Editing Carcosa

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'''Carcosa''' is a name with a very long history amongst fans of [[horror]] and [[Dark Fantasy]], most relevant to /tg/ for three major reasons.

==Carcosa in Weird Fiction==
The name Carcosa debuted in 1886, in the short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce. Believed to take its name from the Latin name for the Medieval Southern France city of Carcassonne, it is described only in passing and in hindsight by the protagonist, a former denizen of Carcosa, and what little we are told in this tale is that it is an ancient, mysterious city.

Carcosa began cementing its place in the canon of Weird Fiction when, in 1895, Robert W. Chambers appropriate the name for his horror fiction universe, making up the short stories in the anthology "The King in Yellow", which all revolved around the same cursed play. In these places, Carcosa is a mysterious, ancient, possibly cursed place, tied into the production of the titular play "The King in Yellow". The most concrete description of it that players are ever given is that it sits on the shores of Lake Hali, which is located "somewhere within the star cluster Hyades", which may place it either on another planet or in another universe.

Finally, Carcosa was assimilated into the [[Cthulhu Mythos]] by [[H.P. Lovecraft]] and his groupie-authors, as Lovecraft himself was a fan of Chambers' works. This is the most famous iteration of Carcosa.

==D&D Supplement V: Carcosa==
The first and most directly /tg/-related appearance of Carcosa was as part of the [[Old School Roleplaying]] Renaissance; in 2008, an OD&D fan named Geoffrey McKinney published "Supplement V: Carcosa" as a Lovecraft-inspired [[Sword & Sorcery]] setting for OD&D. It's gone down as one of the first big controversial OSR modules to catch the public's eye.

In a nutshell, Carcosa postulates a world in which an ancient race of [[Serpentfolk]] engineered 13 different strains of [[human]], each distinguished by a single specific color, to serve as slaves and the sacrificial components in their dark, twisted magical rituals. The serpentfolk are long-gone, leaving their creations to inherit the world. The human race is thus divided into Green Men, Red Men, Blue Men, Purple Men, Yellow Men, Bone Men, Black Men, Orange Men, Brown Men, White Men, Jale Men, Dolm Men, and Ulfire Men - those last three being colors only seen on Carcosa. And these colors are vivid, they're not used in the old stand-in for ethnicity; a White Man on Carcosa is literally stark marble white from head to toes, a Red Man is bright crimson all over. No races other than these human races (who cannot interbreed and highly distrust each other) exist, and they battle against each other and an array of monsters - classic D&D [[slime]]s and [[fungus]] creatures, alongside more Lovecraft-inspired horrors like the Deep Gibbering Madness, the Violet Mist, and the Squamous Worm of the Pit, plus the better known Cthulhoid horrors such as Deep Ones, B’yakhee and Mi-Go.  Many monster descriptions include quotes from Lovecraft’s stories which add a fun authenticity. Rounding out the list are Sword & Sorcery favorites such as giant jungle ants, lake monsters, mummy brains entombed beneath radioactive deserts and misshapen phosphorescent dinosaurs. Oh, and a random table for mutations for extra variety. 

To add further fun to the mix, like a lot of the old-school [[Sword & Sorcery]] settings, Carcosa is also a [[Science Fantasy]] setting; assorted aliens have crashed on Carcosa throughout its history, and left their incredibly dangerous hypertech gadgetry around to be picked up by and ultimately destroy any foolish adventurer.

Carcosan adventurers are not only race-restricted to humanity in its different colored offshoots, but also class restricted. There are only two classes in Carcosa; the Fighting Man, and the new class, the Sorcerer. This variant of the Magic User abandons the Vancian-inspired system used even in OD&D and instead makes use of a new magic system based on long, complex rituals that can be used to banish, invoke, conjure, bind, imprison and torment a variety of weird, Mythosian entities and force them to do a sorcerer's bidding. Basically it's a [[Conjurer]] with the Fighting Man's arms & armor proficiencies, a heightened EXP table, and a reliance on out-of-combat spellcasting.

So, what's the controversy? Well... basically, it's the Sorcerer. McKinney ''really'' doubled down on the idea that "Sorcerers in S&S games are villainous monsters using Things Man Shouldn't Know". Every non-Binding ritual the Sorcerer knows requires the torture, murder and/or desecration of humans. Especially virgins and children. The supplement has ''never'' lived down this one ritual in particular:

::''“Summon the Amphibious Ones: This eleven-hour ritual can be completed only on a fog-shrouded night. The sorcerer must obtain the root of potency found only in ruined apothecaries of the Snake-Men. The sacrifice is a virgin White girl eleven years old with long hair. The sorcerer, after partaking of the root, must engage in sexual congress with the sacrifice eleven times, afterwards strangling her with her own hair. As her life leaves her body, 10-100 of the Amphibious Ones will coalesce out of the mists.”'' - '''Carcosa, page 31'''

To give the supplement its credit, these unholy rituals are a) intended to be used largely for people your players will subsequently punch in the face, and b) easily excised - they are a fairly minimal part of the supplement as a whole. But still, it's never been able to escape the stigma of being "that book with the spell that requires you to rape and murder a little girl". This was in many ways the foundation stone for the ongoing civil war amongst the OSR movement as to where "old school feel" and "good taste" draw their lines, and the perception of OSR fans as... well... let's just say bitterly opposed to [[SJW]]s, for good and for ill, shall we?

==Lamentations of the Flame Princess==
Naturally, the infamous edgelord James Edward Raggi IV, who had literally built a career out of marketing the most [[grimderp]] [[retroclone]] he could concoct in the form of [[Lamentations of the Flame Princess]] under the assumption that there were a lot of OSR fans who would buy even the worst-written sleaze if the right political banners were waved, took his own stab at adapting McKinney's work in 2011.