Carcosa!

[Winds of Nagual]

Anyone had any luck combining the old Carcosa rules from Classic D&D with Pathfinder? I'm trying to homebrew a world with heavy elements from Cthuhlu and 'True Detective.' Right on, right on, right on...

[Darrin]

Anyone had any luck combining the old Carcosa rules from Classic D&D with Pathfinder? I'm trying to homebrew a world with heavy elements from Cthuhlu and 'True Detective.' Right on, right on, right on...

You may need to be more specific. Carcosa is a subtopic in the Cthulhu Mythos. Outside the context of the King in Yellow or the Cult of Hastur, it doesn't really have any direct link to D&D, unless you consider it as part of the Far Realms.

If you mean the Cthulhu section in the 1st edition AD&D book "Deities & Demigods", then I'm not sure Carcosa was even mentioned there. If you wanted to adapt the Elder Gods to more contemporary stats, I suppose this could be done, but it would be largely underwhelming without the CoC sanity rules and the less robust PC investigators. D&D is a numbers game, and if the players know the elder gods have hit points, then from their standpoint it's just a question of wearing down the numbers to zero.

If you mean, has anyone adapted the "epic campaign to stop an elder god" to 3.5, then yes, check out the Elder Evils book.

If you mean, is there a version of Call of Cthulhu adapted to D20 rules that could be easily ported into a 3.5 campaign, then yes, we also have D20 Cthulhu.

If you mean, has anyone ever done all that and actually made a D&D character scared? No. So long as they still have HPs and can attack, D&D doesn't handle horror very well.

[asnys]

I think he might be referring to Geoffrey McKinney's old-school pulp setting Carcosa.

I've never tried to adapt it to 3E/PF - seems wrong, somehow. I am a big fan of the setting, but it would probably be a huge amount of work to do, since so much of the setting is specific to it.

[Winds of Nagual]

Thanks asnys, exactly what I was referring to.