DNH5 Carcosa — Disappointing Dungeon Crawl

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
    In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
    Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
    Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
    Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

DNH5 Carcosa is presumably the last module in the Hastur series from Dark Naga Games, written by L. Kevin Watson. It's a modestly priced (at least when I bought it) at $4 for a 30 page module plus illustration book, chocked with new original art. It takes up directly after DNH4 Confronting Hastur, which leaves the characters transported to Carcosa, the place from Robert Chamber's The King in Yellow.

I first came across Robert Chamber's The King in Yellow a few years before I got into Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu, in a book on UFOs by Jacques Vallee (the inspiration for the French guy in Close Encounters), who used the quotes from it to start chapters to convey the sense of other-worldliness, of eeriness, that he believed applied to UFOs and their inhabitants. If you aren't familiar with it, The King in Yellow is a series of short stories loosely based on Chambers' time in Paris, including a handful of weird stories involving a strange play and the effects it had on its readers. The play is set in Carcosa, which seems to be a city on an alien planet by a lake (the Lake of Hali), across from a neighboring city, Alar.

The Lost Temple of Forgotten Evil Review — More like Generic Evil

The Lost Temple of Forgotten Evil from Dark Naga Adventures might have a rather generic name, but it actually deals with the PCs coming across of a cult of Hastur (the Cthulhu Mythos deity) and presumably foiling its plans. I a big fan of the Cthulhu Mythos (my 2nd favorite RPG is Call of Cthulhu) and incorporate Mythos themes into my own game.

Hastur is perhaps the trickiest deity of them all, because it's not entirely clear that Hastur is even a deity in HP Lovecraft's own works. Though he made mention of the name, clearly referencing Robert W. Chambers work, most notable many of the stories mentioned in the King in Yellow. But Chambers work is eerie, surreal, even sensual, perhaps best captured in Karl Wagner's The River of Nights Dreaming. But ignoring all that, August Dereth made Hastur just another squid god, like Cthulhu.