I want to like *Carcosa* and I sort of wish I could run a campaign there. But perhaps that’s simply my imagination on fire and fueled by reading too many of those old Planet Algol session reports. Check out the sidebar section “ALGOL ADVENTURES”. Planet Algol was the best.
Anyway, have you ran Carcosa or played in it? What did you think?
James Maliszewski reviewed the revised edition back in 2012 and had reviewed it in four parts back in 2018 (1 2 3 4).
The reason my thoughts are returning to Carcosa is that I stumbled upon a review on *How Heavy This Axe*, Running Carcosa, where Dominic laments some shortcomings of the book. He says he’s not sure he liked it. He had to work hard to make it work. Yeah, I think I can see that. I also ended up both disappointed in the sparseness of the *Wilderlands of High Fantasy* and happy to be able to fill it with my own stuff, the map the few words provided to me working as scaffolding, something to inspire me, but not something ready to use by itself. As such, it barely “enabled” the campaign but didn’t really help reduce prep time.
Anyway, I still want to run a campaign in a setting where I can put Space-Age Sorcery to use.
#RPG #Old School #Carcosa
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I ran it for about a year or so. If you scroll back through the Carcosa tag on my blog you can see all my old posts about doing so. I am a big fan of the whole setting, warts and all.
– Ramanan 2019-03-18 20:04 UTC
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Hah, right! I *think* I’ve read your entire blog (with the exception of the Warhammer posts, perhaps) and now it comes back to me. Gotta go back and reread! When I read Carcosa and Canon I just nodded along as I read the Geoffrey McKinney quotes.
One day I will return to reading forums. Like the Carcosa forum.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-18 20:21 UTC
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Heh, how strange. Just now Dungeons and Possums reviews Carcosa. Where does the sudden theme come from?
Dungeons and Possums reviews Carcosa
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-18 22:16 UTC
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I remember reading Carcosa back when it came out. At the time, I was playing 4e but somehow I stumbled across it and it intrigued me enough to pick up the PDF.
I put a fair amount of work into prepping a campaign that never ended up happening.
Anyhow, all that to say I’m happy to see that people are still thinking and talking about it.
– Matt L 2019-03-19 01:18 UTC
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Did you change your mind, or did your players not want to play in Carcosa? Or was the cancellation due to other reasons?
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-19 06:15 UTC
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I moved to another city before getting the campaign rolling. I’d still love to do a Carcosa game at some point.
– Matt L 2019-03-19 13:08 UTC