It’s rare that you get books in this day and age that embrace the
mentality of the older books, when the setting would comprise of a single book
with hundreds of locations and nothing else to go with, so you could play the wandering
game of starting at the top of the map and going down towards the bottom and
seeing what you encountered on the way and know it would never be a random
encounter.
The problem inherent with settings books like these is that for the
most part they’re just a set of encounters, and while that’s fine if you’re
playing it in the manner of a wargame, going from point to point and just
solving the encounter there, but it makes for significantly less fun if you’re
trying to form a meaningful campaign out of the setting.
Until now...
Originally, Carcosa was the name of a city in the Ambrose Bierce story
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” wherein it was described after it had been
destroyed and in scant detail. Since
that time, the name has been used for a variety of stories, worlds, and
settings, most of them to do with the Lovecraftian Mythos in one way or
another.
This latest book is a planet called Carcosa, and as you might expect,
the general inhabitants of this planet are either their strange creatures of the
mythos, those imprisoned as slaves upon it, or the sorcerers who seek to gain
the power of the gods and demons that live there.
From the beginning of the book (starting at the cover), it’s made clear
that this isn’t a book for the faint of heart or those with no tolerance for
adult issues, and when you start to read the contents of the book, it becomes
apparent that they’re not joking when it comes to that. There are details of a number of spells and
rituals within the book, many of them dealing with human sacrifice and the
torturing of innocents and enslaving of entire peoples to achieve the results
that the sorcerer wants. It doesn’t stop
there, there are details of atrocities within the book that the various demons
and gods conduct and the ways in which they can be helped or hindered, not to
mention the details of how little hope there is in the world and how the
darkness is an ever spreading tide of evil.
What makes this book different is that everything is described in
detail, but without any slant towards the good or evil of it. Everything is neutral, and it’s the
description of such things without any moral slant on them, as if it’s simply what happens in this world, that makes it all the more
horrifying. Most of the inhabitants are
just trying to get by, hoping to get through their lives without being abducted
and used by sorcerers or gods in pointless experiments.
Every hex on the map is detailed individually, and the locations aren’t
just “Several trees and a ruin” in the manner of older maps, but rather details
of how many creatures or people are in the area, their leader, their
motivations and other things that would be of use to a GM trying to make
something of it. It’s not detailed
enough to make a whole encounter out of the notes given for each hex, but for
any GM with a reasonable imagination, it’s enough of a world to make any number
of players lives very very miserable...
That in itself would be an interesting thing to start with, but there
are very few world settings out there where there is a distinct lack of things
that are “Good” (I.E. not working towards the greater good), and while this
world has a whole lot of hopeless in it, sometimes it’s in hell that the heroes
learn to make the greatest difference.
There are, of course, stats for all the creatures, including the gods
and those that are so far beyond the players reach as to be the stars above,
and while I agree that technically everything can be killed, it seems
incongruous that the world has so little hope and yet offers the possibility
that such things are vulnerable in some way.
Either way, this is an excellent resource, both for those who play
Lovecraftian games and those who are just looking for a little more dark in
their daylight, it’s not readily available in print, but the PDF is available
on drivethru.
Worth a read.