It Begins

Well, what's this?  What showed up at my house yesterday?

Something from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, you say?  Well, let's take a look.

Oh yeah.  That looks like a Carcosa.

Easy...

It's wrapped in the canvas map that you got for an extra five euros.  I was planning on getting the map to actually use it, but I'll probably frame the bastard.  It's a good-looking map.

Oh that's neat!  One of the other extras is a little cheatsheet tying the rituals, creatures, and hexes together.

And it has another map on the reverse!  I haven't even opened the book and this is already awesome.

It's Jeff Rients' Periodic Table of Carcosa!  As in Paranoia, the different elements and different colors of laser do different things, and Jeff Rients made a little graphical summary.  It's fun with the Newtonian color spectrum!

And there it is.

There it is.  As noted elsewhere, it's a damn pretty book.  It wouldn't be out of place in a library.

A typical sample of the layout and artwork.  In retrospect, I probably should have picked a page other than Species 23750 burrowing out of someone's cadaver, but that's just the way things go in grim Carcosa.

I know Mr. Raggi had some trouble getting the layout to work, but it was worth the wait.  I'd say —

Wait, what?  I don't remember ordering you...

Yup.  This is Isle of the Unknown.  It's done by Geoffrey McKinney (the same guy who did Carcosa).  The format is similar to the location writeups in Carcosa, but this is an island sandbox chock full of stuff.  Awesome as a setting in its own right, a random place to visit, or a good thing for when that wavecrawl goes wrong and you suddenly need a location for the ship to wreck.

The map on the inside of the book.

An example of the layout: hex listings with some illustrations pertinent to the subject matter.  For example, this hex is full of, um, aquatic hedgehogs with snakelegs.  Wait, what?

(For the record, that's exactly what those are; they have a gaze attack that weakens victims, and can turn into swordfish.  What did you expect?  It's the Isle of the Unknown, not the Isle of a Bunch of Stuff You've Seen Before.)

I'll chug through this and write about it when I have a spare moment, as I was hoping to lay my hands on it and serendipity found it here.  This pretty much cements the fact that I'm going to pick up a copy of LotFP: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying.

Incidentally, I wrote a little thing about the unadulterated gonzo awesome that is Carcosa, but don't take it from me.  Go read more on your own.  While you're waiting for me to get around to that Isle of the Unknown review, you can read some of those, too.

And as long as you're buying those things (because you totally will), go have a look at Vornheim: The Complete City Kit.  It's good for you!

Also, I found this fan-made addendum to Carcosa over at Teleleli, so why not increase your knowledge base?