Saturday, December 24, 2022

Is there a Santa Claus on Cha'alt?

 I actually don't want to find out the answer to that question. Darrick Dishaw and I bonded way back when on Santa Claus Versus the Martians long before the movie was hip dorky to the sexy world. Back when the gamer hordes were learning how to become cancellers or alt-right kermits, we libertines knew that joy in your hobby should be a thing.

I have, though, just finished reading reading Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shandows about ten days ago. Now when I say read, I don't mean, I bought a book and skimmed through it to write a review to get hits on my podqod page or something or another. No. I've read it. I've also read the first two books in this trilogy not just bought them. Back in like Spetember, the author was demanding that his fans review his book. While I can't be counted as a fan, I can be counted as a Fantasist that likes to read weird stuff. So my timing is neither expected by most OSR sorts, nor a bit of fan script.

 The work is, well complicated, and not for reasons of moral ambiguity on the part of the reader. It is proclaimed to be a series of scenarios that build the world of Cha'alt as a campaign setting. What is actually is a collection of scenario seeds that the reader must read then sort through to decide what Dishaw tale that they want to present to their players. I will pay cash money to the GM that I find that will run from page 30 through 35 as it's written on those pages in any of the books.


Of the three books, Cha'alt, Cha'alt: Fushia Malaise, and Cha'alt (green shade), the last work, Venger Satanis is the most comfortable in his skin. That is as he is writing, because he as an artist, in my opinion, is going places beyond this RPG campaign setting. He's been exploring himself versus the folks around him. 

For the person that is looking for an RPG world worth jumping into, as long as your taste are leaning towards being shocking, I recommend the work. More ambitious GMs should look at it for its flowing prose and not look for rigid ideas. No really. More than a few authors could gather a few minutes of inspiration about how to be spontaneous for their own writings. The whole trilogy is a Loch Ness of a work.