In my opinion, Carcosa is a mediocre supplement. Mostly because writing is rather poor and uninteresting.
That list of rituals? It's tedious and boring. I mean it. Sacrificing little girls was it's only saving grace, as it made me curious what degeneration will come up next, but I still only managed to read half of it. On the expurgated version, I only bothered with few first. In other words, in my opinion, the brutality here is used as an excuse for writing actually interesting and well designed spell list. In fact, in a controversial opinion - I'd even say that if the rituals just focused on the transgressive parts, adding one or two of the reagents to the mix, they'd be perfect. Instead, we are drowned in the tedious shopping lists, which showcase ideally the trouble that I meant in the first sentence - when I read expurgated version, I didn't even bother reading those long lists of rituals - so in other words, the controversial material was the only reason for them being interesting. That should be changed.
On the contrary - the interesting section is actually the monstrous ones. We have the classic Mythos Crew 1930s, with special rules and descriptions from Lovecraft quoted on them - nice touch. They are ridiculously powerful, as they should be. Later on - we have a lot of new monsters, we have also some Lovecraftian ones (with descriptions quoted from original again), some monsters have more or less bizarre and interesting rules how to kill it. That part of the book is probably the one worth buying this supplement, if you want to sick some Mythos monsters on your players.
The final part of the book - the world design, is well, rather...specific, to say at best. It's but a list of encounters that correspond with each hex on the map. I guess it makes the Carcosa both a very detailed, and a very not so detailed world at the time, since all the fluff we need to pick up from ritual, monster and PC descriptions. Attention to the detail is certainly noteworthy - a pity that the author did not bother with describing perhaps the lifestyle of humans of Carcosa, and cut down on some of those recipes.
Because as you may had noticed, the main problem with Carcosa, is not controversy, but overdetailing that drowns it out, and mediocre quality it masks. The entire island is detailed down to a single encounter, save for some random encounte- oh wait, there's no random encounter table. Does that mean we're supposed to drawn our own, or that the author desires no such things to be in the world of Carcos? I will give credit for the former- but with the design of this supplement like this, I highly suspect the latter. The mutation table, however, is a nice touch.
Now, to finish this review, let's go back to the start for a moment. The player creation is rather simple - you have two classes, Fighting Man and Sorcerer, whose balance would give today's balance fanatics in RPGs a stroke. Some additional fluff for the world is also found at the beginning, again, only as a description of the only player race - in fact, any fluff you will find in this supplement, is only next to descriptions of things. However, the part of the beginning chapter of the Carcosa is what baffles me the most - the rules for rolling dice when playing Carcosa.
Now, I did not play OD&D, so perhaps you were supposed to roll dice for your hit points before each fight - but why, why do I have to first roll a die to determine what die I will roll for my hitpoints and later, my damage? This seems like a very, very overcomplicated design, and the reason of "So the players never know the true toughness of the monster" is not a good enough to complicate the lives of poor players.
In my opinion, Carcosa could had been a great supplement, detailing a weird, terrifying world. Instead, the mediocre, overdetailed design combined with only decent writing and somewhat unnecessary controversial descriptions of the rituals, condemned what could be a great supplement into obscurity.
You call the book mediocre, but you rate it a 1. Are you sure about the rating? The review seems that it should be upward of 3-4.
Yes, I'm wondering about that too. 1? What gives?
...I misclicked when I posted this, and I thought there was no rating system >.>. Heck, I thought I'd be unable to upload thumbnail neither.
Can anyone edit that? If the ratings are 1 - 6 I'd give it a 3+/4- (so maybe just 3), if 1 - 10, I think 6/6+ would be deserved.
It's on a 10 scale, so 6.
Fixed
Thank you very much, and sorry for trouble - technology vanquished me here.
Um. This review sorta reads like a response to another review. It assumes rather too much of the reader with regards to familiarity.
Constructive criticism, stones and glass houses, you know...
Quote from: Spike;499898Um. This review sorta reads like a response to another review. It assumes rather too much of the reader with regards to familiarity.
Constructive criticism, stones and glass houses, you know...
I do presume that with the controversy that Carcosa caused in the hobby, someone will at least hear about it before, before reading this. And even if not, I hope there's just some actual material here, to make your decision if you want to buy it, or not.