At the end of the 19th Century, an American art student went to Paris, read a play called The King in Yellow, and lost his grip on reality. Head reeling from absinthe, bedeviled by unseen adversaries, he realized the alien world it described, Carcosa, had infected the City of Lights. As he explored Paris in search of its decadent influence, he created a scrapbook – a guide for himself, and for those who would come after him.
Gleaned from travelogues, news clippings, and disquieting occult ephemera, and marred by the compiler's increasingly fervid scrawls, the scrapbook laid out a skewed portrait of a haunted city:
- Art student life, from hazing rituals to fabulous bacchanals at the Moulin Rouge
- Hangouts and nightspots, from everyday beaneries to ghoulish cabarets
- Neighborhoods and attractions, with useful maps
- Sources of knowledge, from museums to institutions of technology
- The justice system, from the city's police to its prisons
- Rites of death, from funeral fees to the notorious bone-stacked catacombs
- Details of everyday life, including currency, communications, and essential phrases
- A timeline of recent historical events
Absinthe in Carcosa is an indispensable city guide for The Yellow King Roleplaying Game and a stunning, full-color visual artifact in its own right. Through the anonymous compiler's notes, determined investigators of the Yellow Sign mystery can learn who may aid them, where madness lurks, and how to avoid clowns.
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