Retrospective: The Book of Ebon Bindings

Fan though I am, I will be the first to admit that Professor M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel has a reputation for being abstruse and even unwelcoming to newcomers. Barker himself disagreed, saying that "once one gets past the original alienness, it is easy for others to become immersed in the elaborate societies, politics, and adventures of Tékumel." I agree with his belief (but then I would), yet I can certainly understand why some roleplayers have felt, since the release of Empire of the Petal Throne in 1975, that Tékumel is too complex, too weird, and even too non-European to get into easily. 

Tékumel's reputation probably hasn't been helped by the fact that, in the last 45 years, most of the products released to support the setting have been, if anything, even more difficult for neophytes than the original boxed set. A good case in point is 1978's The Book of Ebon Bindings, released by the Imperium Publishing Company. Unless one counts the fanzine, The Tékumel Journal, whose first issue appeared in 1977, The Book of Ebon Bindings (hereafter TBoEB) was the very first supplement to Empire of the Petal Throne, which had languished under TSR's stewardship (an interesting story in itself). One might think, given this situation, that Professor Barker and Imperium Publishing would have wanted to publish something to fill an obvious gap, such as providing more player-oriented detail of the setting or even an introductory adventure. Instead, what Tékumel got was a cramped, 86-page dissertation on demonology that's devoid of any game mechanics and is presented as a real in-setting text on the subject.

It's a shame really, because TBoEB is a wonderful piece of work. Barker does an excellent job of evoking real world grimoires, with their baroque verbiage and obscure meanings. TBoEB positively drips with flavor. Reading its descriptions of the major and lesser demons of Tékumel is exquisitely kaleidoscopic, a torrent of strange names, details, and concepts, most of which are not explained but instead left to the reader to piece together from the crumbs Barker provides. You get hints about the esoteric magical rituals and disciplines of the ancient peoples of Tékumel, as well as "sorcerously explicit" – to borrow a phrase from the warning on the back of the book – discussions of the manner by which one might invoke these otherworldly beings. Barker does such a magnificent job of manufacturing his own demonology text that one might be forgiven for thinking one was reading the Clavicula Salomonis Regis or Liber Juratus Honorii.

This is also TBoEB's greatest flaw. As interesting as this fake demonology information is, it's largely useless in actual play – not completely useless, as players in my House of Worms campaign know, but certainly not something that most players or referees will need. That's not simply a function of the fact that it's presented as if it were a critical edition of an in-setting text lacking in any game mechanics. It's also that the book is the kind of thing that only a handful of high-level sorcerers possess within the world of Tékumel. This is not an everyday book of spells, like those used by temple priests or magic-users. This is closer to the Necronomicon or some other blasphemous tome from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Most campaigns will have no need of it.

And yet, I can't help but like TBoEB. Its lengthy introduction is a remarkable disquisition on the nature of the gods of Tékumel and provides more insight into the setting's cosmology than anything Professor Barker ever wrote. For that alone, it's valuable. Likewise, the book's descriptions of Tékumel's demons offer plenty of fodder for referees looking to add bizarre locals and frightful devices into his game. I've swiped numerous things for my House of Worms campaign and will likely continue to do so as events continue to unfold. 

There's no question that The Book of Ebon Bindings is an unusual RPG book and one that certainly did little to make Tékumel more accessible to newcomers. As inspiration for existing campaigns, though, it's unmatched and it's for that reason that I'm glad to have it in my collection.

REVIEW: Carcosa (LotFP Edition)

Going back to review a new edition of a product one has already reviewed is often an interesting exercise. A significant part of the interest comes from seeing whether the changes introduced into the new edition have noticeably altered one's opinion. In case of Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa, whose original edition was self-published in 2008, and which I reviewed over the course of four posts, I largely stand behind by initial assessment, namely that Carcosa is a frustratingly eccentric work whose primary virtue is also its primary flaw: a rejection of the (often unstated) moral structure underpinning Gygaxian D&D. It's this rejection, I think, that's at the heart of much of the controversy surrounding Carcosa, which attempts to present a stark, even bleak, interpretation of Lovecraft as the basis for a gonzo science fantasy setting filled with serpent men, gray aliens, Great Old Ones, and Jack Kirby-style science-as-magic. Go ahead and read those original reviews, if you're unsure of the basic premise of Carcosa and what it includes.

The new edition, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and available as both a gorgeous hardcover or PDF, differs primarily in presentation from its 2008 edition, though there are changes, about which I'll speak shortly. Purely as a physical artifact, Carcosa (2011) stands head and shoulders above its predecessor. Indeed, it stands head and shoulders above most other recent gaming products I've purchased. Its cover, which you can see here, depicts a silhouette of the mysterious city of Carcosa after which the book is named. The image is embossed on leatherette that feels right when you hold it, like some ancient tome of forbidden lore. Also right is the fact that the book has no title or identifying marks on it besides the above image and a sigil on the spine. In addition to making Carcosa look like a grimoire (but not in the gaudy way many RPG books have attempted this in the past), I also found myself reminded of early editions of weird fantasy books by authors like Abraham Merritt, William Hope Hodgson, and Arthur Machen, which I suppose was probably part of the point.

The interior of the book is similarly attractive. The pages are thick and off-white in color, again suggesting a libram of black magic. The layout is clear but varied -- sometimes a single column, sometimes two, sometimes more elaborate -- and makes good use of color (green and purple). I'm not especially fond of some of the title fonts, which are occasionally hard to read at small point sizes, but I don't think that seriously undermines Carcosa's esthetics, which I think are nearly perfect. To that end, there are illustrations by Rich Longmore throughout, depicting many aspects of the savage world of Carcosa. I was initially somewhat skeptical of the inclusion of any artwork in the book, feeling it'd undermine individual imagination, but, having now seen Longmore's work, I'll readily admit to being wrong about that. I think the artwork does a superb job of fueling my imagination, in large part because it helps ground Carcosa rather than leaving it to float in some ethereal realm. Longmore is the perfect artist for this purpose, too, since his dark, realistic style provides some much needed weight to elements of Carcosa that might be goofy in other hands, like the dinosaurs and robots.

Carcosa (2011) is an expansion of its predecessor and, for my money, the expansions do a lot to make the setting both more playable and more palatable. Chief among the expansions are the hex descriptions of the Carcosa campaign map. Whereas Carcosa (2008) had terse, often single-line, descriptions like "1 Cthugah's Flame Creature," Carcosa (2011) adds a second encounter or point of interest, which helps, I think, in providing some depth to the setting. Likewise, some of these descriptions include small, off-hand references -- "9 Irrationalist Space Aliens" -- that encourage further development and expansion, something I appreciate in sandbox setting hex descriptions. Also included among the expansions is a starter adventure, Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer, originally published in Fight On! Starter adventures are always useful, since they let the reader know what the creator thinks you're supposed to do with his creation, thereby providing a model to emulate. In a setting as weird as Carcosa's, I think this is essential.

Geoffrey McKinney has penned a new essay, "Humanity on Carcosa," which offers some insight into what it's like to live on Carcosa amidst all its Lovecraftian horrors and extraterrestrial entities. It's pretty bleak stuff, in my opinion, and reinforces the notion that I could never run an extended campaign in the setting. At the same time, I am grateful for its inclusion, since I believed in 2008, as I do now, that a setting like this one demands some "designer notes" to properly get a handle on it. "Humanity on Carcosa" is brief and doesn't explain everything, but it goes a long way toward making explicit some of the thinking behind the setting. A series of random monster tables is another addition in the 2011 version that contributes greatly to playability.

Taken together, Carcosa (2011) is a very impressive package and a good example of where I think an amateur effort was noticeably improved by more "professional" presentation and production values. Purely as an object, I think Carcosa (2011) may be the most attractive old school RPG product I've seen and a vindication of James Raggi's often-eccentric esthetic. As a RPG, I think Carcosa (2012) still remains somewhat frustrating, at least to me, largely because it is written from a viewpoint so alien to my own. That's almost certainly a feature rather than a bug for most people, including its author, but I can't deny that I continue to find Carcosa too bleak and nihilistic a setting for my tastes. It's not just a "hard" setting; it's a hopeless one and, girly man that I am, I'm not much interested in hopelessness in my pastimes. On the other hand, one could reasonably make the argument that its bleakness is in fact a perfect emulation of Lovecraft's worldview, where mankind is cosmically insignificant and knowledge is a double-edged sword. If that's what one wants, Carcosa delivers it in spades.

(I'm going to leave the comments open for this review BUT, as ever, I will ruthlessly delete any comments I consider needlessly intemperate or insulting. Feel free to disagree either with my assessment or with the value of Carcosa all you wish, so long as you do so in a civil, constructive fashion. I didn't allow comments on my original review of Carcosa precisely because of the nonsense it engendered. It's my hope that, in the years since, people have learned to phrase their thoughts and feelings in less inflammatory ways. Don't prove me wrong.)

Presentation: 10 out of 10
Creativity: 8 out of 10
Utility: 6 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a Lovecraft-inspired swords-and-sorcery setting and don't mind a heavy dose of bleakness and amorality.
Don't Buy This If: You prefer your fantasy settings tinged with at least a little bit of hope.

REVIEW: Isle of the Unknown

I find Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown an extremely frustrating book. Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess and available either as a 128 page full-color hardcover book or as a PDF of the same, it's without a doubt one of the most nicely made RPG books I've seen in quite some time, old school or otherwise. By "nicely made," I mean both in terms of its purely physical qualities -- a sturdy cover and excellent binding -- as well as its appearance and organization. At the same time, I think Isle of the Unknown overuses color to the point of garishness at times. The book is so colorful and vibrant that, at first, one can't help but be awed by it. After a while, though, one's initial visual euphoria dissipates, and one begins to wonder how much of one's positive feelings for it are elicited by its substance and how much by its style.

I say that with some regret as this is a book I very much wanted to like without qualification. While nowhere in the text is Clark Ashton Smith's name mentioned, I recall that Isle of the Unknown began as an attempt by Geoffrey McKinney to produce a supplement that evoked Smith's weird tales, particularly those of Averoigne. CAS is a favorite author of mine, as I never tire of mentioning on this blog, and his Averoigne stories have long exercised a powerful hold over my imagination. Consequently, I was very keen to see an old school RPG book that drew on those pulp fantasies. Now, I knew from past experience with Carcosa (whose revised and expanded edition I'll be reviewing later this week) that McKinney's take on Smith would undoubtedly differ from my own, so I expected there to be parts of Isle of the Unknown that didn't sit well with me.

However, that's not quite what happened. Isle of the Unknown still clearly draws some inspiration from the Averoigne tales. The fact that its titular locale is described as having "societies, flora, and fauna ... [that] resemble those of the French territory of Auvergne circa A.D. 1311" is a dead giveaway. Beyond that, though, the CAS influence is thin in my opinion. For that reason, Isle of the Unknown simply comes across as weird, with nearly every one of its over 300 86-square mile hexes home to some oddity or monstrosity, almost all of which are lavishly illustrated in full color by Amos Orion Stearns or Jason Rainville. Of course, that's what you'd probably expect from a book like this. Isle of the Unknown is a gazetteer of 35,000-square mile island that can be dropped into any campaign and, if it didn't provide material of this sort, most readers would be disappointed. That every hex on the island is given an entry -- many of them quite extensive -- is a credit to McKinney and his imagination.

In books of this kind, the problem is most often that the hex descriptions are boringly mundane. Isle of the Unknown has the opposite problem: nearly every hex description includes a magical statue, a quirky spellcaster, or a teratological monster. This is by design, as the introduction to the referee states that "only the weird, fantastical, and magical is described herein." This decision is presented as a boon to the referee, who can thus more easily describe the mundane world based on the realities of his own campaign, but I find this an inadequate justification. It's on par with refraining from describing the "empty" rooms in a dungeon, because all that really matters are the rooms with monsters and treasure in them. Moreover, by describing only the weird, fantastical, and magical, Isle of the Unknown gives the impression of overusing them all. Rather than being spices to improve the flavor of the dish, they become the meal itself.

I find this most troubling with regards to the many monsters described in Isle of the Unknown. Forget Gygaxian naturalism, this is an island populated by over 100 unique monsters: a 14' tall bipedal pearlscale angelfish, limbless serpentine beavers, a 300 lb. koala with suction cups on its limbs, a four-legged pigeon the size of an apatosaurus, and more. Any one of these creatures would be strange enough and might well inspire curiosity but the effect is lost after pages upon pages of them -- and that's without commenting on the frankly ludicrous nature of some of these beasties. Yes, I know there are people who've managed to make good use of "silly" monsters and I also recognize that many hallowed mythological monsters, when looked at with fresh eyes, are pretty ridiculous themselves. But if D&D or Greco-Roman myth consisted only of 22' tall emaciated pandas or four-legged flying kangaroos, I think many of us would be forced to admit that something odd was going on.

Granted, "something odd" going on may be one of the points of Isle of the Unknown. I don't think it's a coincidence that Lamentations of the Flame Princess chose to publish this particular product, as it rather powerfully evinces Jim Raggi's longstanding dislike of "standard" monsters and monster races. There's certainly merit to Raggi's complaint; it's often useful to shake things up a bit by introducing totally bizarre and unexpected monsters from time to time. However, like color or spices, these, too, can be overused. In fact, I only think such monsters work against a backdrop of familiarity and even mundanity, two things that Isle of the Unknown eschews in its presentation, leaving us only with a passel of freaks devoid of any context to give them heft. Instead, they feel, well, random and not always in a good way.

Despite this, I still like Isle of the Unknown. If approached as a smörgåsbord of ideas, it's probably quite useful. I simply cannot imagine using it as a single setting, but I might drop a statue or a monster or an NPC from the book into another locale or adventure in order to introduce a note of inexplicable weirdness into it. What I would not do, though, is use the entirety of the Isle itself; it's simply too much. My feeling remains that fantasy, especially weird fantasy, works best when it can play off well-drawn mundanity and that it's just as much a failure of the imagination not to present that mundanity as it is to stick to haggard fantasy races and monsters without any thought. Frankly, that's what anything drawing inspiration from Clark Ashton Smith ought to do: present us first with a believably grounded "real world" and then, by bits, turn the expectations of that real world upside down. Isle of the Unknown only gives us half of that equation, which is why I find it a frustrating book.

Presentation: 8 out of 10
Creativity: 6 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a collection of ideas to loot for your own adventures or you like really weird fantasy.
Don't Buy This If: You prefer your setting supplements a bit more "ready to use" or prefer your fantasy a bit more on the staid side of things.

McKinney and Raggi Join Forces

As announced today, James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess has come to an agreement with Geoffrey McKinney to release not only his upcoming Isle of the Unknown project, but also Carcosa in "an expanded, deluxe edition." McKinney and Raggi both have very strong visions for their respective old school projects, so the idea of the two of them joining forces in this fashion is certainly one of the most intriguing bits of news I've heard coming out of old school gaming in some time. I have decidedly mixed feelings about Carcosa, as is well known, and, from what I have gathered, the "expanded, deluxe" version will use the unexpurgated text of the book, so I suspect we may be in for another round of discussion when this new edition is released next spring.

Regardless, it's already looking as if 2011 will be every bit as interesting as 2010 -- which is saying a lot.

Cleaning House

Geoffrey McKinney, creator of Carcosa, started threads at both the OD&D Discussion forums and on Dragonsfoot in which he listed and posted images of his entire RPG collection, which he's radically whittled down to a handful of books he finds both useful and inspirational to his gaming. I have to admit that I've often considered doing such a thing myself, as I have approximately two full bookcases of gaming products, most of them unused most of the time. Unfortunately, my resolve to get rid of many of these books is weakened by the painful memory of re-acquiring my Traveller collection after having sold it shortly before I graduated from high school, in the false belief that I'd never play it again. Likewise, I often need to know little bits of trivia associated with this or that game book and, since PDFs aren't available for most of them, I hesitate to get rid of them.

Still, I have to admit there is something very appealing about getting rid of the dozens of books I own and truly will never look at or use again, such as many D20 books or my Ars Magica collection. Of course, finding a good way to get rid of them all is the problem. I hate selling things through eBay if I can avoid it. Worse, I hate trying to come up with fair prices for these days. I figure, if I'm going to take the time to sell them off, I might as well make some money off of them, but, at the same time, how much are they really worth, especially since I wouldn't be selling off anything particularly rare or valuable?

I'll have to give this one some thought.

REVIEW: Obregon's Dishonor

Obregon's Dishonor is the first -- and, so far, only -- support product for Geoffrey McKinney's Supplement V: Carcosa, published last fall amidst a great deal of controversy in the old school community. I am, however, happy to report that this 36-page digest-sized adventure module is not similarly controversial, containing little that should offend the sensibilities of anyone who appreciates the tropes of swords-and-sorcery literature. Indeed, author Cameron DuBeers has done such a thoroughly good job of presenting the Carcosa setting as a quirky, if dark, pulp fantasy setting that I once again can't help but think the original product would have been benefited from a similar approach. Be that as it may, I can say without hesitation that Obregon's Dishonor is a largely unobjectionable scenario whose strengths highlight the possibilities inherent in the Carcosa concept and whose weaknesses have nothing whatsoever to do with any moral questions it raises.

Of the module's 36 pages, approximately 20 contain adventure text, not including a two-page, removable map. The remaining pages are given over to an index, an author's introduction, pregenerated PCs, a new NPC class (the witch), new monsters, and other similar content. The text is presented in a straightforward fashion, using a single column. Unlike Carcosa itself, there wasn't much of an attempt to imitate the style of OD&D supplements, which leaves the book feeling "flat" in my estimation, as its layout is neither interesting in its own right nor as a recreation of the 1970s. The book contains three pieces of art by Andy Taylor, one of which is the cover illustration. I have to admit I wasn't especially fond of the cover, which, like the layout, felt flat, whereas the two interior pieces are quite nice and do a good job of evoking the alien character of Carcosa -- something I think the setting desperately needs. The cartography is functional but not especially inspiring, reminding me a bit of the kinds of maps I remember seeing in old Judges Guild products, so take that as you will.

Obregon's Dishonor begins in a Green Man mining town, where the characters make the acquaintance of a Purple cyborg named Bothess, who wishes to employ the characters for a mission of utmost importance to her. She's the last surviving member of a mercenary company led by a Lawful Red Man sorcerer named Obregon. Obregon was a rare individual whose strength of will enabled him to use sorcery not for self-aggrandizement but to do battle against the Great Old Ones. Though honorable, Obregon was also naive, training an Orange Man named Darsiaas in sorcery without recognizing that his apprentice lacked his strength of will. Once he realized his error, Obregon sought to destroy Darsiaas so as to right his past misdeed. In trying to do so, Obregon succeeded in stopping the summoning of a foul being -- the Shambler of the Endless Night -- but at the cost of his own life and soul. Bothess wishes to free Obregon's soul from its eternal torment by enacting a ritual and asks the PCs to join her in doing so.

What follows is a quest to find the item necessary to enact the ritual and free Obregon's soul, with the bulk of the initial action taking place in an ancient Jale Man stronghold/monastery, inhabited by a variety of creatures and hazards, as well as much treasure. Once the PCs have the item, they can then help Bothess to perform the ritual and free Obregon's soul. It's here that the adventure takes a twist, as things the PCs had been led to believe to be true turn out not to be, precipitating a difficult choice on their parts. The players will be forced to choose between several unpalatable options, none of which is "right" and any one of which will result in consequences they may not find acceptable. In this respect, I think Obregon's Dishonor does a good job in presenting the harshness of Carcosa without reveling in nihilism. One of my complaints about the original product was its bleakness. This adventure is not bleak, but it does show that heroism in a world ruled by the Great Old Ones and their mortal minions demands sacrifices from all concerned. There are no unblemished happy endings.

Obregon's Dishonor is definitely not for everyone. Even without the specific content of the unexpurgated Carcosa that offended so many people, it's not a family-friendly product. I said earlier that it contains little that would offend those who appreciate swords-and-sorcery literature and that's true. It does, however, contain a fair bit of sexual imagery, some of it in my opinion prurient (and puerile), even by the standards of the genre. I was often reminded of Heavy Metal comics from the 1970s, which, again, may or may not be a good thing, but it's worth bearing in mind.

As an adventure, Obregon's Dishonor does an excellent job of demonstrating the possibilities of the dark science fantasy setting of Carcosa. Whereas the original supplement suffered, I think, for providing little direction as to how one might use its material, this adventure has no such problem. It's a terrific model for referees and players alike, showing one possible way to interpret Carcosa and make it the locale for exciting adventures.

That's not to say there are no problems, because there are, chiefly the prominent role played by Bothess. Aside from her highly sexualized portrayal (which, I grant, is a deliberate choice by the author rather than a flaw per se), she's a bit too vital to the adventure's action. She provides lots of exposition and backstory to the player characters and, while provisions are made in the text for her possible demise, it seemed clear to me that her death would likely present problems in using the module as written. In truth, I think Obregon's Dishonor would have benefited greatly from the removal of Bothess and the rewriting of the module to give the PCs a less overt segue into its events.

Despite it all, there's a lot to like here. Cameron DuBeers does a good job of presenting a playable version of Carcosa, one that feels both less bleak and more in line with "traditional" swords-and-sorcery than did the original product. The module's a bit rough around the edges in places, but the strength of its ideas shine through. I'd love to see the further development of this interpretation of Carcosa. With a bit more spit and polish, I think we have the makings of something remarkable here -- but we're not there quite yet.

Presentation: 6 out of 10
Creativity: 7 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You'd like to see an interpretation of how to use Carcosa as a swords-and-sorcery setting
Don't Buy This If: You have no interest in Carcosa or are easily offended by sexual imagery

Carcosa Responses

Geoffrey McKinney has taken the time to make several posts occasioned by my recent four-part review of Carcosa. You can find Parts 1, 2, and 3 over on Geoffrey's blog. Part 3 in particular addresses certain points I made in my review with which he disagrees. I'd actually planned on making a post tomorrow about a similar topic to one of the questions Geoffrey raises, so I'll kill two birds with one stone by responding then and there. In the meantime, I'd suggest anyone who's interested in these matters to head over to the Carcosa blog and read the new posts. While I (obviously) disagree with certain things Geoffrey has said in reply (though not all of it), I'm very grateful for his thoughtful responses nonetheless.

REVIEW: Carcosa (Part 4 of 4)

I got into D&D in late 1979, just months after the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, which led to many an urban legend about kids being led astray by the game and into activities that resulted in their deaths. I remember the ludicrous Chick tract, Dark Dungeons, which first appeared in 1984. I also remember seeing Gary Gygax subject to the irresponsible yellow journalism of 60 Minutes in 1985. During those years, I attended both a Catholic elementary and high school, at which I regularly played Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with my classmates, often in the presence of priests, sisters, and other teachers. Only once in all those years did anyone ever assert that the game was in any way "Satanic" or unfit for being played by a good Catholic boy like me and the teacher who did so was widely recognized as a nut, particularly by the priests of my high school.

I am convinced that the reason why I never ran into any trouble as a result of playing D&D was because, if one took the time to read its rulebooks or to watch someone play the game, one would quick discover that, beneath it all, it's built on a remarkably traditionalist moral structure. That's not to say that all D&D characters are untarnished heroes. As I've argued at length in this blog, the game is in fact at its most coherent when the PCs are rogues (with or without hearts of gold). But the assumed roguishness of most characters doesn't banish the possibility of there being good or evil. Like the gunslingers of the best Westerns, the PCs are individuals who use barbaric methods to fight "barbarians" on behalf of a civilization that, by the barbaric nature of their own actions in its defense, they must be excluded from. This kind of tension can only exist in a world in which morality isn't treated as subjective or an agreed upon convenience.

It's here that I think Carcosa is most troubling to me. The book presents a barbaric, brutal world, one crying out for "good" barbarians to rise to the defense of a civilization in which they cannot take part. Unfortunately, the distinction between a good and a bad barbarian is largely meaningless in the setting the book describes. Morality is mostly arbitrary and relativistic and the primary check on immoral behavior is revulsion. I think, in a world as bleak as Carcosa, where the Great Old Ones and their servitors carry the day, there's a need for more than that -- some moral absolutes against which to judge the actions even of tarnished heroes doing what they think they must, no matter how unpleasant, to hold back the fall of night for just one more day.

Had the book been more clear on this rather crucial point, I suspect that many, though not all, of the criticisms directed toward it would have been rendered impotent. The only reason why the intemperate invective and over-the-top denunciations rang true is because -- and this applies equally to the expurgated and unexpurgated versions -- Carcosa presents a world in which morality has no meaning except as a lie agreed upon. I think, in this respect, the book is probably a truer presentation of Lovecraftian horror than even the much-beloved Call of Cthulhu, which has tempered the grim vision of its inspiration with slivers of hope. There is no hope on Carcosa, at least none that I could see. It's an uncompromisingly nihilstic world and I can't blame anyone who reacts negatively to it. Indeed, I suspect that at least some of the loathing Carcosa has generated is a reaction to this rather important aspect of its presentation.

That said, I find it hard to become incensed by the book. The almost-clinical way that McKinney treats sorcery and its rituals is not the approach of one who either condones or derives some perverse pleasure from describing its vile practices. I think McKinney was incredibly naive to have assumed that he could adopt such a clinical approach and not generate controversy. Even if we did not live in times such as we do, the anonymity and distance of the Internet make it all too easy to engage in high dudgeon about things of which we know little. I'd wager that not one of McKinney's fiercest critics has so much as read more than a couple of sentences from Carcosa and I think that's a shame -- a shame, because, despite it all, this is a powerful and original work of the imagination and it deserves to be discussed, both because of what it is in itself but also because of what it says about the current state of the old school renaissance.

What it says to me is that the old school community is, at this time, too insular and inbred for its long term health. I noted earlier that I felt Carcosa too closely imitated the format of OD&D and I think that's true. I believe McKinney might have presented his ideas more clearly had he not adopted the laconic style of the little brown books and its supplements. At the same time, I'm not sure the old school community really is interested in doing much more than rehashing the past, forever plowing the same creative fields.

Even more disappointing for me, I think, is how the controversy surrounding this book revealed how much old schoolers had forgotten about their own history. There are a handful of things in the unexpurgated version of Carcosa that turn my stomach, but the history of the hobby reveals many earlier products that include things as bad as these and yet I have seen no denunciations of them. I suspect that's because, in this one case, the oft-made criticism that old schoolers wear rose colored glasses when looking at the past is correct. If one were to take an honest look at the things gaming has sometimes coughed up in the pursuit of "verisimilitude," "genre emulation," or "grittiness," you'll find that Carcosa is not unique, never mind uniquely perverse.

All this said, I still wish that an unexpurgated version had never been released. I don't believe that the added detail -- about two pages worth of text in total -- makes the book "stronger," unless by that one means it strengthens the generally nihilistic tone of its setting. I'm just not sure why one would say (or want) such a thing, given that, even without those details, Carcosa is a nasty, brutish setting rather unlike anything ever before offered for D&D.

And that brings me to my final criticism of Carcosa: its claim to the subtitle "Supplement V." As McKinney would have it, Carcosa is the product of an alternate universe, one in which TSR published this book as a supplement to OD&D rather than ending the line and moving on to AD&D. I find this alternate universe implausible for a number of reasons, not least of which being that Carcosa could never have been published in the 70s and it's not primarily because of its content. In form, Carcosa has much more in common with 2e era boxed campaign settings than with OD&D supplements. Not only does it actually present a setting, something no OD&D supplement does, but it also replaces large chunks of the OD&D rules rather than merely providing additional options from which to choose.

Even more significant, I think, is that Carcosa demonstrates a sensibility alien to OD&D. Certainly it draws on many similar sources, but the specific inspirations from which it draws are ones that I have a very hard time imagining ever being attached to D&D, at least in "official" form. Carcosa is a product of very dark fantasy, far darker than the most significant influences on Gygax and Arneson and probably even far darker than almost any fantasy published before the 1990s. Except in its presentation and its self-identification, Carcosa just doesn't feel like an old school product to me, or perhaps it's truer to say that it's a very "postmodern" old school product. By this I mean only that it's a product that is in many ways a commentary on its inspirations as well as a product of them.

That's not a bad thing in and of itself and goodness knows the old school could use a kick in the pants to help it get beyond forever rehashing the "good ol' days." It's possible that, for all its flaws, Carcosa is a happy fall, an occasion for all of us involved in this community to consider what it is we like about the old school and what we think it has to offer us still in 2008. Having watched the reactions in various quarters, I think that, for many grognards, what they want is familiarity and nothing more. Again, that's not a bad thing in and of itself, but I don't think Carcosa can or should be faulted for being unfamiliar, for being willing to do something different than present yet another vanilla fantasy.

At the same time, the mere fact that Carcosa does something genuinely new and different is not enough to free it from criticism. There is, as I hope I have shown throughout this review, much to criticize about Carcosa, both in its content and its presentation. Yet, there is also much to praise. It's a strong but deeply flawed work and I'd like to think that Geoffrey McKinney might take to heart some of what has been said here (and elsewhere) and rework Carcosa into something that allows it to reach its fullest potential. He's already shown he listens, given that he produced an expurgated version, and I think that version makes plain that Carcosa loses nothing by being less explicit in the awfulness of sorcery. I also think that the book would benefit greatly by disentangling itself from OD&D. As written, Carcosa reminds me more of something like Empire of the Petal Throne or Arduin, which is to say, it's really its own game, despite some superficial connections to the OD&D from which it sprang.

On a personal note, I cannot conceive of ever using Carcosa as the basis for a roleplaying game campaign. It's much too bleak and amoral a setting for me and it's too far removed from the D&D traditions that I hold so dear. I am, however, glad to have had the opportunity to read the book, as it's given me the occasion to think carefully about a number of issues that have been swirling in the back of my mind over the last year or so. I haven't come to any conclusions about all of these issues just yet and I may never be able to do so. That I am thinking about them at all is partly due to Carcosa and I find it hard not to be grateful for that, at least. I hope the same is true of many others who have read this frustratingly creative work. I know that future posts to this blog, as well as future old school projects of mine, will benefit from ideas sparked in thinking about and critiquing Carcosa. Few products can say that -- even fewer published in the last 10 years.

Final Score: 3½ out of 5 polearms

REVIEW: Carcosa (Part 3 of 4)

In this part of my review, we come to the meat of the matter: the sorcerous rituals that are both an important part of Carcosa's feel and central to the reasons why many have denounced this book and its author. By and large, I am going to refrain from commenting on the controversy itself (that comes in Part 4 tomorrow). However, I will offer up my own opinions about the content and presentation of the sorcerer class and its rituals that go beyond simply reporting the facts. I believe it's the job of a reviewer to do just this; otherwise a review is nothing more than an extended advertisement for the product under review. Like everything else on this blog, the opinions I express are my own, meaning they're subjective and, in some cases, intensely personal. I don't think that compromises their validity in any way, but I would caution anyone reading what follows against taking what I say out of this context or ascribing to it a universalism I do not claim. I'd also like to reiterate that my review will continue to be of the expurgated version of the book, not the original. I do this out of respect for the sensibilities of many who find the original's content too abhorrent even to read reference to.

As noted in Part 2, Carcosa includes only two character classes, the fighting-man and the sorcerer. The sorcerer is a wholly new character class that functions in most respects exactly like the fighting-man, with which it shares weapon/armor choices, hit dice, and attack progression. The class has a different Prime Requisite (Intelligence), a different experience point table, and a different saving throw progression, however. The end result is that the sorcerer is a fairly "robust" class, generally able to hold its own in a fight, which sets it apart from the OD&D magic-user. The reason for this robustness is that, while a sorcerer is able to wield magical powers -- the aforementioned rituals -- no sorcerer begins with a knowledge of such rituals, which must be discovered through play. In addition, rituals are very difficult and dangerous to cast. The class thus seems to have been built on the assumption that it needs to be able to survive on its own without recourse to rituals, which cannot generally be cast quickly or without proper preparation, thereby rendering their utility in combat situations nil.

The description of the sorcerer class notes that there are six types of rituals -- banishing, conjuring, invoking, binding, imprisoning, and tormenting. All of these rituals, except banishing, require human sacrifice and lengthy ceremonies to perform, in addition to esoteric components and paraphernalia. Furthermore, performing rituals can be quite dangerous to the sorcerer, since the entities upon whom a ritual is cast get a secret saving throw against it, modified by the level of the casting sorcerer (higher-level sorcerers are more likely to be successful). If a ritual fails, the sorcerer likely has no idea why or, worse yet, that it has failed at all until the entity exacts its revenge upon him for his folly. In addition, the casting of every ritual (again, except banishing) requires a save vs. spells to avoid unnatural aging of between 1 and 5 years.

I'd like to make a couple of comments before moving on to the rituals themselves. First, I like and appreciate the general tone McKinney is trying to evoke here. It has a strongly swords-and-sorcery flavor: magic is dark, dangerous, and physically taxing. The book even notes that sorcery owes its existence to the extinct Snake-Men, which highlights its utterly alien and inhuman character. All of this clearly separates it from OD&D's approach to magic, never mind all subsequent approaches in D&D. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but, again, I think it makes the "Supplement V" moniker seem even more inappropriate.

Despite this, I believe the sorcerer character class is largely superfluous. I think Carcosa could simply have posited a single character class and made sorcery an "extra" that some characters might learn and others might not, since the acquisition and casting of sorcerous rituals is in no way tied to the sorcerer class mechanically. That is, there is nothing inherently "sorcerous" about the sorcerer; one could conceivably play a sorcerer that never learns or casts any rituals whatsoever. I don't believe that, as written, the sorcerer follows the same logic as all other OD&D classes and that sits poorly with me.

I suspect that the sorcerer class exists for one of two non-exclusive reasons. One reason is the inescapable drive every D&D gamer has to create his own classes. The early issues of The Strategic Review and Dragon are littered with new classes; it's an impulse as old as the game, so I can't entirely fault McKinney for possibly indulging in it, even if I feel he offered up a less than ideal example of a new class. Another reason -- the more likely one, in my opinion -- is that McKinney wanted to "segregate" sorcery mechanically in some way. That is, he may have wanted to make it the exclusive province of a small sub-set of possible characters rather than an option available to any who takes the time and effort to learn its secrets. That's not an unreasonable desire, particularly given the nature of sorcery, but I don't think there's much warrant for it and I think, given the themes he seems to want to grapple with, it actually weakens Carcosa by including the sorcerer class. I'll return to this in Part 4.

The actual listing and descriptions of sorcerous rituals accounts for approximately 20 of Carcosa's 96 pages -- one-fith of its total verbiage. While I think it would be disingenuous to claim, as some have, that these 96 rituals ought to be reckoned the source and summit of the entire book, I do think it's worth paying careful attention to them, Given that they occupy only slightly fewer pages than the gazetteer of the campaign map, this doesn't strike me as unreasonable. Likewise, it's these rituals rather than the sorcerer character class itself that are what has stirred up so much controversy and I think, in all fairness, that this controversy was warranted. Note that I said the controversy itself was warranted, not necessarily the ways in which any particular person chose to involve himself in the controversy. I think it's fair to say that much of the furor directed at Carcosa was grossly over the top and not based any actual knowledge of the text itself. I simply can't condone such knee-jerk knownothingism, despite my own strong reservations about the content of this section of the book. There's plenty of reason to be concerned about sorcerous rituals, but I believe those reasons ought to be presented rationally and backed up by actual knowledge rather than hearsay.

So, why the concern? Carcosa makes plain, from the start, that sorcery, with the exception of banishing, requires human sacrifice. That pretty clearly means that it's, by most definitions, an evil activity. At the very least, it's an activity whose practitioners clearly place the possibility of personal power above the value of human life. Had Carcosa left it at that, as it does in the expurgated version, I suspect there would have been much less controversy surrounding the book. Human sacrifice is an abhorrent practice; I have no qualms about saying that without any qualifications or reservations. However, it's also (I would hope) a fairly abstract practice for most of us. That is, we all have read about ancient cultures like the Aztecs who indulged in human sacrifice, but such practices are long dead and of no direct relevance to our daily lives. Now, of course, we all "know" about human sacrifice from pulp stories and movies. It's not at all uncommon for evil priests and sorcerers to sacrifice -- or at least threaten to sacrifice -- human beings to their demonic masters. This is very much part of the genre and I believe that McKinney was right to have included it in Carcosa; to have left it out would have been to betray a good portion of the source material on which it draws.

On the other hand, I feel McKinney erred in two important respects in his presentation of sorcery, one general and one specific. Let me handle the specific error first, because it's the one I think people have mistakenly latched on to as the more significant one. The expurgated version of the text includes no information about what the sorcerer must do to cast the ritual beyond the specific implements and/or components (and/or location) he needs to do so. The original version of the text, however, goes into some detail about the type, number, gender, and age of the human sacrifices, including, in some cases, how the sacrifice must be dispatched to effect the ritual. Some have fixated on a few specifically abhorrent examples and used them as a springboard for denouncing the book and its author. I agree wholeheartedly that many -- indeed almost all but the binding rituals -- are, in their unexpergated versions, unpleasant to read and think about. I don't think anyone, least of all Geoffrey McKinney, disputes this. What I think is at issue is whether or not a roleplaying game book ought to been written and published that includes such graphically violent acts.

I am inclined to agree that Carcosa gains nothing thematically by the inclusion of the descriptions of such acts. Singular are the examples in the source material that come even close to the level of moral turpitude these rituals require. I am unmoved by the notion that genre emulation demanded it. One would search in vain, I think, for anything resembling these rituals in the writings of the great pulp writers. Likewise, games such as Call of Cthulhu have long included a wide variety of sinister spells and rituals that make clear that any who cast such magicks are abominable and did so without the need for this level of detail. I know the argument has been made that the detail -- which is, I hasten to add, presented very clinically and without any salaciousness or sensationalism -- makes the rituals all the more obviously evil. It's an interesting argument, but it's a crude and unsubtle one that would have us believe that shock is the best (only?) tool available with which to make a moral point. I simply don't think that's true.

At the same time, I think it's patently ludicrous to anyone who has read the text to brand either Carcosa or its author morally repugnant. As presented in Carcosa, sorcery is ugly; it is, quite literally, painful to read about, to look at. To criticize its inclusion solely because of this ugliness, though, runs the risk of reducing morality to mere esthetics. Now, I actually believe there's a primal connection between our sense of esthetics and our moral intuitions. I believe that the revulsion we feel when reading about human sacrifice has a strong moral component. There's a reason why we use many of the same words to describe something that is unatractive and something that is immoral. The weakness I see in much of the criticism of Carcosa is that it never gets beyond that revulsion and, in the process, validates the mistaken notion that, because it elicits such a powerful feeling of distaste, it is in fact succeeding in what it was intended to do: to shock you into hating sorcery and sorcerers.

This brings me to the broader error I feel McKinney made in his presentation of sorcery: there are no significant disincentives, mechanically or otherwise, to being a rat bastard sorcerer. Let's look and see. There's a chance, as we know, that anytime a sorcerer casts a ritual that he might age unnaturally. So what? This is pure color, with no mechanical effect; there are no rules, either in Carcosa or OD&D, on what happens if your character ages 10, 20, or 50 years. There's also a chance that, if a ritual goes awry, the sorcerer might find himself the meal of the creature he's trying to summon/bind/whatever. Again, so what? There's a chance that any adventurer, regardless of his morality, will die by engaging in his typical activities. In a game like OD&D, death isn't exactly a moral indictment of one's actions; it's simply a fact of life that, like the rain, falls upon the just and the unjust alike. We don't even have recourse to the tried and true D&D "solution" to such questions: look to alignment. There is no objective alignment system in Carcosa that can label this or that act evil absolutely. Instead, we have an "allegiance" system that implies that a Chaotic character -- a servant of the Great Old Ones -- can engage in "noble" behavior regardless of his dedication to bringing about the will of monstrous entities bent on the destruction of human life. All Carcosa can muster when it comes to censuring sorcery is the "ick factor." Sorcery is evil because it makes us feel uncomfortable to think about what a sorcerer must often do to partake of it. That's it; that's the extent of the disapprobation of sorcery. I hope I'm not alone in feeling that's inadequate.

Above, I indicated an affinity between Carcosa and swords-and-sorcery literature and so there is, but I think it's truer to say that the book takes more inspiration from the works and worldview of H.P. Lovecraft. I say this because S&S literature typically takes place in a corrupt world and corruption implies a substratum of goodness that can't be found either in Lovecraft or in Carcosa. What we have instead is a bleak world where might makes right and the best one can hope for is that one's doom comes another day. I think there is merit in roleplaying in such a world, but I also think, when you consider the way that sorcery is described in the unexpurgated version, you are left with an unrelentingly unpleasant place, one that is all too easy to caricature and to denounce.

One of the many virtues of the Call of Cthulhu RPG is that it does not provide much (or any) detail of the horrific things cultists do in the name of their alien gods. Likewise, it shows that the wages of sin are far worse than mere death -- that the loss of one's humanity, the ability to connect to other men, is terrible curse. And, by taking place in a familiar world we all know and understand, we can immediately find things worth fighting for, things that keep us from acquiescing to the inevitable conclusion of Lovecraft's worldview. Carcosa in its unexpurgated form has none of that and, even in its expurgated form, it is still a harsh, cold place. In this respect, it is utterly unlike anything else ever produced in the D&D tradition.

Part 4 of 4 appears tomorrow, probably later in the day, given its length.

Carcosa Corrections

Part 3 of my review of Carcosa will be posted later today. In the meantime, I'd like to offer a couple of corrections that Geoffrey McKinney sent to me. They're corrections of fact and I readily concede my errors. I'm posting them in the interests of providing interested readers with as much accurate information about the book as I can provide.

What follows are McKinney's words, not my own.

1. You wrote: "most Carcosan monsters have psionics"

Out of the 48 monsters detailed in the book, 15 of them possess psionics. Since only 1 in 100 of the random Spawn of Shub-Niggurath have psionics, I did not count them amongst the 15.

2. Regarding the monsters in CARCOSA you wrote: "most of them drawn from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, along with a handful of others unique to this book."

Here is a break-down of the origins of the monsters in Carcosa:

Lovecraft (total of 11):
Cthulhu
Azathoth
Nyarlathotep
Yog-Sothoth
spawn of Yog-Sothoth
Primordial Ones
Shoggoths
Mi-Go
Great Race
Deep Ones
Unquiet Worms (kind of)

Derleth (total of 5):
Hastur
I'thaqua
Cthugah
Cthugah's flame creatures
B'yakhee

Clark Ashton Smith (total of 3):
Shub-Niggurath (Abhoth)
spawn of Shub-Niggurath (spawn of Abhoth)
Fetor of the Depths (Tsathoggua)

Robert E. Howard:
Snake-Men (extinct on Carcosa)

Gary Gygax:
Slime God (Juiblex)

F. W. Holiday's theory of the Loch Ness Monster:
Lake Monsters

My own (total of 27):
Lurker amidst the Obsidian Ruins
Deep Gibbering Madness
Putrescent Stench
It of the Fallen Pylons
Crawling God
Leprous Dweller Below
Shambler of the Endless Night
Inky Crawler
Lurker of the Putrescent Pits
Weird God
Violet Mist
God of the Primal Void
Tentacled One
Foul Putrescence
Suckered Abomination
Colorless Ooze
Watery Death
Desiccating Slime of the Silent Halls
Squamous Worm of the Pit
Amphibious Ones
Diseased Guardians
Green Ooze Pool
Mummies
Mummy Brains
Giant Jungle Ants
Space Aliens
Species 23750

REVIEW: Carcosa (Part 2 of 4)

In this part of my review of Carcosa, I'm going to discuss what might be called the book's "non-controversial content." Approximately 20 of Carcosa's 96 pages pertain to the new sorcerer character class, its game mechanics, rituals, and a few random related bits of text found elsewhere in the book. I shall specifically look at that content in Part 3 tomorrow. This leaves the remaining three-quarters of the book as the subject of the present post.

I'd like to begin by commenting on the physical qualities of Carcosa. The book is identical in size and general appearance to the volumes of OD&D and its supplements -- clearly no accident, given that it bills itself as "Supplement V" (about which I shall comment in Part 4). Geoffrey McKinney obviously went to some effort to imitate the look of OD&D, right down to the typefaces and the color of the cardstock used for the cover. The imitation isn't quite perfect, however, and I hope I can be forgiven in later using this "almost-but-not-quite" quality of Carcosa as a broad metaphor with which to critique the work as a whole.

As already noted, Carcosa is 96 pages in length, making it about a third again as long as the lengthiest OD&D supplements. What I find interesting about this is that, despite its advertisement as "Supplement V," Carcosa takes a very different tack than all of its predecessors. Instead of being a rules supplement -- though it does present many new rules -- about one-third of its text is devoted to a description of a campaign setting. In this respect, it differs quite significantly from both Greyhawk and Blackmoor, neither of which give the reader much information about the campaign settings from whom they derive their titles. Carcosa even includes a hand-drawn map -- "Carcosa Campaign Map One" -- in the centerfold of the book. It details an area covering 160 by 218 miles and includes a wide variety of terrain types and landmarks, all of which are described in the last 25 or so pages of the book.

Carcosa's imitation of OD&D isn't limited to its physical qualities. The internal organization of the book follows that of OD&D's supplements. Thus, there are three sections -- "Men & Sorcery," "Monsters & Treasures," and "Adventures in the Underworld and Wilderness" -- that correspond roughly to the three volumes of OD&D. I personally find this degree of imitation infelicitous, both because the original OD&D supplements are not exactly models of clarity and because there are so many other places where Carcosa doesn't imitate its predecessors that it gives the entire book the textual equivalent of the "uncanny valley" phenomenon. I'll speak more about this in Part 4.

The first section notes that there are only two character classes in the world of Carcosa, fighting-men and sorcerers, the latter of which I won't discuss now. Fighting-men are presumably identical in their game mechanics to those in OD&D, although this is not stated explicitly. The planet Carcosa is also home to thirteen races of Men, each one possessing a different skin color. These colors range from black to yellow, with three new colors -- two primary and one additive -- unique to Carcosa. These additional colors are derived from David Lindsay's 1920 novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, a novel that was an important influence on C.S. Lewis in the creation of his own Space Trilogy. Unlike the poem by Robert W. Chambers that begins this book, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this reference to Lindsay, who was, by all accounts, an unusual thinker who had Gnostic sympathies. There isn't much evidence of outright Gnosticism in Carcosa, but I do think it reveals its author as someone who is well versed in the "weird tale," that predecessor of horror and fantasy from which so much in our hobby sprang.

Alignment in Carcosa is very much in line with Jeff's Threefold Apocalyptic Alignment System. That is, alignment answers the question "whose side are you on?" rather than more specific moral/ethical matters, since the book notes that "all behaviors, including the most noble and altruistic as well as the most vile and despicable, are found amongst all three alignments." Thus, where one stands in relation to the Lovecraftian Great Old Ones -- who epitomize Chaos -- determines one's alignment, not whether one is a good person or not. This approach has deep roots in the h0bby and I am sympathetic to it in some ways. That said, by removing any hint of moral/ethical considerations from alignment, I believe McKinney squandered an opportunity to deflect at least some of the criticism directed toward him and Carcosa.

Carcosa presents a psionics system that is far simpler and also far less extensive than that of Eldritch Wizardry. High ability scores in Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma each grant a cumulative percentile chance to a character to possess psionics. If a character does indeed possess psionics, he gains access to 1d4 psionic powers each day, the type determined by the referee and not necessarily consistent from day to day. How often a character can use a given power is determined by his level. Psionic powers range from telepathy to mental blasts to mind control -- eight powers in all, most of them similar to existing magic spells in use. I'm very ambivalent about these psionic rules. While they are indeed simple, their centrality to the setting -- most Carcosan monsters have psionics -- means that players will quickly feel the need for their characters to possess them, which will necessitate higher and higher ability scores, which isn't a very OD&D approach. In addition, there's too much randomness involved, even for me, so much so that I think using the rules as written might prove tedious.

Unfortunately, tedious randomness seems to appeal to McKinney, who introduces a number of new dice conventions into Carcosa, such as variable damage and hit dice. That is, whenever the rules call for rolling dice, a table is consulted to determine which sort of dice is rolled. That means that sometimes your weapon will deal 1d8 points of damage per hit and sometimes 1d12 (or 1d4). Likewise, your character's hit points will fluctuate wildly for every combat, with a new total being rolled using whatever dice type is indicated by a separate roll. Granted, these rules apply equally to NPCs and monsters as to PCs, but I can't quite see the point. Although McKinney goes to some length to explain that this approach "allows for greater uncertainty in the game," what I fear it does is fetishize the importance of randomness in old school gaming to the point of parody -- "Greetings! It's a" *rolls dice* "pleasure to meet you!"

The second section begins with descriptions of the monsters of Carcosa. Most of the usual D&D monsters don't exist in this setting. Replacing them are a wide variety of beings, most of them drawn from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, along with a handful of others unique to this book. This section is one of the strongest in the entire work. Not only does it give the reader a new context for familiar Lovecraftian entities, which goes some way toward restoring them to their original place as objects of horror and revulsion, but it also does a superb job of illustrating that a singular, well-conceived monster is a far more powerful a concept than an entire race of them. Thus, we get descriptions of beings like the Lurker of the Putrescent Pits and the Desiccating Slime of the Silent Halls rather than hordes of orcs, bugbears, or even traditional D&D demons. In this way, Carcosa is very much in line with pulp fantasy traditions, which rarely presented entire monstrous species but instead relied on unique abominations to challenge their protagonists.

Also described are numerous "sorcerous items," which completely replace the magic items of OD&D. Among these items are numerous types of lotus flowers, each if which has an effect after ingesting or inhailing powder made from their blossoms. Carcosa also freely mixes science fiction with fantasy and makes no apologies for doing so. Consequently, there are numerous pieces of "Space Alien technology," items used by the mysterious race of Gray-like beings called simply the Space Aliens. The effects of some such technology is determined by random rolls (see a pattern?), although there are examples that have definite and consistent effects. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also a random table for generating Space Alien robots and basic rules for re-programming them. Rounding out this section is a collection of items created and used by Lovecraftian beings like the Great Race and the Primordial Ones. These items largely do not rely on random tables to determine their effects and are better for it, instead being unpredictable and possibly deadly without being purely whimsical. For my money, they come across as far more interesting and usable than things like the Space Alien tech.

The third and final section of the book consists of two unevenly sized sub-sections. The first is a percentile table of mutations that characters or creatures might gain as a result of being exposed to the weird radiation of Carcosa. These mutations are almost wholly deleterious in nature. The second sub-section is a hex-by-hex gazetteer of the map included in the book's centerfold. Each and every one of the 400 10-mile hexes included on the map gets at least a short entry -- "12 mosasaurs with transparent skin" or "Village of 310 Green Men rules by 'the Jade Emperor,' a neutral Myrmidon" -- and many include much lengthier ones. It's here, I think, that Carcosa really shines, because what McKinney has done is present to us a dark and mysterious alien world, fraught with danger and damnation -- and all through a series of succinct, spartan entries that leave plenty to the imagination of the individual referee.

Even more remarkable, to my mind, is that Carcosa doesn't feel quite like any of its obvious inspirations; instead, it is very much its own world, even if it does recall Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique and Hyperborea, Lovecraft's Dreamlands, Howard's Hyborian Age, and even the Silver Age comics of Jack Kirby (among others). To call it a pastiche doesn't quite do it justice, but to say that it is wholly original would also be inappropriate. If I had to single out a virtue of this book it's this: the ability to call to mind a myriad of pulp fantasy influences without aping any one of them in particular. That makes Carcosa seem at once familiar and original -- quite the feat after so many years of gaming supplements having been published!

What is unfortunate, though, is that this same approach wasn't applied as consistently to the presentation and content of the other two sections of the book, which frequently suffer from being much too imitative and derivative of OD&D and its supplements but without the soul that animated those creations. That is, Carcosa knows all the words to the old school songs, but it can't carry the tunes. That's not intended to be a dismissal of the book, but I do think it's important to realize that, even without the contentious questions I'll take up in Part 3 tomorrow, Carcosa is a flawed, problematic work. It's a bold but uneven book and I suspect that has probably benefitted unduly from its notoreity. By that I mean that, had controversy not swirled around Carcosa since before it was even published -- not that I was aware of this, parochial eremite that I am -- I doubt it would have been lauded as highly as it has been. I rather suspect that at least some of its boosters do so out of a sense that they're standing up for some important principle or other.

I won't address the question until Part 4, but I'll say now that I don't think Carcosa is a well-executed enough product to be worthy either of comparisons to the original OD&D supplements or of denunciation as if it were one of the most despicable RPG products ever written. It is, I think, a book bubbling with the naive enthusiasm of a college freshman reading Plato for the first time and believing he now has deep insights into life, the universe, and everything. There is merit in that enthusiasm, not least of all a reminder of things we jaded older men might have forgotten in the years since we were naively enthusiastic about something. But there is also ignorance and foolishness and I don't think it's improper to dwell on these flaws, particularly in light of how it has been received in many quarters.

REVIEW: Carcosa (Part 1 of 4)

Although I am occasionally long-winded, I have never before written a multi-part review. But then I have never before reviewed a product that's elicited reactions as strong as those directed toward Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa. Calling itself a "book of rules options for the original fantasy role-playing game published in 1974," Carcosa is a staple-bound 96-page book modeled on the little brown books of OD&D. McKinney even boldly calls the book "Supplement V," a move that's aroused almost as much comment as its content.

In this first part, I won't be speaking about the content of Carcosa except obliquely. Instead, I'm going to make a few things clear, both about the subsequent parts of this review and the reasons why I am writing it. Let me tackle the second part first: why am I writing this? First and foremost I am writing this review because, like its content or not, Carcosa is a major product of the old school renaissance. Nothing quite like it, either in subject matter or scope, has yet been attempted; that alone makes it worthy of my attention. Secondly, the controversy surrounding the book's content is also worthy of comment. I've said many times that the old school community is small, niche-y, and rather staid. When something comes along that stirs up the pot, for good or for ill, I don't think it ought to pass without discussion. Finally, I think it'd be irresponsible of me to duck reviewing Carcosa. The fact is that I rarely refrain from weighing in on topics of interest to the old school community, but I largely did in this case. Rather than risk offending someone, I abstained from saying much of anything. I regret that decision and am now stepping up to do what I ought to have done several weeks ago.

The remaining three parts of this review will each touch upon a different aspect of Carcosa in some depth. Part 2 (appearing November 5, 2008) will examine the non-controversial portions of the book and evaluate them in the context of OD&D and the larger old school renaissance. Part 3 (appearing November 6, 2008) will discuss sorcerous rituals, the section of Carcosa that's at the heart of the controversy surrounding it. Part 4 (appearing November 7, 2008) will be my conclusions about the book, the controversy it generated, and what it all means for the old school community. I've chosen to take my time in reviewing Carcosa, because, from what I have witnessed, it's a book that practically invites caricature, both by those who love it and those who hate it. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that I believe Carcosa to be flawed book, chief among its flaws being its presentation, which, in my opinion, goes too far in imitating the form of its illustrious predecessors without also imitating the ethos that informed them. In the interests of evenhandedness, however, I want to be sure there are no misunderstandings about what Carcosa is and is not, as well as what it contains and does not contain.

As to its content, my review will be of the expurgated version. I have read both versions of Carcosa and I will occasionally make broad references to how the two versions differ. However, I will not go into any detail, since I wish to make this review as palatable to as many readers as possible. As I have already noted, discussions regarding Carcosa are already quite heated as it is and I have no interest in contributing to the acrimony. My goal here is to be as dispassionate as possible, while at the same time being as critical as possible. Whatever else it is, Carcosa is firstly a roleplaying game supplement and my review will proceed from that assumption, even if I will often make digressions into other areas. My feeling, though, is that neither praise nor condemnation of Carcosa is reasonable without first carefully examining its actual contents and I intend to do just that in the next two parts of this review.

A word of warning: I know that many people have expressed strong negative feelings about Carcosa, its author, or both on other blogs and other forums. Again, I don't believe I am giving anything away by saying that I too have expressed strong misgivings about the unexpurgated version of the book. That said, I believe that one can express one's dislike of something without descending into irrational vituperation. Consequently, I will not tolerate such behavior in my comments. Feel free to express your considered opinions of anything I've written in my review, but please do so in an intelligent, respectful manner. Anything less than that and I will delete your comments. I see no justification for ungentlemanly behavior here, regardless of what one thinks of the book. If one is unable to comport oneself appropriately, then I ask that one refrain from reading these entries or commenting on them. Thanks in advance.

Update: I didn't want to have to do this, but it's already pretty clear to me that allowing comments at all was a mistake. I've already had to delete several comments that didn't abide by my instructions and I anticipate that there will be more before too long. It's a pity and a shame, because I had hoped this extensive review would be an occasion for discussion, but such is not to be. Henceforth, neither this entry nor parts 2-4 will allow comments. I may consider reopening comments on these posts at a future date, but that won't be for some time. Comments will remain open on other entries. If anyone decides to use other entries as an opportunity to comment on anything relating to Carcosa when it is clearly not relevant in my opinion, I will delete your comments and, very likely, any future comments you make on any other post for a very long time. I am intensely disappointed at how quickly things took a turn for the worse here and I will not tolerate it further.

You have been warned.