The McKinney Interview Part II: Carcosa

What Went Wrong: A Carcosa Character Generation Supplement

Jeff Rients put it together. And he put that togethered thing here.

I'm a bit concerned about risking LotFP's good name by associating it with such a profanity-laced document, but hopefully damage control won't be too difficult.

"The most beautiful RPG book I have ever seen or, equally importantly, held"

Yeah, that quote is about Carcosa.

Read all about it here.

Frowny Face and Happy Face Reviews

RPGnet review of Carcosa isn't very happy.

Aventuras en la Marca del Este has a happier Isle of the Unknown photo review.

Carcosa is "The Best of the Best This Year"

Don't take my word for it, go read the review here. Lots of pictures. (see a translated version of the review here)

Also, a new review of the Isle of the Unknown.

Carcosa Reviews

The Alexandrian
All Games Considered 
Aventuras en la Marca del Este (English translation by Google Translate)
...and the sky full of dust
Armchair Gamer
City of Iron
Compromise and Conceit
The Dice are a Lie
Diehard GameFAN Part I and Part II
Dreams in the Lich House
Geeky & Genki
Gnome Stew
Grognardia
Grumpy RPG Reviews
How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying
In Places Deep
Kill It With Fire!
Lost in Time One Two
Nerdcaliber
No School Like the Old School
Poltergeist (Polish)
Rollenspiel Almanach
RPG.net
Samwise7RPG Youtube Review  and Part II by azirk93 
Save vs Total Party Kill
Silver Lodge
Skull Crushing for Great Justice
Stargazer's World
Suvudu
Take on Rules
Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Part I and Part II   
Tenkar's Tavern Part 1
Untimately
Worlds in a Handful of Dice

Interviews:

Atomic Array
Terceira Terra 
Save or Die

Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown Now on Sale in Print and PDF

Carcosa

Weird Science-Fantasy Horror Setting. 288 A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes free with a print order) is an absolute state-of-the-art example of PDF technology, with extensive links, layers, and bookmarking. Click around on the maps.

Isle of the Unknown

Island hexcrawl full of the strange and unusual, suitable for any fantasy campaign. 128 page A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes with a print order) isn't quite state-of-the-art with the interior cross-linking as Carcosa, is fully bookmarked and layered.

Extras

Both Isle and Carcosa have optional add-ons. 250 of these are available for each book. Each book comes with an A4 sized map printed on canvas-like material and a double-sided full color A3 poster (both sides of the individual posters are shown in the pics here). Extras for each book are 5€ each. They are added by default, so toggle it to "No" if you don't want them. But you want them.

Discount Offer 1

Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society members get 2€ off the print versions of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown as long as there are extras left for each book. When the extras run out, the discount is reduced to 1€ per book (the same discount Gardening Society members get on all print products in the LotFP store).

Discount Offer 2

Missed out on the Grindhouse Edition? If you buy at least 50€ worth of stuff from the LotFP store (say, the new Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown books), coupon code ULFIRE will get you a 12,50€ discount off the Grindhouse box.

The LotFP Webstore

BONUS

The Euro is in the crapper right now, so all of you non-Euro currency people can enjoy the best exchange rate in quite some time...!

(finally, right?)

Carcosa Cover - Problem and Solution

Just got the Carcosa cover samples that were sent Thursday.

Two notes: The green moon and stars will be a part of the cover, they just aren't part of these samples. And if these covers are accurate, this book will be a slight touch thicker than the Grindhouse box.

Anyway... I was told at the beginning of last week that delivery of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown would happen today, the 5th. But on Thursday I was alerted to a problem...

It seems the metallic foil wasn't bonding to the cover material. In this first pic, you can see what we were going for, and how the problems would make the book unworthy of being sold:

The printer even tested pressing a different foil underneath first, hoping the metallic foil would stick to that. The results were better, but not near good enough:

Their suggested fix was the following material:

The printer says this has bonded as it is supposed to, and I've just thumbed it fairly vigorously and it's on there tight. You're going to have to abuse the book a bit to get that to start peeling, I think.

Note that aside from the added green foil (which will likewise now be non-metallic), this is the cover. No title, no marketing blah blah. There will be a thin b&w wrap with all that jazz so it's identifiable on a store shelf (and in distributor warehouses!).

(note that the cover silhouette, in addition to echoing the original edition's, is the same image as the book's frontispiece, seen here.)

This situation might be a happy accident. My intention for the book was to look fancy-dignified, not fancy-gaudy (or at all like a typical RPG book for that matter). Using the metallic foil was shinier and perhaps "more sci-fi," but maybe it was a bit too much flash.

Everything might be delivered at the end of this week, or perhaps the very beginning of next. phew.

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa PDF Previews

Carcosa preview.

Isle of the Unknown preview.

There is a problem with the Carcosa cover at the printer, apparently the metallic foil isn't bonding well to the cover material. They are sending me a sample of their recommended fix (a different foil I believe), but it didn't arrive today. Independence Day is on Tuesday so even if it shows up Monday, arrrgggghhhhh delays.

(Isle and Carcosa are to be delivered at the same time so a delay on one is a delay for both)

Carcosa: What Is It?

Men of 13 Races fight for life and power, ignorant of their common past.

When other tools fail, Foul Sorcery is wielded without compunction.

Enigmatic and inhuman Space Aliens have crash-landed on the world.

Psionic Warriors turn the tables on the uncaring Great Old Ones with Strange Technology from the stars and beyond time’s provenance, risking Blasphemous Madness and worse to tame the Hostile Planet and push back the darkness... for a time.

CARCOSA is a weird science-fantasy horror setting compatible with traditional fantasy role-playing games. It includes:

• a new character class: the Sorcerer who summons and controls Cthulhoid entities
• a new form of magic, including 96 sorcerous rituals
• an easy-to-use psionics system
• dice conventions
• dozens of new monsters
• tables for the random generation of spawn of Shub-Niggurath
• 5 colors of the desert lotus
• countless high-tech weapons and items of the Space Aliens
• Random Robot Generator
• technological artifacts of the Great Race and of the Primordial Ones
• mutations
• 800 encounters on an outdoor hex map with an area of 34,880 square miles
• the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer introductory adventure
• and more, all extensively cross-referenced and indexed!

Carcosa was originally released as a homemade 96 page booklet in October 2008, intended as Supplement V to the "original fantasy role-playing game published in 1974." This new printing is thoroughly reorganized and expanded and illustrated, no longer claims a direct tie to that game, and is presented in a 288 page deluxe hardcover format.

Here are some reviews for the original Carcosa release:
Dragonsfoot reviews by Korgoth, Melan, Spinachat
Grognardia Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Jeff's Gameblog
Some King's Kent

When Carcosa was released in 2008, it quickly became the controversial topic in old school gaming. As a fan I think the controversy was rather ridiculous (not liking it, fine, not buying it because of such content, fine, being outraged by a wholly fictional work to the point where you insult the writer and rage against those who weren't themselves outraged is silly), but even today people verbal take shots at the author in passing (and the book's been out of print for over a year!) so I think a thorough discussion of the portions of the book causing the controversy is in order.

The controversy is due to I believe just four rituals (out of 96 rituals, all of which take up 33 pages in a 288 page book - 18 out of 96 pages in the original edition) in the book, all dealing with dry descriptions of torture.

My own feeling about this is that these ritual descriptions are, if not absolutely essential, then at least overwhelmingly effective at communicating the absolute horrific and alien nature of Carcosa more than all the laser guns and mutant dinosaurs. It makes sorcery forbidden and dangerous in a way we're always told it should be in genre fiction and gaming flavor text, but never seems to be during actual play. It takes the perhaps too-familiar Lovecraftian bestiary and marries it to a magic system that many find beyond the pale. It is, in most situations, unspeakable.

They are not integral parts of play (refs and players must actively choose to make them part of their games), the text does not glorify or condone the acts either in the game or in real life, and nothing suggests that anyone should do these things or be OK with others doing them in real life.

As the publisher of the new version of Carcosa, I realize this will cost me some sales. But that's OK. Carcosa is not for everyone. Nothing is for everyone. Better to stand by the author's vision and intent than censor it or water it down scrounging for every last possible sale.

While I don't believe these disclaimers and warnings will prevent the controversy from flaring up again (argument and outrage pretty much dominated every single discussion about it a few years ago - which is why I spend so much time on it here), I can at least do what I can to get the word out to make sure that people who really would be truly bothered by this sort of thing don't spend their money on it.

Carcosa is the real deal, fearlessly imaginative, with everything dialed up to 11. The wondrous and fantastic, as well as the icky stuff.

Unsure if it would be distressing to you? Here are the author's own words about the whys and wherefores of Carcosa sorcery, including the text of the ritual that caused the most outrage:

Why Carcosan Sorcery Is the Way It Is

Carcosa will not be to everyone’s taste. I certainly have no quarrel with anyone who does not buy it. This post is to explain why I included the level of detail regarding the human sacrifice necessary for most sorcerous rituals on Carcosa.

Carcosan Sorcery is literally INHUMAN.

Humans did not create sorcery. The Snake-Men did. The (now thankfully extinct) Snake-Men originated tens of millions of years before man. These ophidian beings were not only literally cold-blooded, but they were also without emotion or pity. Imagine the eyes of a snake endowed with calculating intelligence, but no conscience whatsoever. These intelligent and amoral beings deeply studied the arcane aspects of existence, and in so doing discovered that a certain measure of control could be exerted over the very powerful Cthulhoid beings infesting both the world of Carcosa and the universe. This control could best be achieved with bloodshed. Snake-Men sorcerers, over countless millennia, honed and perfected their sorcerous arts. This included breeding the sub-human man-apes into the thirteen races of men, so as to be the most efficacious of sacrifices.

The Snake-Men subjected these hapless humans to the most horrific and degrading of fates in pursuit of sorcerous power. So please note: Carcosan sorcery (with its human sacrifice, rape, and torture) was created by an inhuman race that regarded us as we regard laboratory rats. The Snake-Men had as much sympathy for a human baby being sacrificed as we do for our veal dinner.

There is a grim justice in the ultimate fate of the Snake-Men: “At the height of their powers, the Snake-Men destroyed themselves by releasing ultratelluric forces impossible to control” (p. 111 of the expanded Carcosa book). In short, the Snake-Men paid for their sins. They were destroyed by their own sorcery.

Most Carcosan Sorcerers are EVIL.

In swords & sorcery literature, most sorcerers are evil. That is also true on Carcosa. Most sorcerers are reprehensible, disgusting, shocking, cruel, perverse, etc. Only a very few are otherwise, and they generally limit themselves only to the rituals of banishing (which do not require human sacrifice).

“Sorcerers Never Prosper,” or “Sorcery Doesn’t Pay”

The dangers inherent in sorcery are such that precious few sorcerers live to a ripe old age. Most eventually get destroyed by the Cthulhoid entities they conjure and/or attempt to control. Like the Snake-Men, sorcerers pay for their sins. And what the Cthulhoid entities do to sorcerers is a lot more painful than what sorcerers do to their sacrifices.

“So how can I use this kind of sorcery with explicit violence in a game?”

The explicit details can serve these two functions:

They make sorcerers GREAT villains for the player characters to slay. As a player I find it so much more satisfying to slay “the sorcerer who raped and killed adolescents” than to slay “the sorcerer who did some very bad things (details undisclosed)”.
They make PC sorcerers think twice before performing a sorcerous ritual. Several times in my Carcosa campaign, a PC sorcerer would be researching how to (for example) bind a certain Cthulhoid entity, and upon finding out the inhuman things required, DECIDED TO CEASE HIS RESEARCH. (“That price is too high.”) Many players will balk at sacrificing human NPCs when faces are put upon those NPCs, and when horrific details are given for what has to be done to those NPCs. Many players will refuse for their characters to kidnap an 11-year-old White virgin, rape her, and slay her. However, if the requirements of the ritual were vaguely worded (“requires one human sacrifice to be tormented and slain”), fewer players would balk. If the descriptions of the sorcery in Carcosa were less explicit, player character sorcerers would be more likely to engage in human sacrifice. The explicit language actually reduces (though it does not eliminate) the frequency of PCs sacrificing humans.

“Just How Explicit Is the Book, Really?”

M. A. R. Barker’s The Book of Ebon Bindings (published in 1978) was my model. Prof. Barker’s book is full of unflinching, clinical detail of human sacrifice, torture, and rape. Neither his book nor mine has the attitude of “Kewl! Blood and sex! Yeah!” Let us compare two passages from each work:

From the section on how to summon Gereshma'a, He of the Mound of Skulls (pp. 28-29 of The Book of Ebon Bindings): "In each of these three spaces let sacrifices be bound: in the northern pentagon a male human, in the western a female, and in the eastern an infant of not more than seven years...Then shall the evocator praise the Demon Lord and make the sacrifices. The infant shall be held head downward, and its belly shall be slit with the Ku'nur [the jag-edged sacrificial knife of the temple of Sarku]. When the blood is drained, the body shall be flung outside the diagramme."

From the ritual of The Primal Name of the Worm (p. 65 of the expanded Carcosa): “This one-hour ritual requires the sorcerer to stand in cold, waist-deep water and to there drown a Jale male baby. He must rend the corpse with his own hands and spill the blood upon a stone taken from the phosphorescent cave in hex 0607.”

From the section on how to summon Ka'ing (p. 66 of The Book of Ebon Bindings): "[T]wo of the evocators shall go to a female sacrifice, and while one engages in sexual congress with her, the other will slay her with a garrote made from her own hair. Then the other female sacrifice shall be treated in the same wise, and thereafter two female evocators shall perform the same act with the two male sacrifices, save that the garrotes shall be of the hair of the evocatresses instead."

From the ritual of Summon the Amphibious Ones (p. 70 of the expanded Carcosa): “This eleven-hour ritual can be completed only on a fog-shrouded night. The sorcerer must obtain the root of potency found only in ruined apothecaries of the Snake-Men. The sacrifice is a virgin White girl eleven years old with long hair. The sorcerer, after partaking of the root, must engage in sexual congress with the sacrifice eleven times, afterwards strangling her with her own hair. As her life leaves her body, 10-100 of the Amphibious Ones will coalesce out of the mists.”

As one can see, the level of detail and its clinical character is very similar in The Book of Ebon Bindings and in Carcosa. If Carcosa “crosses a line,” then it merely crosses a line that was already crossed 30 years earlier by The Book of Ebon Bindings. I regard M. A. R. Barker as one of the Five Great Men of FRPGs (along with Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Bob Bledsaw, and David Hargrave). Prof. Barker’s credentials are impeccable. I am confident that I am on safe and appropriate ground when I use his publications as a guide.

In the end, it’s all merely a game, fantasy, and words on paper. None of it is real.

So if reading descriptions of imaginary aliens doing horrible things to other made-up aliens on a planet 153 light years away from Earth for the purpose of influencing fictional slime/tentacle monsters is truly distressing to you, do not buy Carcosa.

(A final note: By request, a month after its original release, Carcosa was also made available in an expurgated edition, removing the most-complained about elements from the book. After the outcry and the requests for such a thing, after all was said and done after two years of the original edition being on sale in both versions, less than 15% of the book's total sales, including print and PDF, were for the expurgated version. LotFP will not be publishing an expurgated version.)

Get ready everyone... it's going to be another interesting ride.

Any other questions you have about Carcosa?

This Carcosa PDF is Something Else

Holy crap.

Just saw the latest version of the Carcosa PDF.

The book itself is extensively cross-referenced, has a proper index, etc.

The PDF takes all of that and links it within the document.

More than that, Eero (design/layout guy for the project) linked every hex on the maps (and the room numbers of the Fungoid Gardens map) so clicking on it goes straight to the entry in the body of the book.

Not that I look at all that many gaming PDFs, but this one is Pretty Damn Spiffy.

The PDF is included in the price of the printed book, and for those not wanting the physical book, the PDF will be available as a stand-alone product on December 11.

Isle & Carcosa Extras

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa will each have as extras the cloth map (discussed yesterday) and a double-sided full color A3 mini-poster. 250 copies of each will be available. (contributors get copies as well - 260 of each will be printed total).

The extras will cost 5€ each, and they are optional. But once they're gone, they are gone...

Note that in each pic, two copies of the poster have been laid down to show you what's on both sides.

Isle of the Unknown's poster has the keyed map on one side and an expanded print of Cynthia Sheppard's cover. The original plan involved a dust jacket and it wasn't until the last minute that we decided not to have one, but Cynthia had already completed the larger piece. We haven't told her yet...

Carcosa's poster has Jeff Rients' Periodic Table of Carcosa on one side (redesigned because the original wasn't in high enough resolution for this printing) and on the other a map of Carcosa keyed with relevant locations involved with the sorcerous rituals. Amos Orion Sterns had made a rough of this on his own after the first edition of Carcosa was released, and Geoffrey and I went nuts after seeing it. We really couldn't fit it in the book, but we knew we had to do something with it, so we had Amos tighten up the design and here it is as a limited edition extra.

Oh, my store software won't let me apply the Gardening Society discount to the extras, so Gardening Society members will get 2€ off Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, even if not ordering the extras. After the extras sell out, the discount will go back to the usual 1€ off.

That means if intend to buy both, you could sign up for the Gardening Society today for 10€ and be saving 4€ next week - and membership gives you 1€ off every print product in the store, always, so you could theoretically turn around and save more money than the cost of membership right away. And you get a kickass membership card!

(figured if I was going to promote something I might as well be completely shameless, right? :D)

Details on Gardening Society membership here.

A Look at the Isle and Carcosa Maps!

Just got the proofs in for the cloth map extras I'll be offering when the books go on sale next week. These maps will be printed in the appropriate book's endpapers, but I thought it would be good to offer stand-alone maps as well.

I originally planned on doing them in the soft-cloth Ultima style. But those aren't good for a lot of detail, because the ink bleeds too much on that material, and I wanted the hex numbers to show up on these maps. They're perfect for player maps, I think. (hexcrawl exploration purists are going to lynch me for that one, aren't they?) This next shot was supposed to show off the material - it's a soft canvas-like fabric, but the texture of the back of the map didn't show up too well... but you can see a bit more detail on the maps themselves so why not.

The Mayan Calendar Is Wrong... The Universe Ends December 2011... CARCOSA IS AT THE PRINTER!

It's done. At the printer. Coming early December 2011.

Hardcover (thread-sewn binding) with a foil-stamped cover, 288 A5 pages, beautifully designed, generously illustrated... you will bow down in AWE of this thing.

And it's not just going to be a pretty physical item. It's been expanded, reorganized, extensively cross-referenced and indexed. Seriously, Eero Tuovinen has been a damn SUPERHERO preparing this book and making sure it's a thing of both beauty and utility.

I am so excited about this, not only in being able to re-release Carcosa and get it out to a wider audience, but in sparing no expense in making sure it was released in a format that did its contents justice.

Carcosa is a big fucking deal to me. It was the first thing that showed me that this whole old school thing was not only about reclaiming the respect and fan base and not being treated like backward morons for the games we like to play, but that we were going to surge forward and be more than a shadow of days gone by.

The Carcosa controversy was raging when I had the first date with the woman who became my wife. Poor girl had to deal with me taking Carcosa out at the restaurant and ranting to her about how awful and small-minded a lot of people were and that this thing was awesome and those people were wrong!

I feel so excited that this thing is out the door. So full of energy, like this is a weapon that will conquer the world and beyond.

I can't wait to show this thing to you all.

Goddamn I have the best job in the world.

Carcosa Will Give Me a Heart Attack

Days away from the print date for Carcosa.

... the artist has been out of touch for almost a week, with four pieces of art still to turn in. He was one of the people who lost power during that big New England snowstorm last weekend. This week has been stressful, to say the least.

But he's now he's borrowed a generator and is uploading the needed files. Nothing like getting everything done at the last minute. :D

One of the pieces is the cover. Here is Carcosa's frontispiece, with the cover being a silhouette of this to call back to the cover of the first edition:

Suddenly, We Have a Deadline

I need to get things to the printer on Nov 7 in order for them to be out this year.

The plan is to get Carcosa and Isle to the printer (these have taken long enough...!), have them back around the first of December and ready to order and ship.

Carcosa will be 288 pages, deluxe hardcover (foil embossing on the cover, about 40 pages of art inside), going to be 3cm thick, looking at 30€-32,50€ on the price for these.

Isle of the Unknown will be a 128 page hardcover, full color throughout, tons of art. Looking at 20€ - 25€ for the price here depending on how we work some things.

Once the books are off to the printer I can concentrate on showing real previews that'll show some content and how the presentation will look.

Working on giving both limited edition (250) extras. The idea for Carcosa is a cloth map and a double-sided poster, both full color. Cloth map for the Isle, looking into other extras for that as well. Don't think I can offer the cloth maps for FREE, but we'll see closer to the time.

I do believe things will shake out so that there is the same shipping cost for ordering both as there would be for just ordering Carcosa (no difference between the price for a 501g shipment and a 999g shipment in the Finnish postal system)... but I won't know for sure until they return from the printer so no pre-orders... they go on sale when they arrive.

Looks like Monolith and then hopefully a flood of smaller (and cheaper!) adventure stuff for 2012. The only big-ticket item I have on the schedule right now for 2012 is Exquisite Corpses - Poag is still working on it.

The Carcosa Problem: The Haves and the Have Nots... or, Humans Are Not Cool

When I got the original edition of Carcosa back in 2008, the view I had of the setting was one of primitive man armed with sword and vile sorcery making its way in a cruel, cruel world.

There were pages and pages of ray guns and technological marvels and all the things the Space Aliens, Great Race, and Primordial Ones have made.

Mentally I treated those things the same way I did most of the magic items and high level spells in D&D - almost background noise, stuff that I suppose is in the setting, somewhere, but nothing that will ever show up in a normal campaign.

But that's not right, is it?

Carcosa's Old Ones are meant to be interacted with, meant to be battled. That's why there are all those rituals, that's why the "gods" have combat stats, that's why there are all these rocket launchers and power armor, that's why there are these strange dice procedures... This isn't traditional D&D where you eyeball the monster HD and the PC levels and estimate how things might go.

And on a pure in-setting level, you have all these advanced races that ruled the world for aeons, most of them are still around here and there. There's a lot of this stuff to be found.

I think to decide that the PCs won't ever really take on Cthulhu, or that they shouldn't ever drive a tank, or that the rituals should be assumed to only be used by NPCs removes a little bit about what makes Carcosa special. It's making sane what was clearly designed to be utterly insane.

But humans are primitive on Carcosa. They can't make any of this cool stuff on their own.

To me this creates a power disparity on Carcosa. The haves and the have nots. Who has discovered and mastered some of this superior technology, and who has not?

And how to depict both the primitive nature of humans and the access some have to the advanced tech?


One thing we needed to get in there was a cyborg Spawn of Shub-Niggurath. Them wacky space aliens, right?


Talk about have-nots, Bone Men look like they don't even have skin...

I can't help but address something else as well. The 300 Carcosa pic that Rients first posted is cool and all, but there is a reason why that sort of thing won't be in the book:

We're intentionally avoiding it.

Geoffrey's art guidelines said that humans should be depicted only in certain ways (killing other humans in a ritual, getting victimized by a monster, looking up in horror at some horrible thing)...

"Carcosa is certainly not a planet in which adventurers 'pose for the camera.'"

These guidelines are obviously not unbendable, as Geoffrey approved these two pics here and they seem to not fit any of those things. But notice that humans are still second banana to other things in the pictures. The Bone Men are tiny in comparison to the beast in the second picture and one can imagine all it has to do is sweep a tentacle and the men are in a world of hurt. The humans in the first picture are completely obscured in technology, and the focus of the pic is the weird creature in the foreground.

In play, PCs are going to try to make their mark, do all the cool things, become powerful. A bunch of art showing how cool the PCs could be would be conveying exactly the wrong message though. The book's job is to communicate the setting. And on a setting level, humans just aren't that important in Carcosa. Yet.

Carcosa Publishing Trivia

Forgive me for repeating it (I mentioned it seven months ago or so), but I have a feeling I'll be repeating this story until I die...

I deal with the senior sales person over at Otava even though I'm a very small publisher. Perhaps it's because I'm special, or perhaps it's a random draw, or maybe she's just the best at speaking English over there.

In one of our first Carcosa meetings, I asked this senior employee of a printer that's been in business since 1890 if they had any connections in India or something, because I was wondering if we could get the book bound in human skin. (I mentioned India because as Return of the Living Dead taught me, India used to be the source for skeletons for medical research purposes... skeletons with perfect teeth!)

"Not amused" is one way to describe the reaction. We're going with Balathane Sensuale material for the cover instead, with two-color metallic foil stamping for the graphic. It should be HOLY CRAP THAT'S AWESOME special and the book will give you little orgasms just touching it... but it's not going to be anyone that used to be alive.

But I had to ask, you know?

I Have the New Carcosa In My Hands... Sort Of

So the layout is more or less done except for some typographical adjustments and the art that needs to be dropped in.

I went to the local digital print shop (the people that printed everything for me up to the Grindhouse Edition/Vornheim releases) and had them do me up a perfectbound copy of the new Carcosa so I can see how everything looks and do another round of proofreading with an actual book. Thought you might like a sneak preview.

This mockup (with no cover art) is 282 pages, but that doesn't include two pages for the Fungoid Caverns map. The final book will be 288 pages (the 2008 edition was 96), with a good deal of added material such as the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer adventure, an added encounter in every single hex, random encounter charts, plus other little things here and there.

so it might have a few blanks at the end. This one is made of regular copy paper whereas the final version will be hardcover with more robust paper inside.

Carcosa will be fancy with formal "front matter" in the book. The final book will be printed in 3 colors, but of course I just got a black and white mockup here. A lot of the page texturing (which will not be underneath the text) was left out of this version as well.

Here's a spread in the ritual section. The blobs at the top and bottom (with the GLE notation) are just placeholders for art, as is the off-kilter block on the bottom right. The art allocations are largely irregular like that throughout the book - will be interesting to see what all the final pieces look like.

Here is a spread from the monster section. As you can see, we've alphabetized the creature listings and put the stats with the descriptions. Also shown here are a couple of examples of creatures that have rituals associated with them, and how that ritual info is part of the creature listing.

Some of the hex descriptions here. I thought it was kind of neat how Eero Tuovinen (the layout guy) separated the labels, hexes, and separate encounters within the hexes from each other, and this is something that really benefits from having a few colors to play with in the book.

Oh, there's a new Carcosa blog out there called, fittingly, The Doomed World CARCOSA.

THIS IS CARCOSA!

Pic by Rich Longmore, click to enlarge.

That wasn't an informational blurb, that was a command. Click that bad boy and look at it.

There are a lot of hidden details in Carcosa that Geoffrey didn't spell out in the first edition, and I think some of that hidden lore can be used to entice people to investigate Carcosa rather than just being a revelation for people already digging into it.

I didn't want to alter the text to accomplish this (although Geoffrey did write a new introduction and a Humanity on Carcosa section for the upcoming edition) because using a lot of blah blah blah isn't going to suck anyone into anything.

So you clicked the pic, right? Some Carcosan man is stepping into the Temporal Transcendence Gulf, one of the technological artifacts of the Great Race. It's a frickin time machine, right? So what better way to give a sneak peak at various historical epochs of Carcosa?

Using a bit of influence from the intro of the old Buck Rogers TV series, we can throw a few things into one picture. The Snake Men experimenting on the pre-human man-apes, the coming of the Space Aliens, and a glance at the civilizations of the Great Race and the Primordial Ones...

Carcosa has a history, and a major difference between Carcosa and most settings is that humans aren't part of the setting's history. Humans were just lab animals (hence the color coding) who experiment on each other now (the rituals) because that's what the all-powerful Snake Men did and humans now want to be all-powerful! Now humanity is free as 13 separately breeding species, making their way in a very hostile world. Will humanity rise from this barbarism to create an Age of Humanity on Carcosa, or is the story of man just going to be one of extreme cruelty on the way to being eaten by radioactive dinosaurs?

That's how I see Carcosa. I'm sure Geoffrey will stop by with his own view on the matter... or else end up horrified that I've given it all away. :D

(I'd say that highlighting all this fun stuff will also help people remember there's more to Carcosa than 4 nasty sentences, but we all know that's not going to work, especially since that section will have art too, and we all know how much restraint and good taste I have with that sort of thing...)