Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise

 So into the second Cha'alt book by Darrick Dishaw,  known better by his handle Venger Satanis, which I will lump the overall works into my High Fantasy folder in my head's reality.  I could just be brainwashed from bothering to read the world's filings in any sort of depth, but I doubt that. It is not because of writing structure that I categorize the overall world setting as such. If there are two poles of world-building in gaming such as highly skilled prose and narrative [1] and then massive dumps of notes, charts, and recurring references [0], this work would be [.46] and the rating is probably not on the conscious effort of the author.

 Fuchsia Malaise starts out with bunch of charts, many are designed to further detail the atmosphere of the doomed planet Cha'alt with its pink rose colored skies and purple mountains. Others are the random for random's sake so loved by the professed OSR (the ones that are not friendly to 5e because like there's girls involved) crowd which reminds me a lot of the original Arduin Adventure pamphlets (supposedly written before girls were involved) that I read years ago. Entries such as Dehydration and Henchman reactions are straight up Runequest level of visceral land tromping detail for the D20-addicted.

And then, following all that, there is the scenarios.

It is in these scenarios where a guy like me, an escapist looking for weird fantasy to tide me over until my next foray in the Dreamlands, gets some bang for my buck. The potential GM has hundreds of rooms throughout the book that are, as written, seeds for entire scenarios. The subplots for this or that room does not have to necessarily have to be tied into each other. Malaise is also where Dishaw starts to tie his other work(s?), Alpha Blue, and maybe others which I haven't read, into this long and arduous text. A narrative form of the story starts to come out where the Satanis Federation of Planets (my name not his) are exploiting Chaalt, Pompadour planet (Not Dune, Desert Planet) and an over-arching theme gets developed. This narrative, to Dishaw's credit, gets accomplished in paragraphs not chapters. That is strong work for an Author-GM in the tabletop roleplaying field.

This second book has a lot of problems though. Mostly it is lack of tone continuity control in the project. The tone varies from page to page, making it a hard read. A decent editorial approach could've corralled the work into nice story-stems instead of just making sure the words therein were spelled correctly and formatting was most correct. On top of the approach, I, being a person that does not fault someone for being not fully throughout in their humor. I have to give a pass to a lot of political jokes, not really tied into anything overall, that can be applied to any political group yet somehow tied in Dishaw's mind to socialists. Makes me think he's never met somebody that voted for a Clinton let alone a lefty-liberal. I am joking here, he has and is just being lazy.

The work though overall is a Loch Ness on the scale of Godzilla to Smurf scale of things. An experienced GM can make a whole year of gaming sessions out of this book alone. Their players would feel like they are in a epic quest and the GM would have plenty of leads to start that next campaign.