So Carcosa: lots of good ideas, lots of weird ideas, and lots of regretful decisions.

I could have done without the squick. And the hexes in the crawl oscillated between great and pointless. And probably a lot of the "roll a D20 to determine how to roll your other dice in a neverending cascade of what" should have been cut.
Anyway.

Point is I've got blueballs for a really good Martian-chronicles-meets-Lovecraft kind of 'crawl. I'm left looking at this gorgeous 400-point hexcrawl map and thinking: "Yeah I could crowdsource this"

So it's my birthday and I want to do.... Something, with the inspiration that Carcosa gave me. Here's some points:
•   I like the idea of learning rituals to do magic stuff. Like, "Go to this temple in this hex, sacrifice a monster you found in a different hex, and you get to summon some horrible Cthulhu beast". (Leaving the squick at the door, and just doing the completely not objectionable dark magic.)
•   I'm thinking anybody can learn these rituals. Why should MU's get all the jollies?
•   I want to do B/X because ACKS.
•   I've been convinced that even thief might be extraneous. Maybe just ACKs fighter and mage?
•   Barsoom-meets-Lovecraft-meets-Moebius-meets-Carcosa setting. Swords and nudity and fat white alien larva.

400 point Hexcrawl folks. Let's see how many we can come up with.

And feel free to do the awesome thing that Carcosa did: "You get the Thing in this hex, but have to go to this other hex to use it". I love that.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]729[/ATTACH]

Stuff you could do:
•   Hex description!
•   Simple dungeon!
•   Weird monster!
•   Magical ritual! (What it needs, what it does, where you do it)
•   Random table!
•   Magic or weird science item!

Go nuts. I want all your strangest. And remember: nothing is too bizarre for pulp not-mars.

Happy Birthday!

Have you seen these Carcosa resources?

http://carcosa.totalpartykill.ca/random/

https://plus.google.com/communities/111842077476924201944/stream/81e8597c-107b-416c-8d61-9fd97f5f5e64

https://sites.google.com/site/hyadianschismchaosincarcosa/home/-hex-maps

https://thedoomedworldcarcosa.wordpress.com/

Happy birthday!

Hex 0011:
Above Ground: A castle inhabited by 42 black men lead by a 5th level fighter of lawful alignment named "The Magna of Illusion". The men are not aware of the secret door in their castle's basement leading down down to subterranean ruins.
Under Ground: Deep within the snake man ruins there is a vault that holds an otherworldly treasure; a grand piano quantum-entangled to an identical such piano located on the planted Earth in a Virginia home in the Earth year of 1873 AD. Playing a tune on one of these pianos causes an identical tune to play on the other. Destroying one of these pianos likewise destroys the other.

Happy Birthday!

Hex :

A crater that upon closer inspection is created out of adobe, without straw. Several bricks have (craftman?) seals reminiscent of the Face on Mars, (even though that original image has been thoroughly disproven to be a trick of the light). The impact peak in the center is a small pagoda-shaped building with a bricked well going deeper...
The long-time Martian Earth colonists deliberately go silent, spit, and walk away mad when this location is brought up.

Sapient Native Martian Quirk:

Utter fear of flowering plants. When questioned their terror repeats, "It's going to enslave me! Spare me its pleasures!"

Dark Ritual:

Planting a seed by a canal and watering it. Mostly roots grow over time; very tiny leaves, if at all. A strange sense of accomplishment & tenderness fills the caster, desiring to water the roots routinely. This will build into homocidal monomania over a Martian year's time.

Good luck with this. It couldn't turn out worse than Carcosa.  Well, actually it couldn't turn out worse than Isle of the Unknown, which was worse than Carcosa.

My problem with Carcosa is that it shouldn't be named Carcosa. It's like a parody of Lin Carter's sword & sorcery pastiches (and Lin Carter ia already awful to begin with) more than anything else.

Carcosa (by Chambers) is surreal, not silly. Eerie, not goofy. Decadent, not tacky. Not many authors can do it justice. Hell, Chambers couldn't do much of it (or found it easier to writer popular drek).

Yeah I expected Carcosa to be influenced by Chambers but I din't see much evidence of that. I've seen some CoC supplements with Carcosa in the title are they more in the spirit of Chambers?

Quote from: JeremyR;950598Carcosa (by Chambers) is surreal, not silly. Eerie, not goofy. Decadent, not tacky.

It's the line between "weird" and "gonzo" - thus deeply dependent on how the GM presents setting elements.

Gonzo goes silly while Weird can go become disturbing horror.

Which is better for your group, depends on...your group.

Hex ???1:

An otherwise unnoticeable basin in a Mare, except that all Martian sandstorms go around or 30' over it. A settlement arose in the SE corner taking advantage of the shelter. They avoid analog radio transmission because of "the constant whispers."

Quote from: RPGPundit;950593Good luck with this. It couldn't turn out worse than Carcosa.  Well, actually it couldn't turn out worse than Isle of the Unknown, which was worse than Carcosa.

What's the deal with Carcosa? I only hear people mention it vaguely.

Personal opinion, neat ideas, meh execution. I wouldn't say it's bad personally it just sort of left a lot to be desired. The idea of a pseudo-Lovecraftian science fantasy story set on a distant planet is great. However I personally think it went a bit silly in trying to capture the feel, particularly with the rituals involved in the magic system. There also just wasn't a lot of meat there. Tons of hexes on a map with incredibly sparse description.

I unironically like Lin Carter. He had a very pure love of fantasy as a genre and he wrote in a way that makes that love contagious. Even his really "bad" stuff (And he could get pretty hacky and purple) is still fun as a guilty pleasure.

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HEX ____: The cave-complex of the vile wizard Skumcrown and his dark elf lover Hateflower. For years they lorded over a mob of mutants and cannibals, using the caves as a base from which to periodically terrorize the entire region.

And it all ended yesterday, when a party of "Heroes" raided the dungeon and slew everything in it. The wizard and his minions are all dead (Skumcrown was doused in lamp oil and set on fire while bound and gagged, Hateflower was gang-raped and had her throat slit while her lover was forced to watch). The caves have been ransacked, the treasures looted, the secret doors kicked in, the traps disarmed and the walls blasted and sometimes even collapsed by high-level spells. The place is a wreck, ravaged as only jaded high-level dungeon-crawlers can ravage.

However, if the PCs don't mind “Sloppy seconds”, there is still loot to be seized here: First, there are 3, 785 CP and 7, 863 bronze pieces (each worth ½ CP) just laying around the various corpse-strewn rooms (The adventurers only had so much room for loot and gave more precious coins priority).

Second, there is a secret treasure room that the adventurers actually missed. The PCs should discover it only after a very thorough inspection and careful searching. The secret room contains two traps, one in the secret door to the treasure room and the other in the room itself: Trap #1 sprays out a 10' x 10' cloud of flesh-eating bacteria suspended in an aerosol mist (Save v. poison (disease) or slowly die over one day in the most horrible manner imaginable. Also, the disease is contagious). Trap #2 sprays out a jet of acid-coated glass shards at eye-level (save v. breath weapon or be permanently blinded and disfigured. Only affects those who are 5' to 7' feet tall). Inside the room are chests containing 2, 563 GP and 4, 777 SP, a magical veil with an illusion effect that allows a woman to pass as any other woman 1/day (it only works for a woman, and it only works against men), a magical talking mirror that will endlessly flatter it's owner, a potion of animal control (felines), and a disturbing 50 lbs. marble statuette of a child being devoured by a pig (200 GP value, but it won't be easy to find a buyer among decent folk).

Quote from: JeremyR;950598My problem with Carcosa is that it shouldn't be named Carcosa. It's like a parody of Lin Carter's sword & sorcery pastiches (and Lin Carter ia already awful to begin with) more than anything else.

Carcosa (by Chambers) is surreal, not silly. Eerie, not goofy. Decadent, not tacky. Not many authors can do it justice. Hell, Chambers couldn't do much of it (or found it easier to writer popular drek).

Yes, that is one serious problem among its many, many problems.

Quote from: JeremyR;950598My problem with Carcosa is that it shouldn't be named Carcosa. It's like a parody of Lin Carter's sword & sorcery pastiches (and Lin Carter ia already awful to begin with) more than anything else.

Carcosa (by Chambers) is surreal, not silly. Eerie, not goofy. Decadent, not tacky. Not many authors can do it justice. Hell, Chambers couldn't do much of it (or found it easier to writer popular drek).

I don't think it's too much to ask that the setting, dungeons and relics be Chambers while the monsters, adventures and characters are Carter. Inject a little pulp into all that dreadful mystery.

Thanks everybody thus far. I'm especially impressed with the Carcosa resource links: my cup runneth over!

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;950993What's the deal with Carcosa? I only hear people mention it vaguely.

Short version: it sucks.

Long version: it sucks bad.

I'd rather not go into details further than that, it's really stupendously shitty.