Carolina Death Crawling In My Skin

So for the penultimate session before the Quarter Quell, I decided to go a little unorthodox. A while back, I purchased a game that I wanted to play for so many years. This is dating back to when I was doing the Hope Inhumanity games. Life and other such problems got in the way, though. But now? I can try this. The game? Carolina Death Crawl.

I’m gonna be brutally honest with you all. I’m going into this game blind. Whereas almost every other game, I had an idea of what I’m gonna play, either because I heard someone else talk about it, or I saw a demo, or I have played it before. Here? I have no such prior context. To give you an example, I had this idea the game’s gonna be about cross-country horseback racing a la Steel Ball Run, but instead, it’s about the Civil War…

The one about the blue and white soldiers fighting over the legality of slavery, not the one with the armored billionaire duking it out with the personification of America over superhero regulation.

So, yeah. I’m gonna learn this game as I play it. What I know is that the game is played through cards, much like Hope Inhumanity, and that there’s three kinds of cards: Kill, Disgrace, and Destroy. Thankfully, the rules that come free with the DrivethruRPG page explain the premise. Basic gist is that it’s Civil War, we’re left behind enemy lines, only one person can live. Our character is a soldier for North Carolina and is loyal to the Union despite North Carolina being a Confederate State.

Character Creation seems to be very cool. There’s two halves of a character. The first half has their first name, rank, and title whereas the second has their last name, placement in the North Carolina Army, and the second part of the title. Naturally, I went with Charles Comfort, Lieutenant of the 1^st NC Cavalry, Officer & Ass-Kicker.

Well, I’m ready to play, though I’m not sure if I will need additional players or if I can just wing it. In either case, I will have Henry Dunham, Private of the 1^st NC Cavalry, Swamp Rat & Imposter, on the ready in case I do. For now, I will need to answer my main question: Whose ass am I going to kick the moment I slip your leash? This question does not necessarily have to be answered right away and can be answered during the game, it seems. So, on with the game.

Skimming the game does reveal that I would need at least three other players for this game. They will act as extensions of myself rather than use an Emulator to simulate them. So, after Henry Dunham is Isaac Eager, Corporal of the 1^st NC Calvary, Intellectual & Criminal. And after him is Lemuel Maybank, Sergeant of the 1^st NC Calvary, Veteran & Aristocrat. Already we have some interesting combinations. Almost everyone has a beef with each other. Maybank is in debt to Eager, Eager is loathed by Dunham, and Dunham is hiding from Comfort.

The Gandalflocke Challenge (Rules)

A long, long, long time ago, back during the beginnings of Solo RPG Voyages, I had hatched a challenge that I’ve decided to share with the community to see if they can try their hand at it. It’s based off a Pokémon challenge called Nuzlocke. The basic gist of a Nuzlocke is that you play Pokémon like normal, but with two stipulations: You could only capture the first Pokémon you see in every route and when a Pokémon faints, they automatically die.

Translating that for a solo RPG campaign is pretty easy. I recommend using an RPG that’s based off the D20 system, so any OSR game, D20 game, or even 5E will do. Next, either pick your favorite adventure/campaign or make a whole new one up. Create a party of four characters or less. The recommended party build for this challenge is the following:

Omegazone II: City of the Apes

So, I kinda lied. I’m gonna stick to Omegazone for just a little longer before going into Call of Cthulhu. The reason being that I haven’t covered other parts of the Omegazone Deck that I wanted to show you guys. Not only that, but there’s also a supplement to the deck that tells you a little bit more about the lore of Omegazone.

It turns out to not be the Mad Maxian setting that I made it out to be in the first post, rather the opposite. Nature has grown out of control, plant life growing everywhere. Then aliens and radiation took hold, effectively turning the world into the hot mess we’re in. The lack of communications results in the fact that rumors are now truth.

There’s a large, in depth story about how the world became the world we know now and why the game’s called Omegazone. If I were to summarize, aliens known as the Kreen invade Earth. The resulting battle and breaking out of the OmegaForce (think of them as a sort of X-Com task force) caused the world to change, ground zero being L.A., now known as the Omegazone.

That’s the basis we know now.

Instead of resuming our adventures with Dr. Wheeler, I’m instead gonna focus on a new character. A cat-spider hybrid named Spicat, who lived in the Vineland, a city overrun by vines and ruled by gorillas. It’s there that we see Spicat catching and killing a strange panther that, up to this point, had been evading her by teleporting away. It had teleported up to a roof, to which Spicat invokes her Super Sticky Skin.