Post by korgoth on Jun 9, 2009 15:53:03 GMT -6
(Cross-posted at Dragonsfoot Reviews)
This is a review of Supplement V: Carcosa, a "Book of Rules Options for the Original Fantasy Role-Playing Game Published in 1974" by Geoffrey McKinney. The book is a private press effort and is available through the author's blog at carcosa-geoffrey.blogspot.com/. This review is of the 1st Edition, October 2008. Currently two editions are available: the 1st Edition and the Expurgated Edition. The differences will discussed below.
The artifact is a digest-sized book of 96 pages; 5 pages are intentionally blank. The center leaf is a hand-drawn hex map of the quadrant of the campaign world which Supplement V: Carcosa (hereafter, "Carcosa") describes. The cover is textured cardstock and is dominated by an evocative skyline of the eponymous ghost city, drawn by the author and the only piece of visual art in the book. The interior formatting of the book is clean and excellent; the presentation is necessarily dense due to the amount of information the author chose to include. Ample use of spacing, bold text and underlines make the information and tables easy to read.
Carcosa is difficult to describe because the work itself provides, as it advertises on the front, "rules options". That is not to say that there is no setting... in fact, one could argue that the book is almost entirely setting information. The issue is that Carcosa is at the same time something definite and something open-ended. In one respect, there's no denying that Carcosa is a unique product in itself, due to the strange alchemy of the elements it includes. To elaborate, Carcosa is an alien planet. On this planet, which is one of harsh climes and terrifying monsters, thirteen distinct races of mankind dwell, each a different color. Some of the Carcosan colors do not even exist in the terrestrial spectrum: Carcosa is a place of alien physics as well as alien beings. The slimy pantheon of Lovecraft and Derleth physically inhabit Carcosa, as do many other squamous monstrosities of similar type. Carcosa is also a place of dinosaurs (Order: Kirbyensis), space aliens (like from New Mexico and the History Channel), ray guns, robots, riding lizards, deadly fungus, science and sorcery. In a sense, it is all the cool stuff from weird fantasy thrown together... except that it isn't "thrown together". It all sits rather well together, and strikes the review more as an alchemical potion and less as a mere bricolage.
On the other hand, and it is in this that Carcosa defies a certain sort of definition, part of the virtue of Carcosa is that it is presented as a lump of sculptor's clay, able to receive any of a certain range of forms which the user might choose to impress upon it. It could be a game of fantasy horror, in the style of Derleth or the style of Smith (both very different). It could be a game of heroic (or self-interested) derring-do in the style of Howard. It could be Thundarr the Barbarian or the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath or King Kong or Zothique. It could be Ambient or Metal or Schoenberg. McKinney gives you a world of these various elements, but does not attempt to tell you what to do with them. I expect that any given Carcosa campaign will be as much a reflection of the interests of the Referee as it will be of the text; this appears to be the intention of the work.
The first piece of content is a poem from Robert W. Chambers, the originator of the concept of lost Carcosa. We then have the Table of Contents.
The rest of the book follows the general division of the original three digest books: the first part is about characters and spells, the second part about monsters and artifacts, and the third part is about adventures above and below ground. The first part begins with a new character class: the Sorcerer. There are only two classes in Carcosa: Fighting Men and Sorcerers. They differ only in two ways: Sorcerers can use Sorcery (ritual magic) and have a more rigorous XP advancement table than Fighting Men. In other words, Sorcerers are Fighting Men who can also use spells, and pay a level advancement penalty for it.
So the Sorcerers of Carcosa can wear armor if they choose, and use whatever weapons they choose. They do not encompass magic spells in Vancian style, and Carcosan magic does not directly concern combat or utility effects. In fact, all Carcosan magic concerns dealing with entities of the Cthulhu Mythos (both the usual suspects and new entities specific to the Carcosan setting).
The spells of Carcosa conjure Mythos entities, and can also bind them, contact them, imprison them, torment them and banish them. However, the entities in question get a Saving Throw against all of these things except the actual conjuration, and Cthulhu has lots of hit dice... draw your own conclusions about what happens next.
A Sorcerer's level can impose a penalty on the entity's Saving Throw, so higher level Sorcerers are better at subduing and controlling the Mythos. Rituals can also age the caster unnaturally. Plus, sometimes rituals are defective or have other complications.
Next up, we have a short description of the thirteen races that inhabit Carcosa. Each race is dramatically colored; a green man is actually green (like terrestrial grass or one of Captain Kirk's girlfriends), etc. Several colors (ulfire, dolm and jale) do not exist in the terrestrial spectrum and are described analogically. The races do not generally trust one another... more on that later.
Alignment is a system of "party affiliation". It has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. Rather, Lawfuls oppose the Great Old Ones (Cthulhu and his cronies), Chaotics serve the Great Old Ones and Neutrals try to avoid being burnt alive or sacrificed by the previous two groups; whereas if a Lawful saw a Great Old One he would fight it, and if a Chaotic saw one he would do its bidding, a Neutral would get the heck out of Dodge. Which makes the Lawfuls sound pretty good, until you realize that a given Lawful could be Vlad the Impaler as easily as he could be Mother Teresa... there is no practical moral component, it is merely a question of which team you're on.
Next we get the Carcosa system for Psionics. This is one of the things that anybody, even someone not interested in playing on Carcosa itself, could use. This is quite simply the best system for Psionics that reviewer has seen for D&D. It's main virtue is that it is actually intelligible. It's also simple: based on your Int, Wis and Cha, you have a % chance of being able to use Psionics. The number of uses (shots) you get per day is based on your level. The number of powers you have to choose from on a given day is determined by a 1d4 roll. There are 8 powers in all. So if you're psionic, you first roll a d4 in the morning to see how many powers you get that day. Then you roll a d8 that many times to see which ones you get that day. Each of the powers is simple... things like Clairvoyance, ESP, etc. Many of them directly mimic spells from the original edition. The attack power, Mental Blast, is potent in that it deals 3 dice of damage.
As you will see in a moment, Carcosa likes randomness. Every die roll in Carcosa is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to roll. Whereas the original edition mostly just used the d20 and the d6, Carcosa uses all the polyhedrals. However, it never specifies die type. It just says things like "3 dice of damage". So how do you know what kind of dice to roll?
The answer is that you roll a d10 (or you could do it as a d5) to select one of the five die types: d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12. Then you roll that die type for your roll. So some days your psionic character may have Mental Blast; that's your lucky day. On a given use of Mental Blast (your only use if you're a low level type), you may be doing d4 damage or d12.
This applies to virtually everything in Carcosa, not just Psionics. As the author notes, some days Cthulhu has to roll d4s for his hit dice, and sometimes the peasant's pitch fork hits for d12 damage (ouch!). If it sounds a bit gonzo, perhaps it is. It's also the newest old schoolism the review has seen in a while.
Hit dice are explained and work in an interesting way. At the start of combat, you roll your hit dice. So a 4th level Hero, like we all expect, will roll 4 dice. Which dice? See above... it could be d12s or d8s or whatever. Have lots of polyhedrals on hand for this campaign. And yes, you roll your "hit points" at the start of every combat. But you don't add them up... when you take damage, you take damage to the dice themselves, starting with the highest. What is interesting about this is that if the combat results only in minor scratches for you (your highest die was reduced but not removed) then you are effectively undamaged by the combat... it really was just a scratch. When you are actually being hurt is when dice are removed because they are reduced to 0. For example, our Hero rolls a d10 and gets a 3, which means he rolls d6s this combat. He rolls a 5, a 4 and two 3s. He is then hit for 4 points of damage. His '5' die becomes a 1. If hit again, this time for 5 damage, his 4 die is removed and one of the 3s becomes a 2. At this point, he is so wounded that he is down 1 hit die. They heal up at the rate of 2 dice per week!
One nice thing about this system is that it reduces bookkeeping. You don't need to constantly adjust your HP up and down; you just remember how many hit dice you have for your level and how many you are down. There are a couple added complications, but it's very straightforward.
Next we have the Sorcerous Rituals. These are the magic spells of Carcosa. Virtually all of them are a pain to cast in some way: either there is an elaborate sacrifice to stage, there is only one place on the whole map where the spell can be cast (probably a dangerous, adventurous place), the spell requires you to Save or die, the spell requires you to be covered by a yucky monster, etc. The banishing rituals, meant to send away the Great Old Ones, are the only ones that are not outright evil. The other rituals, which involve summoning the Great Old Ones, binding them to your will, imprisoning them someplace they don't like, contacting them for a chat or torturing them so that they do your bidding, all involve some form of human sacrifice. Carcosan Sorcerers who seek to do more than simply drive away the Great Old Ones (and you could be a Lawful Sorcerer who only uses banishments) will have to do some pretty horrible things to innocent people. For this reason, Carcosan Sorcerers make excellent villains in the style of Howard's Hyboria. They really are out to sacrifice virgins and summon ghoulish monsters with which to terrorize the local communities.
It is in regards to the ritual descriptions that we have the difference between the 1st Edition of Carcosa and the Expurgated Edition. Simply, the Expurgated Edition removes the references to the specifics of the rituals. However, that is not to say that the descriptions in the 1st Edition are actually specific... in fact, they're quite vague and dispassionate. A Carcosan ritual might specify that you cut out a heart or entrails with a knife, or crush the victim's head with a stone, but for those rituals which entail the rape of the victim the text simply says "rape" and leaves it at that. Here is an example to show what is being discussed:
an excerpt from the Serpentine Whispers of the Blue-Litten Pillars: "Six Orange men must be crushed between stone slabs during the ritual. In addition, another sorcerer (whether an apprentice or a colleague) must similarly slay six more Orange men at the same time in another one of the four circles of blue menhirs."
You will not find the quoted lines in the Expurgated edition. In that version, the menhirs are mentioned and it says that another Sorcerer must be at one of the other circles... it doesn't say what he does there.
Although this is not a review of the Expurgated Edition, the difference bears mention. The victims in Carcosan rituals are sometimes men, sometimes women, and sometimes children. None of the sacrifices in a Carcosan ritual probably deserves what happens to him or her, and the concept of violence against innocent women and children always makes us uncomfortable... or at least it should, and if it doesn't you should probably have that looked at. The Expurgated Edition exists so that people don't have to read details like the ones that I quoted above. Though you can see that the "details" are not really detailed at all.
Sometimes, good games come along that actually make an argument about something. Call of Cthulhu was one of those games, and Carcosa is one too, though what they have to say is different. If you recall Call of Cthulhu (henceforth "CoC"), to fight the Mythos you had to look at them visually and sometimes use magic spells against them, both of which reduced your "Sanity"; the lower your Sanity, the greater your degree of alienation from human civilization. Part of the genius of CoC was that, in the end, human civilization was a sham and the horror of the Mythos was fact. So the characters had to struggle against facticity in order to preserve a sham (human civilization) and they would not be able to even enjoy the civilization they were saving (because the struggle made them so alienated). So if human civilization was a sham and impossible for the characters to enjoy, why were they saving it? Why were they fighting against facticity in order to preserve such a remote dream? Because it pleased them... because they found human civilization pleasing. Thus, in the end, the player characters can save human civilization only by becoming exactly like the Great Old Ones themselves: acting unreasonably and in an aesthetic mode, beyond good and evil. CoC is a good game (as a game; I don't agree with its philosophy) and very Nietzschean.
But the genius of CoC is not the genius of Carcosa. Carcosa includes no mechanical representation of alienation, nor any benefit or penalty for engaging in the depraved acts of Mythos sorcery beyond the mere consequence of the spells themselves. The dynamics of reason and aesthetics, humanity and pragmatism, etc. are not explored in the text of Carcosa, though they could of course be explored in your game if that's what you wanted.
Rather, the argument that Carcosa makes is almost satirical in nature: Carcosan men are lab rats. They were created by the Serpent People for use in Mythos rituals, and were even color-coded for snakely convenience. The scientists in the lab (the Serpent People) destroyed themselves with the fruits of their irresponsible activity... but the lab rats remain, and they have now taken over the lab. Rather than abolishing the lab, the strongest of the rats have put on lab coats and taken up where the original scientists left off. That, in this reviewer's opinion, is the argument of Carcosa: when the inmates run the prison, the strongest become the wardens.
Because of the malleability of Carcosa that was mentioned above, this bleak and desolate view of humanity does not have to be definitive. It is a premise of Carcosa, but it does not have to be the final outcome. There is absolutely nothing stopping a Referee from running a campaign of upbeat heroism in Carcosa, where the characters roam about bringing the cruel to justice and setting the ignorant straight. There is nothing that prevents even a Kingian campaign premise: characters could set about to bring the various colors of humanity together to fight genuine evil regardless of their past differences. In Carcosa the races are not interfertile but can otherwise cooperate, if they can get over their superstition and mistrust. There is fertile ground for heroism here, if that's the direction one wants to go. The reviewers own taste runs more toward "moody horror" (despite espousing Kingian philosophy), but again in Carcosa there is room for all of this stuff.
Section two begins with the monsters of Carcosa; these include the Mythos, the lesser associated entities, and novel creations of Mr. McKinney. Monsters range in hit dice from 1-1 up to 60. Of special note are the various spawn of Shub-Niggurath: a series of random tables allows the generation of unique, often incongruous entities complete with special attacks and defenses. No two are likely to be alike.
Following the excellent monster section we have entries for various artifacts and substances. Several varieties of "lotus" are described, all of which are dangerous. There is a long section on Space Alien technology. Projectile weapons are generated through a number of random tables. A Technetium Ray Rifle will not be the same as an X-Ray Pulse Pistol or a fearsome Gamma Radiation Beam Cannon. Like generating characters for Classic Traveller, rolling up bizarre alien ray guns can be an end in itself. Of course the aliens also have a lot of other high tech gear, all detailed so that you can have your Blue barbarian tromping around in power armor if you like.
Of similar interest to the random ray gun tables are the random robot tables, which give all sorts of amusing and deadly results. Again, you could sit down with some polyhedrals and come up with a dozen robots in as many minutes, all of which would baffle or frighten the PCs. There are also rules for attempting to reprogram the robots, which in true Carcosan fashion has an equal chance of turning it into a rampaging killing machine as it does of bringing it under PC control. Cyborgs are also discussed.
There are also sections on the technologies of two lost Mythos races, the Primordial Ones (from At the Mountains of Madness) and the Great Race (from The Shadow Out of Time). Both are still around in Carcosa, but their civilizations are lost. The Primordial One technology is mostly gooshy biotech stuff, and the Great Race focus on mind-boggling conveniences of mastery over space, time and dimension. The latter actually come off as less horrific than most things on Carcosa, since they merely look at humans as curious animals rather than something they want to smash out of arrogant spite.
The third section begins with a table of random mutations, to make sure that you can get your dose of Gamma World and have an excuse for attaching some extra eyeballs and tentacles to the hapless PCs. Given the prevalence of radiation, robots and giant ants on Carcosa, the random mutation table fits right in.
The rest of section three, comprising the last part of the book, is the key to the various hexes on the center leaf hex map. The hex descriptions are short, with a Judge's Guild level of compression. Some of them are not especially interesting, such as "7 Giant Frogs", and merely give you an idea of what can be found tooling around the Carcosan wilderness. Some are more evocative, such as "12 mosasaurs with translucent skin". A number of them describe a human community, often with the florid appellation of the leader, such as "Village of 260 Dolm men ruled by 'the Infinitude of Humility', a neutral Champion". Note the irony! And many more contain absolutely excellent descriptions, such "Here stands the lone tower of an Orange Imprisoner. He seeks solitude. Those who interrupt him can atone for their intrusion by retrieving for him an object from the dead city of the Primordial Ones in hexes 0807 and 0808" or "In the ruined domicile of one of the Snake-Men sorcerers is a stone tablet inscribed with the hieroglyphs revealing the secret of the ritual of the Serpentine Whispers of the Blue-Litten Pillars. It can be mastered in twelve hours." You can simply flip through the hex descriptions and get any number of interesting adventure hooks and ideas.
In all, and to sum up an overly long review, Carcosa is a unique product full of evocative and thought-provoking ideas and elements. It is able to take on whatever particular style and theme that the Referee brings to it, while at the same time remaining that enigmatic mixture that reflects McKinney's sensibility. It rightly stands in the tradition of the original digest supplements, which threw a bunch of strange and new and optional things at you and let you do with them as you chose. And yet there is a certain coherence to the elements of Carcosa presented that make it stand out all the more. Considering the evocative ideas and dense compression of elemental Cool contained within, it is the judgment of this review that Carcosa stands as the best single supplement ever publishied for the original fantasy role-playing game. That this review could be written over six months after its original conception, but with the same enthusiasm, suggests that perhaps Carcosa is destined to be a latter-day classic of the genre.
This is a review of Supplement V: Carcosa, a "Book of Rules Options for the Original Fantasy Role-Playing Game Published in 1974" by Geoffrey McKinney. The book is a private press effort and is available through the author's blog at carcosa-geoffrey.blogspot.com/. This review is of the 1st Edition, October 2008. Currently two editions are available: the 1st Edition and the Expurgated Edition. The differences will discussed below.
The artifact is a digest-sized book of 96 pages; 5 pages are intentionally blank. The center leaf is a hand-drawn hex map of the quadrant of the campaign world which Supplement V: Carcosa (hereafter, "Carcosa") describes. The cover is textured cardstock and is dominated by an evocative skyline of the eponymous ghost city, drawn by the author and the only piece of visual art in the book. The interior formatting of the book is clean and excellent; the presentation is necessarily dense due to the amount of information the author chose to include. Ample use of spacing, bold text and underlines make the information and tables easy to read.
Carcosa is difficult to describe because the work itself provides, as it advertises on the front, "rules options". That is not to say that there is no setting... in fact, one could argue that the book is almost entirely setting information. The issue is that Carcosa is at the same time something definite and something open-ended. In one respect, there's no denying that Carcosa is a unique product in itself, due to the strange alchemy of the elements it includes. To elaborate, Carcosa is an alien planet. On this planet, which is one of harsh climes and terrifying monsters, thirteen distinct races of mankind dwell, each a different color. Some of the Carcosan colors do not even exist in the terrestrial spectrum: Carcosa is a place of alien physics as well as alien beings. The slimy pantheon of Lovecraft and Derleth physically inhabit Carcosa, as do many other squamous monstrosities of similar type. Carcosa is also a place of dinosaurs (Order: Kirbyensis), space aliens (like from New Mexico and the History Channel), ray guns, robots, riding lizards, deadly fungus, science and sorcery. In a sense, it is all the cool stuff from weird fantasy thrown together... except that it isn't "thrown together". It all sits rather well together, and strikes the review more as an alchemical potion and less as a mere bricolage.
On the other hand, and it is in this that Carcosa defies a certain sort of definition, part of the virtue of Carcosa is that it is presented as a lump of sculptor's clay, able to receive any of a certain range of forms which the user might choose to impress upon it. It could be a game of fantasy horror, in the style of Derleth or the style of Smith (both very different). It could be a game of heroic (or self-interested) derring-do in the style of Howard. It could be Thundarr the Barbarian or the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath or King Kong or Zothique. It could be Ambient or Metal or Schoenberg. McKinney gives you a world of these various elements, but does not attempt to tell you what to do with them. I expect that any given Carcosa campaign will be as much a reflection of the interests of the Referee as it will be of the text; this appears to be the intention of the work.
The first piece of content is a poem from Robert W. Chambers, the originator of the concept of lost Carcosa. We then have the Table of Contents.
The rest of the book follows the general division of the original three digest books: the first part is about characters and spells, the second part about monsters and artifacts, and the third part is about adventures above and below ground. The first part begins with a new character class: the Sorcerer. There are only two classes in Carcosa: Fighting Men and Sorcerers. They differ only in two ways: Sorcerers can use Sorcery (ritual magic) and have a more rigorous XP advancement table than Fighting Men. In other words, Sorcerers are Fighting Men who can also use spells, and pay a level advancement penalty for it.
So the Sorcerers of Carcosa can wear armor if they choose, and use whatever weapons they choose. They do not encompass magic spells in Vancian style, and Carcosan magic does not directly concern combat or utility effects. In fact, all Carcosan magic concerns dealing with entities of the Cthulhu Mythos (both the usual suspects and new entities specific to the Carcosan setting).
The spells of Carcosa conjure Mythos entities, and can also bind them, contact them, imprison them, torment them and banish them. However, the entities in question get a Saving Throw against all of these things except the actual conjuration, and Cthulhu has lots of hit dice... draw your own conclusions about what happens next.
A Sorcerer's level can impose a penalty on the entity's Saving Throw, so higher level Sorcerers are better at subduing and controlling the Mythos. Rituals can also age the caster unnaturally. Plus, sometimes rituals are defective or have other complications.
Next up, we have a short description of the thirteen races that inhabit Carcosa. Each race is dramatically colored; a green man is actually green (like terrestrial grass or one of Captain Kirk's girlfriends), etc. Several colors (ulfire, dolm and jale) do not exist in the terrestrial spectrum and are described analogically. The races do not generally trust one another... more on that later.
Alignment is a system of "party affiliation". It has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. Rather, Lawfuls oppose the Great Old Ones (Cthulhu and his cronies), Chaotics serve the Great Old Ones and Neutrals try to avoid being burnt alive or sacrificed by the previous two groups; whereas if a Lawful saw a Great Old One he would fight it, and if a Chaotic saw one he would do its bidding, a Neutral would get the heck out of Dodge. Which makes the Lawfuls sound pretty good, until you realize that a given Lawful could be Vlad the Impaler as easily as he could be Mother Teresa... there is no practical moral component, it is merely a question of which team you're on.
Next we get the Carcosa system for Psionics. This is one of the things that anybody, even someone not interested in playing on Carcosa itself, could use. This is quite simply the best system for Psionics that reviewer has seen for D&D. It's main virtue is that it is actually intelligible. It's also simple: based on your Int, Wis and Cha, you have a % chance of being able to use Psionics. The number of uses (shots) you get per day is based on your level. The number of powers you have to choose from on a given day is determined by a 1d4 roll. There are 8 powers in all. So if you're psionic, you first roll a d4 in the morning to see how many powers you get that day. Then you roll a d8 that many times to see which ones you get that day. Each of the powers is simple... things like Clairvoyance, ESP, etc. Many of them directly mimic spells from the original edition. The attack power, Mental Blast, is potent in that it deals 3 dice of damage.
As you will see in a moment, Carcosa likes randomness. Every die roll in Carcosa is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to roll. Whereas the original edition mostly just used the d20 and the d6, Carcosa uses all the polyhedrals. However, it never specifies die type. It just says things like "3 dice of damage". So how do you know what kind of dice to roll?
The answer is that you roll a d10 (or you could do it as a d5) to select one of the five die types: d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12. Then you roll that die type for your roll. So some days your psionic character may have Mental Blast; that's your lucky day. On a given use of Mental Blast (your only use if you're a low level type), you may be doing d4 damage or d12.
This applies to virtually everything in Carcosa, not just Psionics. As the author notes, some days Cthulhu has to roll d4s for his hit dice, and sometimes the peasant's pitch fork hits for d12 damage (ouch!). If it sounds a bit gonzo, perhaps it is. It's also the newest old schoolism the review has seen in a while.
Hit dice are explained and work in an interesting way. At the start of combat, you roll your hit dice. So a 4th level Hero, like we all expect, will roll 4 dice. Which dice? See above... it could be d12s or d8s or whatever. Have lots of polyhedrals on hand for this campaign. And yes, you roll your "hit points" at the start of every combat. But you don't add them up... when you take damage, you take damage to the dice themselves, starting with the highest. What is interesting about this is that if the combat results only in minor scratches for you (your highest die was reduced but not removed) then you are effectively undamaged by the combat... it really was just a scratch. When you are actually being hurt is when dice are removed because they are reduced to 0. For example, our Hero rolls a d10 and gets a 3, which means he rolls d6s this combat. He rolls a 5, a 4 and two 3s. He is then hit for 4 points of damage. His '5' die becomes a 1. If hit again, this time for 5 damage, his 4 die is removed and one of the 3s becomes a 2. At this point, he is so wounded that he is down 1 hit die. They heal up at the rate of 2 dice per week!
One nice thing about this system is that it reduces bookkeeping. You don't need to constantly adjust your HP up and down; you just remember how many hit dice you have for your level and how many you are down. There are a couple added complications, but it's very straightforward.
Next we have the Sorcerous Rituals. These are the magic spells of Carcosa. Virtually all of them are a pain to cast in some way: either there is an elaborate sacrifice to stage, there is only one place on the whole map where the spell can be cast (probably a dangerous, adventurous place), the spell requires you to Save or die, the spell requires you to be covered by a yucky monster, etc. The banishing rituals, meant to send away the Great Old Ones, are the only ones that are not outright evil. The other rituals, which involve summoning the Great Old Ones, binding them to your will, imprisoning them someplace they don't like, contacting them for a chat or torturing them so that they do your bidding, all involve some form of human sacrifice. Carcosan Sorcerers who seek to do more than simply drive away the Great Old Ones (and you could be a Lawful Sorcerer who only uses banishments) will have to do some pretty horrible things to innocent people. For this reason, Carcosan Sorcerers make excellent villains in the style of Howard's Hyboria. They really are out to sacrifice virgins and summon ghoulish monsters with which to terrorize the local communities.
It is in regards to the ritual descriptions that we have the difference between the 1st Edition of Carcosa and the Expurgated Edition. Simply, the Expurgated Edition removes the references to the specifics of the rituals. However, that is not to say that the descriptions in the 1st Edition are actually specific... in fact, they're quite vague and dispassionate. A Carcosan ritual might specify that you cut out a heart or entrails with a knife, or crush the victim's head with a stone, but for those rituals which entail the rape of the victim the text simply says "rape" and leaves it at that. Here is an example to show what is being discussed:
an excerpt from the Serpentine Whispers of the Blue-Litten Pillars: "Six Orange men must be crushed between stone slabs during the ritual. In addition, another sorcerer (whether an apprentice or a colleague) must similarly slay six more Orange men at the same time in another one of the four circles of blue menhirs."
You will not find the quoted lines in the Expurgated edition. In that version, the menhirs are mentioned and it says that another Sorcerer must be at one of the other circles... it doesn't say what he does there.
Although this is not a review of the Expurgated Edition, the difference bears mention. The victims in Carcosan rituals are sometimes men, sometimes women, and sometimes children. None of the sacrifices in a Carcosan ritual probably deserves what happens to him or her, and the concept of violence against innocent women and children always makes us uncomfortable... or at least it should, and if it doesn't you should probably have that looked at. The Expurgated Edition exists so that people don't have to read details like the ones that I quoted above. Though you can see that the "details" are not really detailed at all.
Sometimes, good games come along that actually make an argument about something. Call of Cthulhu was one of those games, and Carcosa is one too, though what they have to say is different. If you recall Call of Cthulhu (henceforth "CoC"), to fight the Mythos you had to look at them visually and sometimes use magic spells against them, both of which reduced your "Sanity"; the lower your Sanity, the greater your degree of alienation from human civilization. Part of the genius of CoC was that, in the end, human civilization was a sham and the horror of the Mythos was fact. So the characters had to struggle against facticity in order to preserve a sham (human civilization) and they would not be able to even enjoy the civilization they were saving (because the struggle made them so alienated). So if human civilization was a sham and impossible for the characters to enjoy, why were they saving it? Why were they fighting against facticity in order to preserve such a remote dream? Because it pleased them... because they found human civilization pleasing. Thus, in the end, the player characters can save human civilization only by becoming exactly like the Great Old Ones themselves: acting unreasonably and in an aesthetic mode, beyond good and evil. CoC is a good game (as a game; I don't agree with its philosophy) and very Nietzschean.
But the genius of CoC is not the genius of Carcosa. Carcosa includes no mechanical representation of alienation, nor any benefit or penalty for engaging in the depraved acts of Mythos sorcery beyond the mere consequence of the spells themselves. The dynamics of reason and aesthetics, humanity and pragmatism, etc. are not explored in the text of Carcosa, though they could of course be explored in your game if that's what you wanted.
Rather, the argument that Carcosa makes is almost satirical in nature: Carcosan men are lab rats. They were created by the Serpent People for use in Mythos rituals, and were even color-coded for snakely convenience. The scientists in the lab (the Serpent People) destroyed themselves with the fruits of their irresponsible activity... but the lab rats remain, and they have now taken over the lab. Rather than abolishing the lab, the strongest of the rats have put on lab coats and taken up where the original scientists left off. That, in this reviewer's opinion, is the argument of Carcosa: when the inmates run the prison, the strongest become the wardens.
Because of the malleability of Carcosa that was mentioned above, this bleak and desolate view of humanity does not have to be definitive. It is a premise of Carcosa, but it does not have to be the final outcome. There is absolutely nothing stopping a Referee from running a campaign of upbeat heroism in Carcosa, where the characters roam about bringing the cruel to justice and setting the ignorant straight. There is nothing that prevents even a Kingian campaign premise: characters could set about to bring the various colors of humanity together to fight genuine evil regardless of their past differences. In Carcosa the races are not interfertile but can otherwise cooperate, if they can get over their superstition and mistrust. There is fertile ground for heroism here, if that's the direction one wants to go. The reviewers own taste runs more toward "moody horror" (despite espousing Kingian philosophy), but again in Carcosa there is room for all of this stuff.
Section two begins with the monsters of Carcosa; these include the Mythos, the lesser associated entities, and novel creations of Mr. McKinney. Monsters range in hit dice from 1-1 up to 60. Of special note are the various spawn of Shub-Niggurath: a series of random tables allows the generation of unique, often incongruous entities complete with special attacks and defenses. No two are likely to be alike.
Following the excellent monster section we have entries for various artifacts and substances. Several varieties of "lotus" are described, all of which are dangerous. There is a long section on Space Alien technology. Projectile weapons are generated through a number of random tables. A Technetium Ray Rifle will not be the same as an X-Ray Pulse Pistol or a fearsome Gamma Radiation Beam Cannon. Like generating characters for Classic Traveller, rolling up bizarre alien ray guns can be an end in itself. Of course the aliens also have a lot of other high tech gear, all detailed so that you can have your Blue barbarian tromping around in power armor if you like.
Of similar interest to the random ray gun tables are the random robot tables, which give all sorts of amusing and deadly results. Again, you could sit down with some polyhedrals and come up with a dozen robots in as many minutes, all of which would baffle or frighten the PCs. There are also rules for attempting to reprogram the robots, which in true Carcosan fashion has an equal chance of turning it into a rampaging killing machine as it does of bringing it under PC control. Cyborgs are also discussed.
There are also sections on the technologies of two lost Mythos races, the Primordial Ones (from At the Mountains of Madness) and the Great Race (from The Shadow Out of Time). Both are still around in Carcosa, but their civilizations are lost. The Primordial One technology is mostly gooshy biotech stuff, and the Great Race focus on mind-boggling conveniences of mastery over space, time and dimension. The latter actually come off as less horrific than most things on Carcosa, since they merely look at humans as curious animals rather than something they want to smash out of arrogant spite.
The third section begins with a table of random mutations, to make sure that you can get your dose of Gamma World and have an excuse for attaching some extra eyeballs and tentacles to the hapless PCs. Given the prevalence of radiation, robots and giant ants on Carcosa, the random mutation table fits right in.
The rest of section three, comprising the last part of the book, is the key to the various hexes on the center leaf hex map. The hex descriptions are short, with a Judge's Guild level of compression. Some of them are not especially interesting, such as "7 Giant Frogs", and merely give you an idea of what can be found tooling around the Carcosan wilderness. Some are more evocative, such as "12 mosasaurs with translucent skin". A number of them describe a human community, often with the florid appellation of the leader, such as "Village of 260 Dolm men ruled by 'the Infinitude of Humility', a neutral Champion". Note the irony! And many more contain absolutely excellent descriptions, such "Here stands the lone tower of an Orange Imprisoner. He seeks solitude. Those who interrupt him can atone for their intrusion by retrieving for him an object from the dead city of the Primordial Ones in hexes 0807 and 0808" or "In the ruined domicile of one of the Snake-Men sorcerers is a stone tablet inscribed with the hieroglyphs revealing the secret of the ritual of the Serpentine Whispers of the Blue-Litten Pillars. It can be mastered in twelve hours." You can simply flip through the hex descriptions and get any number of interesting adventure hooks and ideas.
In all, and to sum up an overly long review, Carcosa is a unique product full of evocative and thought-provoking ideas and elements. It is able to take on whatever particular style and theme that the Referee brings to it, while at the same time remaining that enigmatic mixture that reflects McKinney's sensibility. It rightly stands in the tradition of the original digest supplements, which threw a bunch of strange and new and optional things at you and let you do with them as you chose. And yet there is a certain coherence to the elements of Carcosa presented that make it stand out all the more. Considering the evocative ideas and dense compression of elemental Cool contained within, it is the judgment of this review that Carcosa stands as the best single supplement ever publishied for the original fantasy role-playing game. That this review could be written over six months after its original conception, but with the same enthusiasm, suggests that perhaps Carcosa is destined to be a latter-day classic of the genre.
