What is (Lost) Carcosa?

It’s almost time...

Sorry for invading your mailboxes again so soon (and we’ll be doing it tomorrow when things go on sale), but I thought it might be a good idea to actually go through what exactly is in this book. Say what Lost Carcosa even is, instead of assuming the audience is exclusively people who have been around the past twenty years and have always known it as part of their RPG landscape.

It’s a little more than 24 hours before it goes on sale in the LotFP EU webstore (along with The Ennui of the Deep-Delving Dungeoneer) and I am so nervous. Once upon a time I dreamed of a publication schedule that would have a couple things come out a few times a year, but when we managed to do that, sales on each item were noticeably less than when we just released one batch of stuff. So basically, once a year, I prepare for the big new release, and that one day a year that is going to tell me what my future is, and how I’ll be able to live my life from now on. Especially since that without the US retail distribution we had up until January 2024, things don’t have so strong a tail.

It’s so weird. I still have more contacts in the music industry, and I stopped doing the LotFP metal zine twenty years ago, than I do in the halls of power in the RPG industry that I’ve been actively living in for the past 17 years. And I promise you I was no more accommodating or less disruptive there than I am with RPGs. Shit, I was much more a belligerent asshole in my metal zine days towards things I didn’t like in the metal scene. And I know US distribution has been a huge mess with the Diamond bankruptcy, but still, how the hell can a distribution company see books like Disastrum and Nebulith and think naaahh, not worth our time. (and after 2019 I was asked, repeatedly, for a few years if there will be another printing of Red & Pleasant Land for retail. And now that it exists and is ready to ship… nothing? I don’t even get a callback? Seriously? sigh) Even a couple hundred copies of a title moving through distribution would make an enormous difference, but in the US… nothing.

The original plan for the year, despite what I just said a couple paragraphs ago, was that Lost Carcosa would come out in March and then I’d have a couple smaller things out (32/48 page hardcover things) for the summer convention season. Well I very badly misjudged that timing, and that screwed up all the following plans, and it’s been a matter of just keeping the lights on (which included taking some outside freelance work) until Lost Carcosa saw the light of day. And we almost missed the convention season with it (and Ennui was picked up from the printer the morning of Ropecon setup), the printer had to put together a set of copies with a different cover finish in order to get those to us before Ropecon and Gen Con.

But here we are now, finally, on the eve of release. And since the books were delivered on Thursday, it’s all become real. It’s happening. Do-or-die time, so forget being able to sleep. Response at Ropecon and Gen Con was good, but past years have shown that there is little to no correlation between convention sales and website sales. And now I’m betting my life on a reprint. A reprint that has about +40% additional material, yes, but still. Goodness gracious me.

There will be another video posted maybe around midday tomorrow on the youtube channel (it won’t get its own post here though) concerning the slipcase edition, and after that… there’s not much else to do but wait.

Just need to keep remembering this is the life I chose. And whether tomorrow crashes and burns or lifts me up to a where I can pull the trigger on a few things, it’s been a hell of a ride regardless. And if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably screw everything up worse trying to fix mistakes I’ve made, so I have to remember the important thing right now:

This Lost Carcosa book I’m publishing is fucking amazing and at the end of the day, that’s the entire point of all this.