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Isle of the Unknown has 330 encounters listed, broken down thus:

109 monsters
83 magical statues
80 "other"
27 magic-users
15 clerics
15 towns
1 city

I hope no one loses sight of the 80 "other" encounters: magical pools, temples, caves, trees, fungus, animals, etc. They might be relatively easy to overlook since they aren't listed in the index.

In the Referee's book on pp. 53-55 James counsels Referees not to use the real world as the campaign world, summing it up thus: "The Referee should be the final authority about the campaign world, and using the Real World gives authority to the world beyond the Referee's. Avoid that."

In James's call last month for module submissions, he stipulates: "Present the adventure as if it takes place during the Early Modern period, roughly between the years 1500 C.E. And 1650 C.E of our own history. You do not need to be a student of geography or history to write a LotFP adventure, but when it comes to cities and nations and cultures, your adventure must be real-world in feel."

James, does this present a re-thinking of your earlier position against using the real world as the campaign world, or am I misunderstanding your statement in the call for submissions? Are you wanting modules set in (for example) 16th-century Germany, or rather in something like "the fictional country of Augstrafen which feels like 16th-century Germany"?

Click here for James's blog post about Carcosa: http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2011/09/this-is-carcosa.html

In it he writes: "Carcosa has a history, and a major difference between Carcosa and most settings is that humans aren't part of the setting's history. Humans were just lab animals (hence the color coding) who experiment on each other now (the rituals) because that's what the all-powerful Snake Men did and humans now want to be all-powerful! Now humanity is free as 13 separately breeding species, making their way in a very hostile world. Will humanity rise from this barbarism to create an Age of Humanity on Carcosa, or is the story of man just going to be one of extreme cruelty on the way to being eaten by radioactive dinosaurs?"

James is right as far as he goes. But he leaves the future as a question. Of course, each referee's Carcosa will have its own, unique future. Here's how I see the long-term future of humanity on my version of Carcosa:

The high-tech artifacts of the Space Aliens are mankind's ace in the sleeve. In what is perhaps mankind's only stroke of good luck on Carcosa, the Space Alien armada that made a hard landing on Carcosa had a lot of powerful high-tech stuff that humans can easily use. Humans out-number the Space Aliens, so eventually the humans will kill all the Space Aliens and own all their stuff.

Laser cannons. Tanks. Submarines. Aircraft. Robotics. All the way up to nuclear weapons. The Old Ones and their minions will, over a long period of time, get blown away by men armed to the teeth. Most importantly, sooner or later someone is going to nuke Shub-Niggurath, and then it will all be over save for the mopping-up. Since Shub-Niggurath is the source of the vast majority of monsters on Carcosa, taking it out will put an end to the generation of new monsters.

As a fringe benefit, as Old Ones are destroyed, sorcery will ipso facto also be destroyed. That ritual that summons Nyarlathotep won't do you any good after Nyarlathotep is destroyed.

So I think humans will end-up wiping-out all other sentient things on Carcosa. Then the humans will turn their weapons on each other. Remember that skin color differences are pronounced on Carcosa. Also remember that the 13 different colors of men on Carcosa are not fertile with each other. There will be no rapprochement. It will be wars of genocide. Either one color will wipe out all the rest and then continue on, or ultimately nobody will be left standing. My instinct is the latter. So after humanity wipes out everything else on Carcosa, men will finish the job by wiping themselves out.

Nihilism at its best.

The 1974 D&D rules have a specific flavor to them, which I will here refer to as "vanilla".

The various versions of A/D&D through the decades (as well as their support products) have not travelled far from 1974 in terms of flavor. Thus we have "French vanilla", "vanilla bean", "vanilla with nuts", "vanilla with chocolate syrup", "vanilla with ______", etc.

Consider: "This setting has crusty dwarves who have wars with goblins who have chests full of gold and elves living in forests with dragons flying overhead while regenerating trolls live in caves and every town has a cleric to heal people and magic-users will zap you with fireballs and etc."

I just described almost every published D&D product. Those that supposedly "innovate" from that merely A) add more stuff to that mix ("...plus laser guns and crashed spaceships and robots!"), and/or B) give the above mix some twists ("In this campaign, elves live in the desert and ride anhkhegs.").

The only two publishers that I know of who are giving us actual innovation are Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Goodman Games (with their forthcoming DDC RPG and with James Raggi's Random Esoteric Creature Generator).

Next post: How we got into this mess.