Interviewed on The Coffee Break Podcast

Listen here...

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.

Stockholms Spelkonvent Sept 16 - 18, Who's Going?

I'll be running The Monolith from beyond Space and Time on Saturday for sure, and will have either The Dancing Queen in Yellow or The God that Crawls ready to go that same day as well.

Any readers showing up and wanting to play?

Friday and Sunday will be "hang out and talk to people" days...

I'll also bring a selection of OSR goodies for those that would like to pick something up.

A Total Shock

A Nice Grindhouse Review and a Note

Diehard Gamefan has reviewed the Grindhouse Edition, and they have to be nominated for most hilarious use of censorious black bars.

They do seem to suffer from a common misconception though... that picture opposite the Halfling class description is the illustration for the class, the same as every other class gets. If you didn't notice this, remember what the Halfling's best class ability is and make another Search roll.

Save or Die Podcast Interview with Zak

About Vornheim.

Listen here.

This Was Only a Test...

I ran The Monolith from beyond Space and Time for the first time yesterday in a hallway at Tracon.

It featured characters wondering whether suicide was the answer to a dilemma, leaving the key adventure area two weeks before they entered, getting attacked lots and lots by an enemy that didn't exist, and ended up with two characters killing each other over whether they should eat the brains from the head in the jar or not, and one character ended up in the Forgotten Realms.

In other words, a great success.

I'll need to run this one lots more, as the key to making this a success as an adventure will be clearly explaining all the weird situations and possibilities the Monolith allows.

I think I've said before that when I playtest an adventure, I'm not looking for what I need to change mechanically or balance-wise, but rather discovering what players are likely to do within the adventure and make sure that the module includes enough information about the setting/situations to handle it.

Next run of the adventure will be at Stockholms Spelkonvent. Be there!

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...)

Abuse of Power: A Survey!

What is the biggest screw-job you've ever perpetrated against your players as a Referee?

What is the biggest screw-job a Referee has ever perpetrated against you as a player?

I want to qualify "screw-job" for these purposes... I'm not talking about something stupid you did when you were 12, or "The GM is a dick" style power trips.

I mean above-board, belongs-in-the-game screw-jobs.

Dear Diary

Describing the effects that things that don't exist have on the characters is rather difficult. But it is very important.

Five seconds into the new Portrait album Crimen Laesae Majestatis Divinae I was thinking it was the best album ever. After listening to it a half-dozen times, it's merely very very good. "Must-have for all fans of 80s Metal and MERCYFUL FATE lunatics!" says the promo sticker on the front, and it's accurate.

 Falconer's Armod is not bad (the band is best when charging and at its worst when folking, but they folk off a lot), and ICS Vortex's Storm Seeker is, on first listen, rather dull. Unfortunate, since the idea of a Simen Hestnaes solo album was what drew me to the CD store to begin with. Hopefully it will be a grower.

I'll be Tampere tomorrow and Sunday for Tracon. Come say hi, play a game, and/or buy something. For added punk cred, I have no ride home, which will be interesting with a (hopefully) half-full box of merch.

I don't like this new Blogger interface.