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That said, I rather doubt that I'd be setting my game in Carcosa.
The Book
I'm working from the PDF version available on DriveThru, so I can't speak to the book's physical qualities. That said, it's a nice PDF. Coming in at around 275 pages, it's well laid-out, contains plenty of black-and-white art that's at least as good as any you'd find in a Moldvay-era boxed set, and makes good use of PDF technology: it's fully bookmarked, and extensively hyperlinked, with each hex of the large map that serves as something of a centerpiece of the product linked to its own description in the text. Frankly, I'd like to see more PDFs assembled this way.
The Setting
Here's where they start to lose me. The Introduction section tells us that Carcosa is "a planet 153 light years away from Earth, orbiting a star in the Hyades Cluster." And that's just about it, setting-wise. "You will not find within long-winded histories or encyclopedic descriptions of countries, forests, and rivers. Instead, the world of Carcosa is presented as a numbered hex map filled with 800 encounters and the rules to use them," they tell us. And while I'm not averse to the DIY aspects of gaming, given the somewhat kitchen-sink nature of what we are shown, I would have liked to have seen more of how all of this might fit together.
We have serpent-men, who apparently created the 13 races of men so that they'd have the right flavor when sacrifice-time came around. The serpent-men are extinct, but have been replaced as the horror du jour by Cthulhu and pals, who have populated the planet with their unnamable spawn. Add to the mix an invasion by a race of 50s era, theremin-playing space aliens, and we start to spin a bit out of control.
What we end up with are dinosaur-riding sorcerous cavemen exploring ancient ruins and pursuing the Greys for their nifty rocket launchers while being pursued in turn by Nyarlathotep and some undead mummies.
Why? Fuck you, that's why.
The strange vague nature of the setting only seems to get worse when you start looking at the descriptions of the hexes on the campaign map. Looking at hex 1507, for example, we're told that "on a lifeless island of black stone stands the alien city of Carcosa." So, "unkowable to Men" serpent-man alien? Non-Euclidean Cthulhu-style alien? Invaders-from-Space alien? We don't know, because that one line is all we get about the city of Carcosa. One could say that the beauty of the setting is that it allows me to answer these questions for myself. One could also say that that's what I paid the writer $21 to do for me.
Being given ideas is great; being given ideas that are so scattershot and random that one practically has to rewrite the setting in order for it to make sense, thus negating the primary reason that one buys a premade setting in the first place, is perhaps not so great.
The System
This is where the wheels come off this ride; the rules presented for playing Carcosa with LotFP pretty much negate all of the good work that Raggi has done to create that lean, clean BX clone I described when I started this review.
The largest chunk of system by far is the "Dice Conventions" section, which basically boils down to "all of the dice you roll will be random in every conceivable way."
Determining hit points involves rolling to see what type of dice you get for that combat, rolling those dice, and using those as your hit point pool. These dice stay in front of you as the combat progresses, so you better have a lot of every type. And the whole thing is rerolled for every combat. Example: Your 6th-level fighter is going into combat, so you roll his hit points for that combat. First, you determine the die type - a d4 for you this time. So you roll 6d4 and end up with 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3. He loses 9 hit points in the combat, reducing him to 3 hit dice (you remove them from highest to lowest). The next combat comes around, and again you roll for hit dice. He only has three left, but this time you get lucky, and determine his hit points with d12s: 12, 11, 12. Yes, your character is at half his hit dice, and now has almost six times as many hit points as he had at the end of the last combat.
Weapon damage is handled in a similar way, with the player rolling for the type of die used before rolling that die for damage. This tends to negate even the most basic of tactical decisions; sacrificing a shield to carry a two-handed weapon is pointless, for example, because there's no guarantee that you won't get stuck rolling d4s for damage for the entire combat. The same goes for monsters, and there's nothing saying that what was projected to be a bloody encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex won't turn into a laugh-fest as the DM is unable to roll better than d4s for its damage.
The two character class options that the rules present are fighter and sorcerer, a new class that involves engaging in all manner of lurid rituals in order to summon, bind, or dismiss various Lovecraftian entities. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to play a fighter; sorcerers get just as many hit dice as fighters, attack with the same bonuses as fighters, can use the same equipment as fighters, have better saving throws than fighters, and get to cast all of those fun blasphemous rituals. It's true that they need more experience points to advance from level to level, but of course, if everyone was playing one, there wouldn't necessarily be that much of a "level gap." The introduction states that the specialist class can be used without throwing the game off too much; I'd say it's practically a necessity, simply to keep characters from looking like monochromatic copies of each other.
The psionics rules presented are about as random as the hit dice and weapon damage. Characters with a high enough Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (or a combination of the three) have a chance to "be psionic." That said, they don't really "get" psionic powers; every game day, the GM rolls to determine how many powers the character has access to, and then randomly determines what those powers are. So, again, there's no real way to plan or shape a character around psionics; he either has them or doesn't, and if he does, it's anyone's guess as to what they do in any given instance.
The Conclusion
I have to give McKinney and Raggi points for effort. I've always wanted to see a game that dealt with all of the strange and terrible places that Lovecraft's works talked about, but that games like Call of Cthulhu never covered. There's a big ol' Mythos-infested galaxy out there ready to be explored, full of reptilian insects and forbidden libraries and obscene fungi, and I wanted this to be the game that launched that exploration. Unfortunately, what they ended up with is so random in every conceivable way that it's tough to know where to begin untangling it, and the effort of doing so may not be worth the return.
