Arounds the Blogs... & The Carcosa Incident

It must be Saturday, because its time for my weekly RPG blog round up! But before I get into that... I need to ask that you nominate a blog post and give us feeback for the upcoming 2008 Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs. You could win a free copy of the book once it is in print!

Now, on with my weekly roundup...

• Geoffrey McKinney's The Carcosa Incident !!!  I'm no doubt missing a bunch of posts... but with all the hub-bub, I figured I might as well link back to the posts I actually read. I just love the echo chamber that is the blogosphere sometimes!
  
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess went to great length to explain his position on the bruhahahahahahah about "...Carcosa is an amazing book in every way. It stays true to its source material, embodies the creative and daring spirit that makes this hobby possible at all, eschews artificial limits of commercialism and public opinion and expands what it can mean to play Dungeons and Dragons..." (24 comments) He later followed up with a second post on the subject that featured some of the in-game items found in Carcosa.
  
• Tlaloc - Jeff Rient's reponse to the hub bub about Carcosa that appeared on Lamentations of the Flame Princess. "...I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that they took for granted that the reader showed up with his or her own moral compass and didn't really need to be told that killing and eating babies is bad..." (22 comments)
  
• Berin Kinsman chimes in too, over at The Dire Cafe. Says Berin, "I might not want to hang out with people who groove on this sort of stuff, but I also wouldn't want to hang out with people who would burn them at the stake, either." (4 pages of comments)
• Ripper X, over at Advanced Gaming Theory, throws in his 2¢ on The Carcosa Incident. "We always have the final say so, but I do think that D&D is also a teaching tool, and culture shock is a great lesson that we can all stand to learn a bit better." (2 comments).
• Monsters & Manuals' author noisms added his own voice to the storm as well, although it seemed against the grain of the rest of chest beaters. "...And the moral ambiguities associated with the killing of 'evil' creatures are worthy of exploration. But there is nothing morally ambiguous about, for example, sexual abuse. I don't have any interest in exploring that as an outlet for the player-characters..." Well said, I might add.. (13 comments)
• Twenty three PAGES of comments are the fire-storm that is The Carcosa Incident over at theRPGSite.net. I'm not even going to touch this one...
• Wyatt puts his own scholoarly reponse to the page at Turbulent Thoughts. "...Carcosa, and other things like it, are fiction. Violence is visceral and cathartic, and not only that, it is interesting. Violence is a psychological and emotional push. Violence against helpless and innocents even more so..." (17 comments)
• Honestly... after reading all the above posts and agreeing with both sides, the middle, and even the uncommitted (especially since I have not read Carcosa myself), I stopped following the story. It will still go down, in my books, as The Carcosa Incident.
• Onto more RPG topics of the week - Stargazer added the stats of a few firearms for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There are just so few ranged weapon options to the game, that this was a welcome addition that I included in my recent list of 4E Weapons.
• Turtles All The Way Down featured a post about Fantastic Governments. I love this sort of thing becuase it can provide the spark that some GMs might need to build a whole campaign.
• Pointyman2000 brings to light a beautifully rendered new campaign setting, Illyria, as savory good FREE PDF. When I say beutifully rendered, I'm not joking. Please go check this out.
• MadBrewLabs writes an excellent piece about the Power of Myths in RPGs and features a specific campaign style for high-epic play. "...I believe a Monomyth based storyline taking the heroes from obscurity to nigh divinity could be very fullfilling for everyone involved..." Worth the read, IMHO.
• Greek Orthodox posted probably the coolest artwork I've seen all week. This post just blew my socks off. Russian woodblock art... rulz. (see inset above)
  

And with that, I'll leave it be. There was much more I read this week, but I don't want to overwhelm you.