Gran Carcosium: Session 1

My friend Alex from To Distant Lands has been working on a really fun campaign setting. In his words, it's Carcosa but with the nasty shit replaced with Final Fantasy aesthetics. I only have secondhand knowledge of Final Fantasy, but that means a mix of fantasy, sci-fi, and retro elements blended together into a fruity smoothie. This isn't Dungeons & Dragons. It's Crystals & Chocobos! We played using Legends, a "lo-fi hi-fantasy" micro-game in the 24XX series.

Summary

My character was Trixie the Auto Tech, a car mechanic with an old red convertible (I don't know much about cars) and a giant wrench. I thought of her as being like fantasy Cuban. My friend Halloween from Underground Adventures played Malice the Gun Witch, which is delightfully self-descriptive. We were exiled from our ex-country for being public nuisances, and thrown into the strange prison land of Carcosium. One day, we happened to be driving across the plains when we heard a strange offer on the radio, interrupting the lo-fi crystal hiphop tunes: "Come to the citadel if you're interested in a job. First come, first serve!"

Also note-worthy: Malice's friendly chocobo Marius!!! He rode in the trunk of Trixie's car :)

We headed that way, and found the radio station which also served as a tavern. It turned out we were beat to the chase by the rambunctious Skull Gang, and the bartender/DJ felt it was bad practice to give us the job after already giving license to them (not to mention the gang violence that would likely result in doing so). We approached the Skull Gang and shared with them our last blunt, which they hogged for themselves. They were not interested in working together on the job, so we decided to make our help necessary.

Malice walked out the bar, found their car, and blew it up—hurting herself and alerting the Skull Gang in the process. The Skull Gang ran outside yelling, "What the fuck?!" and started pulling out their guns to shoot at her. Trixie followed them out from the bar and swung at one of them with her giant wrench, but it turned out his skull was reinforced with some kind of metal. She was still able to redirect some of their attention away from Malice, pulling herself together. Trixie also did a cool move where she jumped on top of a car and did some wrench-swinging, knocking out one of the skulls. Meanwhile, Malice got shot in the leg.

Eventually Trixie and Malice ran back to their car, with Trixie in the driver's seat and Malice singing a lullaby to a bullet before loading it in her broom-rifle. She was going to shoot spells at the skulls to make some of them fall asleep, but in doing so she also made herself drowsy and out-of-action for the rest of the day. Trixie drove to an inn some distance away, but the vibes were kinda really bad. Not only did it not have a bar, but it was a motel owned by prejudiced Christians with Bible verses hung up on the walls. Trixie patched up Malice's wounds with snack packages and newspapers from the car. Then the two swore sleepy revenge on the Skull Gang for smoking their last joint.

Closing Thoughts

This was such a flavorful setting!! The world oozed a delightful weirdness. I felt like there was an interesting clash between the JRPG-inspired aesthetic and the pretty concrete nature of 2400's rules, especially with regards to injuries. Malice didn't lose hit points; she got shot because she didn't get out of the way of people with guns. It's a very refreshing approach, and one that complimented the setting as counterintuitive as that might seem. I did look up how long it takes to recover from a gun wound, though. Six months? Insane. Glad the world is magic.

The images above were AI-generated during the game because we were messing around. "Roarside Moel" is beautiful. The artpiece below, however, was human-made by the artist Kabewski, and served as the inspiration for Malice. Love her vibes!! She seems fun to hang out with :)