The original set of The Yellow King RPG, featuring three separate products:
The Yellow King RPG
Written and designed by GUMSHOE master Robin D. Laws, The Yellow King RPG takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines.
Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ influential cycle of short stories, it pits the characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. This suppressed play, once read, invites madness or a visit from its titular character, an alien ruler intent on invading and remolding our world into a colony of his planet, Carcosa.
Four books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront your players with an epic journey into reality horror:
- Belle Époque Paris, where a printed version of the dread play is first published. Players portray American art students in its absinthe-soaked world, navigating the Parisian demimonde and investigating mysteries involving gargoyles, vampires, and decadent alien royalty.
- The Wars, an alternate reality in which the players take on the role of soldiers bogged down in the great European conflict of 1947. While trying to stay alive on an eerie, shifting battlefield, they investigate supernatural mysteries generated by the occult machinations of the Yellow King and his rebellious daughters.
- Aftermath, set later in the same reality, in present day North America. A bloody insurrection has toppled a dictatorial regime loyal to Carcosa. Players become former partisans adjusting to ordinary life, trying to build a just society from the ashes of civil war. But not all of the monsters have been thoroughly banished—and like it or not, they’re the ones with the skills to hunt them and finish them off.
- This is Normal Now. In the present day we know, albeit one subtly permeated by supernatural beings and maddening reality shifts, ordinary people band together, slowly realizing that they are the key to ending a menace spanning eras and realities.
Absinthe in Carcosa
At the end of the 19th century, an American art student went to Paris, read a play, and lost his grip on reality.
The play was called The King in Yellow.
Having read it, head reeling from absinthe, bedeviled by unseen adversaries, he realized that the alien world it described, Carcosa, had sunk its traces throughout 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. This is Absinthe in Carcosa.
Yoked together from existing travelogues, newspapers, and the disquieting ephemera of the occult tradition, it 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 institutes of technology
- Operations of 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
In the margins appear the increasingly fervid scrawls of the anonymous compiler. Through them determined investigators of the Yellow Sign mystery will learn:
- Who to seek aid from
- Where madness lurks
- And to never waver in their distrust of clowns
The Missing and the Lost
The Missing and the Lost is a novel by Robin D. Laws based in The Yellow King RPG‘s Aftermath setting.
Imperial America has fallen.
Emperor Castaigne, who ruled the nation with secret police and even more secret sorcery, has fled. The portals that connected him to his rumored source of power, the alien realm of Carcosa, have been destroyed.
After a century of tyranny, democracy has returned to the USA—if those who fought for it have what it takes to keep it.
Along with his loyal crew, the man they called the Technician helped win the struggle. Now he seeks a return to civilian life.
Specifically, he wants to eliminate his job. He repairs the suicide machines known as the Government Lethal Chambers.
His determination to decommission these instruments of death brings him to the People’s Hall. There a generation of political pioneers works to jumpstart a disarrayed provisional administration into a fairly and freely elected government.
But when the body of a murder victim shows up in flagship Lethal Chamber in Washington Square, the Technician sees that the skill set of his crew hasn’t quite gone out of fashion.
The ensuing investigation takes him on a journey through the secrets of the old regime, with fugitive war criminals, haunted hide-outs, urban firefights and dread parageometrical rituals along the way.
People who bought this also bought Black Star Magic, Legions of Carcosa and Fifth Imperative.
