[Review] Chartreuse Shadows Pt. III (CDS); Maze Medusa Blues

The concluding part, and from Venger’s posts (Artpunk vs Jakeying? Sign me up hoss!) I glean that he may have sensed the direction the review was going to take. Writing a negative review for a person you like always sucks but unfortunately part of one’s duty as a reviewer is unfailing honesty. Chartreuse Shadows has been out for a while and I genuinely hope it will do well enough to spur on Venger to further projects without his wife locking him in the shed again. With that said, let’s rip off the bandage, go to the autopsy and hope he won’t be too mad.

Chartreuse Shadows is essentially the third part of an adventure trilogy and the ideal third part is always a home-run. You introduce the concepts or the world in the first part, the second part functions as a bridge where you work towards your conclusion and lead people further in and the third one is absolutely bonkers, no holds barred, slam dunk. You see the pattern with Bruce Cordell’s the Illithiad, you see it with the G series and you see it with the D series (just check my Reviews). Introduction, Break/bridge and then Grand Finale. You blow up a megastructure and run away from Ilensine in Dawn of the Overmind. You discover that your entire struggle against the Fire giant king was but the prelude to greater struggles in G3. You have a showdown with Lolth in D3. I make this general overview because I will be doing some griping about how Chem’rikazaam is not a well-crafted Dungeon, but that has nothing to do with why I don’t think Chartreuse Shadows lives up to the legacy of its predecessors.

As far as Cha’alt was concerned, the introduction was a stunning success. After years of nothing but Alpha Blue wackiness that Venger would insist was OSR, we got a glimmer of hope. An enigmatic Gonzo megadungeon was air-dropped into the creative wasteland of the OSR and struck with the force of a thousand atom bombs. FUCK YOUR RULEZ, goes the lion’s [1] roar, as Venger empties half a canister of gasoline onto a pile of mint 1978 copies of the AD&D 1e Dungeon Master Guide, lights the pyre, then drinks the rest of the canister. CHA’ALT BITCH! And it was probably exactly what it needed to be, some setting info, followed by some short adventures (that were still, I might add, very dungeon-like), and then a grand work that genuinely felt fresh, like we were back to the Isle of Purple Haunted Putrescence days. Yeah it didn’t make sense, yeah it was pure funhouse, but it was great stuff.

So how do you follow up on that? You expand the format. I think I have mentioned it before but Gonzo essentially has a weakness and that weakness is you can’t really expand upon it. You get an initial dopamine hit because everything is possible and that is followed by a sort of ennui as nothing really matters. There are themes to Cha’alt but the rules of what is or is not possible are so elastic as to be nonsensical. By the time part II kicks around you have already averted complete universal destruction sixteen times, met five hundred Great Old Ones, had sex with all the asslicking cathookers and even played the, by now surprisingly playable and refined, Crimson Dragon slayer for all it’s worth. So you expand the formula. You do a short adventure, you do a weird event-based multi-headed railroad adventure (a rail-hydra?), you do a damn fine starbase, you introduce a setting based malaise that threatens the entire planet AGAIN. That was basically Fuschia Malaise. You paint over things you didn’t hit the last time, you try some new things, you introduce something new to stir things up.

So what do you do for Part III? You need to go absolutely balls to walls. You thought Cha’alt was gonzo? You ain’t seen nuthin yet! Here is mega-ultra Cha’alt. It has teleporting Rob Schneider ninjas, diamond killdroids, a level that you have to run while the GM makes up his characters, a bleach drinking competition, an ass bleaching competition, a magic N-word that functions like power word kill, and a surprisingly warm-hearted railroad level where you reconnect with your estranged father and sip pinot noir in a tuscany sundset. You begin in the dungeon, but that is only a wink and a nod before you set out for absolutely batshit climates and the farthest corners of postapocalyptic outer space!

Are you excited? That is a pity because that is not the Cha’alt III we get. Instead we get a part III that is kind of like the first one, just a lot more tame. By now the ideas have been fully absorbed so pulling the same trick is no longer as effective and it feels formulaic. I no longer do the double spit take when the dungeon has a chick-fill-a that is also a brothel. I shrug as a shoggoth appears in the dungeon. There are more adventures here then in any other part, but the adventures are shorter then ever, and they are all event railroads or they are small dungeons with simplistic maps, consisting of individually interesting encounters with no sense of interconnection, pop-culture references, space-shit and sleazy sex stuff.

Yeah I laugh when I read this, I am still a human being.

But Cha’alt III feels, more then anything in the series, like it has reached a dead end. It cannot do anything but replicate itself infinitely. It is stuck in a configuration that it cannot escape from. It is no surprise the anthology adventures are actually much less gonzo then parts I & II. At this point it has been through a full cycle. All of which is understandable and would have been acceptable, if Chem’rikazaam, the megadungeon, had surpassed Cha’alt.

But it does not.

Chem’rikazaam is another Megadungeon, 110 rooms once again, and comes across as a second Cha’alt, or Cha’alt Again, rather then a worthy successor. There is no sense of trying to surpass, and without growth, you get stagnation. It uses multiple floors this time but this time spread over 7 floors with a sort of underrealm beneath it. The multiple floors are almost illusory. There is no sense of identity to individual levels and the nature of the encounters makes it feel as though they could be presented in any order and it would make no difference, though perhaps level 7 is a bit tougher then level 1. There is one random encounter table for everything, no description of individual levels or things going on, no prelude, no nothing. It is impossible to describe the feeling of wading through what is essentially a thick, indistinguishable mess of encounters. The maps illustrate this perfectly.

I am going to be sick.

Was there a bulk deal at maps R us?

Expedition to the Caverns of Brown

Descent into the caverns of darker brown.

At last, you have arrived at the caves of dark

Yup. No listening at doors, no secret doors, no doors with keys, no multiple passageways, no hidden treasure, you can get a handjob from a demon shemale but you can’t get a fucking teleportation trap to save your life. Also, can you point me to the fucking exit on each level? No?

Everyone has their own style. But to leave all this structure on the cutting room floor means you had better be writing like Patrick Stuart with a Butcher’s Nails implant [2] or this is going to be a fucking hard sell indeed. And I know what caused it, it’s the format. You played 2 hours per session on d20, random selection, single instance. That’s fine for a tiny railroad but with a megadungeon you need to be thinking about campaign, persistent world shit, people looping back and forth, going back to areas that were unexplorable before etc. etc. There are whiffs of that here, but it feels directionless. There is no sense of progression. Even Cha’alt experimented with the idea to have areas that are walled off by differently colored keys. Where is that here?

So does this read like it was written by the Primarch of the Art Eaters chapter? Well, it is noticeably more satanic then the last dungeon, but the tighter adherence to thematics actually make it less gonzo, and it isn’t going for a purely serious dungeon either. The whole idea behind Cha’alt was that it didn’t really make sense, but it was sort of playing around with that idea, trying to trick you into thinking it made sense, before pulling the rug under you. Enigmatic. Infinetely varied. Maybe self-aware. This one does the same thing only with less variety and more arbitrary constraints. Even the premise is less good. Some demonic halls built by serpent men, where a bunch of evil elves congregate, with demons below. Starting off so strong with The Black Pyramid makes this feel weak by comparison.

The individual encounters are still pretty good in a broad sense. There’s a decent variety of combat, negotiation, people with goals elsewhere on the level or the dungeon etc. etc. But you already know that. You already know Venger can write individually pleasing, tactically simplistic, occasionally laterally thinking type of challenges. Sample below. An entire demon city is placed on level 5, and it’s just fucking random tables, nothing actionable. No higher organization. Instead it is much hornier then the last part, to the point it gets a 18+ rating. Kitchy, yeah. But for a non-coomer audience?

And so on and so forth. We can grapple with individual encounters, and yeah, I do think it is funny that there is an encounter where you get put on a stand and interrogated while demons electrocute you. I can tell you of my frustrations that the Tommy Wiseau reference in the book is not turned into a boss. There is boomer humor and hornyness and the eldritchness of the first book has been replaced with demon-ness and more hornyness. But in the end, it feels like Cha’alt, Season Six, and it suffers from many of the same problems that I alluded to in Maze of The Blue Medusa.

We conclude the book, maybe typically, with a space dungeon, the Colony Ship Salvation. It’s a nice map, but the scenario feels rushed, several individual space themed encounters are thrown together, without overlapping framework. Why are people here? What are we doing? Are there alarms? Do people respond to intrusion in some way? Can I fire the ships weapons? Can I turn off the air? Are there areas that are hard to get into, forcing me to go around them? Are there robots I could hotwire? This just makes me wish I was playing that Space Base scenario from Part II instead. There’s an angry super computer I can wake up to maybe get killed, and all 4 keys are located in one room, that’s something I guess.

Is this a priority thing? Or a time preference thing? Has my journey through the long dark valley of Rpgdom transmuted me so I can no longer enjoy the simpler, sillier things? Have I been transformed? Do I now soar too high to catch sight of the humble daffodils that bloom so close to earth’s bosom? Perhaps.

But mark well these words of mine, oh erstwhile Priest of Cthulhu. The divine fire has been spent for now. Perhaps it is time to grant Cha’alt some well-deserved time at the pasture. You know what to do. Encounter Critical, one 4 hour game per week, with the same group, no coomers, until you understand the game in your sleep. Everyone fights. No one quits. If you try to run, I’ll kill you myself. Good luck Hoss. We are all rooting for you.

Chartreuse Shadows is a mixed anthology of short adventures that does not live up to the promise of the earlier parts. Venger has perfected the rail-hydra format he struggled with in the second book but at what terrible price! If all you want is more Cha’alt, it provides this in spades, but it is not going to convince anyone not already on board the Fuchsia train. Diehard fans and completionists only. Check it out here.

**


[1] Li’on?
[2] Patgron?