

There are no elves, dwarves, hobbits, standard magic-users or clerics in Carcosa so character choices are limited to Fighting Men or Sorcerers. His XP requirements are much higher so his level progression is slower. The Sorcerer class can wear armor and use any weapons, just like a Fighting Man. So instead of Magic Missile, you can cast The Ninth Tracing of the Measureless Void to gain forbidden lore from weird entities beyond the galaxy. Ritual magic is complex, requiring many hours effort with strange implements at odd locations under the right astrological conditions.

The Sorcerer can banish, invoke, conjure, bind, imprison and torment these entities and force them to do his bidding. To be sacrifices efficacious for their sorcery.Ĭarcosa introduces the Sorcerer class to OD&D whose only magic comes in the form of incredibly powerful rituals to control a variety of weird and terrible Cthulhoid entities. If you are unsure what that means, google an article by Matthew Finch called A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.įrom shambling man-apes, the Snake-Men bred the various races of humans The gameplay espoused in Carcosa is completely old school. This setting is Swords and Sorcery, or better yet, Swords against Sorcery. Carcosa is the twisted kindred of Conan’s Hyborea and Elric’s Melnibone.

This setting is far away from Middle Earth, Shannara or the Forgotten Realms of the Renaissance Faire. Instead, Carcosa rivets you with a raw vibrancy so missing from many current products.Ĭarcosa is not Tolkeinesque high fantasy. It is clearly homage to the early days of DIY gaming where RPG fans produced supplements in their garage without any need for glossy art and slick pages. All the text is laid out cleanly with an easy to read font. There is no interior artwork except the two page hand-drawn campaign map in the center of the book. The cover has an evocative image of a strange ruined city “of non-Euclidian geometry” under a pale green moon. The booklet is 96 pages, measures 8.5 x 5.5 with a beige cardstock cover so Carcosa nicely matches the other OD&D books. Obviously, naming the book “Supplement V” invokes nostalgia. Fans of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, AD&D, and Castles & Crusades will have an easy time converting the new rules.
#Carcosa pages pdf pdf
Thanks to RPGNow, new players can discover the original D&D books on PDF without paying a king’s ransom and even better, there are free “retro-clones” like Swords & Wizardry, Microlite74, Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy available online that are 99% compatible with Carcosa. Like Greyhawk and Blackmoor, this supplement presents alternate rules and a fresh new setting for your D&D adventures. Thirty something years later in 2008, author Geoffrey McKinney publishes the unofficial fifth supplement entitled Carcosa. Chambersīack in the disco 70s, Gary Gygax and his TSR crew published four supplements for the original Dungeons and Dragons game.
#Carcosa pages pdf download
Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.Strange is the night where black stars rise,Īnd strange moons circle through the skies,īut stranger still is Lost Carcosa- Robert W. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.įor printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book.

However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching.
#Carcosa pages pdf pdf download
Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.įor PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition.
