Current designs mostly assume investigators are outside auditors of Carcosan contagion; what changes if you instead treat the PCs as curators of a King in Yellow anthology (editors, festival programmers, archivists) whose job is to select which fragments of the forbidden play, Yellow Sign imagery, and Carcosa testimony get preserved, remixed, or suppressed—and how would that curator frame alter scenario goals, clue design, and safety tools when the core horror is that their professional judgments literally determine which version of Carcosa becomes canon in-world?

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Answer

Summary: make PCs cultural gatekeepers. Their choices about what to preserve or cut are both clues and world-editing tools, pushing the campaign toward specific Carcosa “canons.”

  1. Core shift: auditors → curators
  • PCs aren’t neutral investigators; they decide what gets archived, funded, programmed.
  • Every decision changes what future NPCs can know about the King in Yellow.
  • Horror: your professional ethics literally author the world’s Carcosa.
  1. Scenario goals under the curator frame
  • From: “What happened and how do we stop it?”
  • To: “Which materials survive, in what form, and for whom?”
  • Common goals:
    • Decide which texts, recordings, props, testimonies go into the archive vs. get buried.
    • Choose what’s shown to the public (festivals, exhibits, reprints) vs. sealed.
    • Protect or sacrifice specific voices (whistleblowers, artists, patients).
  • End-states: the city’s Carcosa canon is visibly different depending on their curatorial record.
  1. Clue design: fragments with editorial levers
  • Each clue is a fragment plus 1–3 levers:
    • Format: raw (transcript, tape), edited (excerpt, translation), or re-staged (installation, cut of the play).
    • Audience: internal file, elite salon, mass public, underground.
    • Status: highlight, bury in noise, misfile, destroy.
  • Resolving a clue = both learning from it and choosing its fate.
  • Track a simple “Canon sheet” (like the city sheet from 46720334-3a63-4595-a894-7d9cacc17e13 / 57394cba-b594-4dcf-9e0e-ada79b564772):
    • Columns: Institutional, Artistic, Carcosan, Player-authored realities.
    • Rows: key artifacts (Script A, Poster series, Survivor interview, Mask, etc.).
    • Each row records: existence, format, audience.
  • The Yellow Sign and Carcosa appear as recurring motifs in those artifacts, not just set-dressing.
  1. How this changes play moment-to-moment
  • Every “we copy this” / “we cut that” becomes a high-stakes choice.
  • Many hooks arise from new submissions: a found reel, a script draft, a grant proposal, a recovered diary.
  • NPCs court the PCs because inclusion in the anthology/festival/collection is power.
  • Faction conflicts are about canon: who gets to define what “The King in Yellow” means.
  1. Campaign structure ideas
  • Case cycles = acquisition + selection + release:
    • Ep 1: acquire fragments (fieldwork, interviews, raids, auctions).
    • Ep 2: evaluate/restore (lab work, viewings, internal debate).
    • Ep 3: decide and enact release (programming a season, publishing a volume, sealing a box).
  • Later arcs show fallout driven by prior curatorial calls:
    • A censored monologue survives as samizdat with a harsher Yellow Sign.
    • A festival season normalizes KiY aesthetics in pop culture.
    • A “safe” academic edition becomes the primary infection vector.
  1. Ambiguity and multiple Carcosas
  • Use the competing realities frame from 46720334-3a63-4595-a894-7d9cacc17e13:
    • Institutional Carcosa: appears as diagnoses, risk codes, case-law.
    • Artistic Carcosa: in retrospectives, festivals, critical essays.
    • Carcosan Carcosa: in dreams, masks, unstable testimonies.
    • Player-authored: the anthology / catalogue / season the PCs build.
  • Each curatorial decision bumps one track and weakens others.
  • You never prove which is “true”; you decide which becomes legible and lasting.
  1. Safety tools in a curator campaign
  • Clear session 0: handling of madness, art trauma, identity erosion; lines/veils.
  • Use player-facing control from 4abc2f73-ca16-4fd2-8deb-bcce538942f6:
    • No-Carcosa recaps and audit scenes whenever fiction/reality blur.
  • Offer “content distance” levers:
    • You can tag especially disturbing artifacts as offscreen summaries.
    • Let players describe editorial choices at a higher level (“we cut the most graphic parts”) without playing them out.
  • Put consent around identity harm:
    • Before publishing or staging NPCs that mirror PCs, check in.
    • Allow players to veto certain uses of their PCs’ likeness or backstory in in-fiction art.
  1. How sanity pressure shifts
  • Less about passive exposure; more about moral/professional corrosion:
    • SAN loss for choosing to publish something you know will hurt people.
    • SAN tradeoffs for suppressing vital testimony to keep contagion contained.
    • Obsessions tied to “getting the edition right,” “saving the archive,” “being the one who truly understands the play.”
  • Mechanical knobs:
    • Each artifact row can carry a small SAN tag: gain/lose SAN when you interact, preserve, or destroy it.
    • Long-term disorders express as curatorial fixations: endless re-cuts, living in the stacks, refusing to release anything.
  1. Failure and stakes
  • Failure = not “you miss the clue,” but “you canonize the worst version.”
    • Misidentify a forgery → your anthology cements a false, more infectious text.
    • Over-edit a testimony → survivors become unreliable footnotes; institutions win.
    • Overexpose a motif → the Yellow Sign becomes fashionable branding.
  • There’s no clean win; only “which future did we publish?”
  1. Use in CoC-style systems
  • PCs as academics, archivists, programmers, critics, culture cops.
  • Tie skill rolls to editorial acts:
    • Library Use / Art / Language = what you can safely decode and reframe.
    • Credit Rating / Persuade = who you convince to back or bury work.
    • SAN / POW = how much Carcosa seeps through your edits.