with an in-game purpose and exists according to an internal logic, and only careful placement of hazards and tweaking render the whole gameable. It is really details like this that make it come alive.

Hidden under the dirt of the far wall are slave survival spells in a simple tongue, decipherable by any mage. All the spells count as level one, are not very powerful and can be cast without being noticed. Reduce Scars. Lessen Pain. Minimise Thirst. Hide Sorrow. Avoid Notice. Ease Grief

This is combined with gameplay, as the PCs must locate and find several passwords scattered throughout the observatory in a remarkably organic fashion in order to gain access to the inner sanctum, with success certainly not being guaranteed. Once they do so, they are in for a treat, a Zak S reference that has aged like fine milk, a staggering amount of wealth and a set of magical items that are both incredibly powerful and essentially cursed (the wearer of the crown and mace+5 can unerringly detect lies but must kill and destroy anyone who does so).

This is where I make the argument that DCO is actually much more traditional then its reputation would indicate, allowing me to escape the pyres of my fellow OSR-Inquisitors and possibly salvaging my already irreparably damaged reputation.

DCO is a highly ambitious recreation of the end of G3’s revelation of the Underdark. The wonders and horrors of the Observatory, from the Slime ambassador to unnervingly beautiful Salt Dryads, these are all a recreation, an attempt to evoke the same wonder that early players must have felt at the revelation that underneath the mountain fortress, a whole new world existed. In form DCO is almost entirely original, but in spirit it is EXACTLY this, but amplified! The Drow have been turned into creatures of nightmare, so abominable that the mere sight of them causes one to weep tears of blood that freeze on one’s face. Ineffable miracle materials are discovered, sentient geisha golems of silk, crossbow bolts of silence and duergar digging tools that run on human blood. This recreation is so fertile, and hints at such vast worlds below through the use of orreys, strata, and terrifying under-art objects that may be carted off (keep track of encumbrance when you run this), that here we see the seeds that would later grow into Veins of the Underdark.

It is also much more traditional then any of its awful offspring in the sense that it actually adheres to one law that is all but ignored in much artpunk trash, that of verisimilitude, and presents a type of fantastical eco-system, beginning with relatively mundane animals, sometimes gigantic. Crabs, eels, giant sturgeons, there is an underlying order to it all, a hierarchy that renders the fantasy believable and slowly eases the players from the land of the mundane to the land of the wondrous and the strange. This is married to a sense of motion, a sense of time passing, that one can find nowhere in Vornheim or RaPl for example; Creatures are in the process of inhabiting the world, tombs have been broken open, lives have been altered by the cataclysm.   

There are the odd practical concerns involved with giving the players nine billion gp worth of treasure, or how exactly the mathematical shapes work, or whether the groups that follow them will even stand a chance against seasoned PCs, or the fact that the observatory map doesn’t have a scale, or how the surrounding sessions will deal with a manual of black silk with writing in silver thread that can ruin empires with ideas (but this is actually a good inclusion) but if one looks at Deep Carbon Observatory Remastered, one can see a concerted effort to CLEAN UP the mechanics, to provide legible maps, to edit and cross-reference (though this is surely a herculean endeavor), to work out some of the encounters so they become much easier to run, to clarify some things and to generally improve on the product, not as a work of art [2] but as a module to be used.


The original DCO hit the OSR like an atom bomb and spawned an artistic legacy whose misshapen progeny will haunt the abandoned parlours of drivethru and itch.io for a long time. The writing and imagination was always superb. The implementation was lacking. DCO Remastered seeks to better itself in the only area where it really needed to do so. The end result is something that is runnable, works as a game, and still does what it sets out to do, the adventure as something to be experienced.

That he be canonized among the highest, that his work be recognized, its virtues extolled, its praises lauded.

To the rest, only the fires.   

Fuck it. *****

Post-sleep correction: Busted down to ****. There is a higher-order synergy between encounters, a co-operation between disparate elements, a refinement in the mapping and the objectss that this module, for its many strengths, does not quite reach. The encounters in the observatory are individually very strong but I am missing a type of coherence that is difficult to articulate. Its good but I am not convinced it can stand toe to toe with anything I have given Five Stars.

[1] To give one an idea, one room holds 2-8 art objects worth between 1-20.000 each (value not distributed symmetrically).      
[2] Here too it has improved, as the Scrapprincess Art has improved considerably