Carcosa: Random Community Generator

Dogon dancers

One of the biggest gaps in Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa setting is the lack of cultural or social details about the people of the world. There is basically nothing there except a vague sense that they are "savage" and "degraded", plus a weird assertion that their culture resembles "pre-Columbian Mesoamerica" which doesn't really make any sense (hint: in the year before Columbus arrived in the Americas, Tenochtitlan was the largest city in the world.)

Here's a set of tables to generate Carcosan communities that are a bit more interesting and textured, while maintaining the themes of desperation and brutality.

Economy

1. Semi-nomadic dinosaur herders
2. Fungal forest slash and burn farmers
3. Bandits, raid other villages or extort them for tribute
4. Make sacrifices to eldritch god in exchange for food
5. Nomadic hunter-gatherers
6. Semi-nomadic, raid ruins for ancient technology, tinker with it and trade it
7. Slave hunters and traders
8. Lake fishers; have specialised knowledge that allows them to safely prepare the mutated lakelife

Dwelling place

1. Cave complex
2. Walled town
3. Abandoned snake men ruin
4. Mud huts
5. Wood huts on stilts
6. Inside an ossified dinosaur carcass

Cultural quirks*

1. Widow sacrifice - when a woman is widowed she calls on her sons to strangle her; when a man is widowed he calls on his daughters to prepare a poison meal
2. Obsession with feasting - the leader who gives the best feast is given prominence
3. Men and women strictly segregated except during annual courting season
4. Corpses' brains must be eaten by their relatives or their soul cannot pass on
5. 'Unclean' tasks are relegated to a servile underclass
6. Polygamy: men take many wives or women take many husbands. The surplus unmarried population are disposed of through 1. long pilgrimages with low chance of survival 2. Castration 3. Ritual murder
7. Sub-economy revolving around brass rods. Brass rods can be used to pay important social costs, such as bride-price (to 'buy' a bride from her family) or blood-price (to pay compensation for murder). They cannot be exchanged for other goods.
8. Believe themselves to be haunted by the ghosts of everything they have ever eaten. Perform banishing rituals before each meal, with the ritual growing more elaborate as one grows older.

Religious beliefs

1. Worship Azathoth; a nihilistic religion that embraces the pointlessness of existence
2. Worship the snake men and await their resurrection
3. Worship Nyarlathotep. He rewards the strong and devious, punishes the weak and honest
4. Worship a derelict robot, interpreting its error messages as scripture
5. Worship animist spirit
6. Worship a minor god that dwells in a noxious pit

Leadership

1. Council of elders
2. Powerful sorcerer, rules through constant threat of summoning an eldritch god that will devour everyone
3. Warrior-chief and retinue
4. Priestly caste interprets the wishes of 1. a holy child 2. a sacred book 3. the sun and moon
5. Caste of bigender shamans
6. Society is egalitarian, decisions reached by consensus

Adornment

1. Naked except for string belts
2. Embroidered robes and niqabs
3. Dinosaur leather and dino-feather headdresses
4. Filthy rags
5. Furs and skull helmets
6. Loincloths and iridescent tattoos

*Many of these are taken from real hunter-gatherer societies. I recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber and The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond as sources for inventing nuanced hunter-gatherer societies.

'Imperial Lancer', Viktor Titov

'Dopesmoker', Arik Roper

Star Wars: Rogue One

Yanomamo man