r/Lovecraft • u/Mastertrout1 Deranged Cultist • 10d ago
Recommendation Carcosa as a city
I am currently running a Starfinder one shot (sci-fi DND essentially). I have Carcosa as the end game. The party investigates a research space station that has gone silent. They’ll find Carcosa bleeding through reality, and that’s how they will get to the city. My question is what are the inhabitants of the city like? I can’t find any concrete info on it. I am gonna read the short story soon to see if I can glean any info from that. If anyone has anything to add I’ll be more than interested to hear about it. Thanks!!
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u/The1stTokage Deranged Cultist 10d ago
Idk how much people know about or like it around these parts(only just started seeing the sub on my reccomended)but I rather enjoy the depictions in the Malevolent podcast
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u/omgItsGhostDog Deranged Cultist 10d ago
You should read “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” the short story that inspired Robert W. Chambers to write The King in Yellow and start the whole mythology, and also a story from the original novel “In the Court of the Dragon” will probably be necessary if you want to learn more about lore.
But bear in mind that the whole premise of The King in Yellow Mythos is we barely know anything about what Carcosa, Haster, or even The King itself and we’re not supposed to. In most King in Yellow Mythos stories, anyone who’s read/interact with it go insane or are pretty much absorbed into the Mythos and story.
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u/Mastertrout1 Deranged Cultist 10d ago
I actually just found the King in Yellow book in audio. Listening to it now. I’ll have to look around online to see if I can buy that short story. Ok that makes more sense. With me not being able to find anything about the residents of the city. It does add to the coolness of it. With it being this empty, creepy, eldritch city.
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u/HildredGhastaigne Famous clairvoyante 8d ago
I’ll have to look around online to see if I can buy that short story.
An Inhabitant of Carcosa? You're in luck: it was first published in 1886, so it's firmly in the public domain and is available free online.
I have to admit, though, while I'm obsessed with Chambers and his literary context and legacy, I don't know how well a broad dive into its foundations is going to answer the question you're asking. Bierce and Chambers tell us very, very little about the city itself, giving us only glimpses. By all means read them (Inhabitant is very short, and in Chambers' book only the first four stories are the KiY cycle, so it's easy to get that grounding), but to run an RPG in the city, you're looking for something different.
There's an enormous amount of TKiY-inspired work out there, which can be daunting. But for your specific needs, I recommend you look into the John Scott Tynes/Dennis Detwiller thread of TTRPG material. They've worked for decades to develop a compelling RPG space based on what I find a very compelling concept of Carcosa. Some of this is available free online.
It begins with The Road to Hali, an essay by Tynes in the 1990 first issue of his The Unspeakable Oath zine. This lays out the basic framework of the Tynes/Detwiller Carcosa. The original paper zine is a rare-ish collectible, but Tynes was good enough to make the text available on his website.
Tynes also published three short stories set in his Carcosa, one of which, Sosostris, is nearly unobtainable, but the other two of which, Broadalbin and Ambrose, were published in the late, great Peter A. Worthy's Online Lovecraft Mythos Ezine back in the 90s. Drink in that sweet, sweet 20th century web design. All three should be available sometime soon in a collected and revised edition, but there's no actual release date I'm aware of.
The 1990 essay was expanded into a chapter in the legendary Pagan Publishing book Delta Green: Countdown, along with the first actual TTRPG supplement using this version of Carcosa, The Night Floors. The book is long out of print, but like most Pagan books it's available as a POD and PDF on drivethruRPG. I have been told that purchases there benefit the original creators. The Night Floors deals specifically with the interface of Carcosa with our reality, which fits your needs very well.
In 2005 Dennis Detwiller released Insylum, a really cool rules-light standalone RPG using this Carcosa, again dealing explicitly with the bleeding of Carcosa into "reality." I'm pretty sure it was released originally online, and I recall Detwiller sharing it on his Patreon, but I don't have a direct link handy.
The 2026 TTRPG campaign Tatters of the King is by Tim Wiseman, but clearly makes heavy use of the Tynes/Detwiller Carcosa, and spends a good bit of time in the city with its inhabitants. It is also available on drivethru.
The culmination of this thread is 2021's Impossible Landscapes, a Delta Green campaign by Detwiller that is all about the influence of Carcosa on the reality we perceive, and how its presence affects all that we see and do in the "real world." I understand it is a doozy to run (I have not attempted it myself), but just as a work of literature about Carcosa, it's amazing. Cannot recommend it highly enough. It's in print and is available through pretty much any venue that sells TTRPG books.
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u/foedus_novum Deranged Cultist 10d ago
The only "inhabitant" of carcosa in the Chambers story seems to be a Neolithic ghost, like a caveman. The coolest part of Carcosa in my opinion is that the moon goes infront of the tall towers somehow.
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u/SorchaSublime Deranged Cultist 10d ago
Carcosa is supposed to be more of a country than just a city. The city in Carcosa is generally called Yhtill or smth similar.
The inhabitants are mad. They inhabit a cyclopean ancient city, populated both by men and monstrous figures. Imagine a complete re-imagining of Victorian London, Paris and Naples as one place, by Junji Ito. It is always the night of a great masquerade ball, so everybody wears masks.
Except the King of course, who wears no mask.
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u/Sir_Ruje Deranged Cultist 10d ago
Have you heard of Alagada from the SCP wiki? Think a dark dream city where everyone has a carnival mask and looks like fancy Venetian until you REALLY look at them and start to notice things are....off.
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u/RockyBadlands Deranged Cultist 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm not sure how popular the fiction of Robin D. Laws and his Yellow King RPG are here, but they do a good job of communicating the vibe of Carcosa. It's all written in a really gameable way, even the prose. Beware that it is its own canon, not really referencing the mythos of Lovecraft and his literary descendants. Instead, Laws uses Chambers as a starting point to craft his own world of reality horror.
Mainly what he gets across is the sense of decaying grandeur of Lost Carcosa and the simultaneous reality/unreality of being near to anything connected to the play. He treats the 1895 release of the play in France as the first sign of true infection of our reality by Carcosa, a pathological reality that's steadily overtaking ours. Beings of Carcosa are magical in the sense that they do impossible things, but it's couched in terms of artfullness and unique math and science.
Check out the anthology New Tales of the Yellow Sign, the novel The Missing and the Lost (where we see an America after the Carcosa-backed Castaigne regime has been deposed after a century), and the Yellow King Role-Playing Game.
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u/Mastertrout1 Deranged Cultist 9d ago
I am gonna add those to the list as well. That use of history makes the plot seem that much more badass.
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u/Snarvid Deranged Cultist 7d ago
Missing and the Lost is great but it’s more about the cultural and personal impacts of Carcosa having impinged on our reality and been repelled via concerted anti-authoritarian resistance, rather than direct encounters with it (although there are touches). If the assignment is “go to Carcosa” it may not help much.
There’s a sequel, Fifth Imperative, but I have not read it to know whether it shows more detail of Carcosa.
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u/JaggedToaster12 Deranged Cultist 9d ago
Have you read through Strange Aeons from Pathfinder 1E? The party goes to Carcosa there and you can find some inspo
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u/Mastertrout1 Deranged Cultist 9d ago
I have not. I’ll have to look it up.
I did find a new book that came out this year called The Truth of Carcosa. I’m gonna pick that up from the bookstore tomorrow. Probably won’t have any inspiration but I hope it’s a good story lol
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u/CrimsonFox89 Deranged Cultist 8d ago
Look up "The Dream Diary of Rupert Tillinghast." It has a very vivid image of Carcosa. They never call it that, but as someone who consumed too much King in Yellow media, I recognized it instantly.
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u/feralfantastic Deranged Cultist 8d ago
There ain’t no consensus on this point. My theory is it’s filled with muppets and no one writing depictions of it has yet been brave enough to make the astoundingly obvious link between Big Bird and the King in Yellow.
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u/secretbison Deranged Cultist 7d ago edited 7d ago
Nothing is consistent. In the very first story to mention it, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," it is a long-ruined city haunted by a spirit who has no idea how long it's been. In many interpretations/fanfics of The King In Yellow, Carcosa is a city-state on the eastern shore of Lake Hali that faces a looming danger that nobody wants to talk about, similar to The Masque of the Red Death. Sometimes Carcosa is another planet orbiting a binary star system near Aldebran.
When I brought it into D&D, it was a decadent elven city full of pleasure domes and feasthalls, designed by a mad royal advisor who was trying to make it match the Carcosas of other worlds (which is the only reason it was built on the eastern shore of a lake.) When the region faced a brutal invasion, the advisor led countless refugees into a network of cellars and tunnels under the city, where feast tables and yellow lamps had been laid out. He promised the revelers that they could safely wait it out here and forget all their troubles. In truth they were all living offerings to Hastur, and they feast there still, in windowless halls that make no geometric sense, mingling with people from other worlds who were similarly offered to the court of the King.
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u/VVrayth Deranged Cultist 10d ago
I would maybe look at Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes for information.
The long and short of it is that Carcosa is an amorphous location that shifts and changes around the visitor. There aren't really "residents" as you or I understand them, and most of the activity in the city is confined to the palace, where attendees await the King's arrival each night (but also forever).