Cha'alt: A Very Early Impression (Not Actually A Review)

This is not a review because I'm too lazy, incompetent and irrelevant to do proper reviews. These are just rambling initial thoughts on Cha'alt. There's a lot of reasons I might end up regretting buying this, namely that I've never been good at running dungeons (let alone a megadungeon). The other one is that I've got some seriously mixed feelings on Venger Satanis, as he's one of those awful OSR-related people who at times is much more interested in his own ego and brand name than anything constructive and he's also a raging edgelord much like the other egomaniacs of the OSR scene, namely Pundit and Raggi.

Do I think Venger and his ilk ever deserve to be on the receiving end of cancel culture? Absolutely not. However that doesn't mean I can't think these people, at times, seem to be wasting genuine talent on childish drama, temper tantrum and a dick-measuring contest of 'edgier than thou', with Raggi getting on the receiving end pretty bad of social media-driven nonsense and rage. Ultimately there is nothing wrong with edge if done right but its hard to not think of them as shock jock that are trying too hard to be as politically incorrect for the sake of some punk-esque desire to give our current culture the middle finger. That's fine and dandy but the question deep down is: is there anything good in all this or is it going to be just edgy bullshit? Time for me to find out. Fitting with these people being a bunch of edgelords, I too will channel my own inner edgelord a tad more for this post.

Inital-est of all Initial Impression

Okay so, Cha'alt. "The Black Pyramid is like nothing you've ever seen before.  Unique design, purpose, feel, magic items, NPCs, monsters, factions, motives, agendas, strangeness, the works!" says the description (and presumably Venger). Not gonna lie, I do have some decently high bars set when it come to weird settings that are both interesting yet also usable, with Yoon-Suin the Purple Land being my all-time favorite. Will this other purple weirdness live up to the hype?

The cover, but everyone already knew that.

Honestly I can't say I dislike this cover, it looks like some cringy-yet-kind-of-funny drug-fueled indie band, which may or may not what Venger was going for. If his (or whatever the fuck his alien pronouns are, 'cuz yeah apparently he now identify as a tentacle alien!) intent was for it to look like the cover to the debut album of some weird '80 band then it totally work because that's the vibe I am getting. Internal layout and coloring is nice, simple and eye pleasing no problem there. Its in color, its good looking and looks quite polished so nothing to complain. At least it isn't MYFAROG (you know, the RPG made by that crazy fucker) whose interior use the Papyrus font. Maybe its unfair of me to put Venger in the same category as an actual murderer, however.

Overall its a decently good-looking book and maybe of even better production value than some of my favorite OSR books. That's praise I am not ashamed in giving where it is due, this isn't a bad looking book. Next question then is will it be filled with nothing but a thirteen years old definition of cool and edgy or will there be really good stuff that is genuinely inspiring? Because its hard for me to take a work where a major location is called the 'Gamma Incel Cantina' which I'm sure will age as fine as a joke as any single joke about Margaret Thatcher made back then or any jab at Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau once they leave politics. In general, socio political jokes age very poorly to the point many of them become meaningless once people get older. Will people know what an 'incel' is in 2040, for example?

More Disconnected Impressions

The initial setting description isn't particularly impressive, to be honest. Cha'alt tries to sell itself on uniqueness but we see basically yet-another-rethread of warmed over H.P. Lovecraft. Cosmic Horror, especially of the Lovecraftian bent, is becoming increasingly trite and the opposite of scary. Cha'alt was once a generic fantasy world but then generic evil tentacle cosmic alien gods came, then there was a high tech age and then finally Old Ones stirred again causing an apocalypse. Meh. Overall it isn't particularly unique so far but I can somewhat start to see where people have mixed it with Godbound, so maybe there's some good stuff in there for me to salvage.

Cha'alt already has a bit of a naming problem too, such as abusing the cliché of making stuff sound alien by adding an apostrophe: Cha'alt, Mela'anj, Kra'adumek and S'kbah are words used. One could be a lot more charitable and say this is a deliberate attempt to evoke the cheese of older Pulp works, in which case its fine enough in my book. Maybe I'm feeling a bit annoyed by it because it is a cliché I too indulged a tiny bit too much in the past with my own failed attempts at making weird fantasy and planetary romance. It wasn't very good or original which I why the project got axed and buried in concrete at the bottom of the ocean.

Drilling home the point of how trite this is compared to something like Yoon-Suin, the race section appoint with not one but six breed of elves. Yeah, fucking elves. That's so original and unique, Venger I've never seen that before. Adding insult to injury there aren't really any other new race added by default: while I'd be all in favor to leave this space blank for GM to invent their own thing, at least one truly unique race could have been neat. This section is a disappointment. I'd say make some table of the traits in Machination of the Space Princess and generate some weird alien freakazoid races, at the very least, to salvage this.

Overall, So Far?

This is honestly pretty disappointing and only further cement my belief that major OSR personalities are often more hype than actual content, with only RPGPundit out of that bunch so far having truly produced anything I find to be quite good. So congrats, Venger, my own curiosity to check this out got me suckered. I'll keep reading and see what else in there but this does not hold a candle to the works produced by Sine Nomine or to Yoon-Suin.

So far Cha'alt is kind of a dud. I know this will not earn me any fans but its true.