The Mysterious Island

By Pedro Gil
La Marco del Este
OSR
Levels 4-6

Beyond the Pirate Islands, in the southern seas, there is said to be a mysterious island, eternally shrouded in a thick fog, as cold as a corpse’s shroud, where monstrous creatures, strange artifacts, and relics of the ancient world await. Who will be brave enough to explore it and uncover its secrets?

This 23 page adventure presents a jungle island with an old temple on it and seven-ish other locations presented in about twelve pages. It’s yet another poor and confusing Dread knockoff, with even less going on than usual, described in a poor manner.

Hey, this is, I think, an EASL adventure. There is a decent amount of awkwardness that comes from the language, but none of it is all together too indecipherable. For example, it uses “voyages” for “nights at sea.” So, three voyages is three nights at sea. It’s nothing you can’t handle though. On to the review!

For some reason you are going to the Isle of Mystery. You pull up and find a rock formation that looks like a skull. Inside you find three rooms and it MIGHT have some pirates. Yeah! Fun! You can find a village of natives! You can go fight some giant apes! There’s a rope bridge over a chasm! And, of course, there’s the ancient ruins at the end with the fabulous treasure! One room. “Note to the Narrator: We recommend you compile a comprehensive list of treasures and artifacts to be found here.”

What, I wonder, do designers believe that the purpose of an adventure actually is? 

About eight locations, about twelve pages used to describe them out of the adventures 23 or so pages. Each of them is described quite … loosely. An ancient ruins/temple that is barely a column long, with three paragraphs of that being read aloud! Very loosy goosy stuff. There could be pirates here. The pirates might be friendly. You are attacked by giant apes. Or might be. 

They are all written in this weird manner. It looks for all the world like it might just be a standard encounter that you might find anywhere. But then it is kind of zoomed out, abstracted, in something more generic. It’s like the adventure is afraid to get tied down in specifics for fear of ever treading on the DM. “You might make friends with them.” Uh, sure? That’s true for every adventure, right? That you might make friends with the star-eating chthonic monster? Instead of responding with the specifics of how that might happen, what happens, or what opportunities are there to make THIS friendship-is-magic thing special, instead we just get a generic “you can maybe be friends if the DM wants them to be!”

Hey man, for a wandering encounter with humpback whales you get this as the first line “It is a group of humpback whales, or humpbacks, as they are known in Cyrinea.” Yup. This is a pattern. The encounters take up too much space for what they are. It’s padded out. And yet anything that could be useful or interesting is just not present. “Once the characters access this accessory cavern, we can read or paraphrase the following paragraph:” Yes. That IS how read-aloud works.

Read-aloud that is all in the second person. “You arrive at the beach, and you cannot help but be amazed by its wild beauty.” I’m blind you insensitive clod! Seriously, don’t do second person writing. Nothing is worse. Yes, it’s even worse than italics.

Oh, hey, look, here’s a peaceful beach locale! “There is nothing of interest here” Well, hey, that’s nice! Oh, wait, “, except that the characters will be attacked by a huge crab that emerges from the water and comes ashore as the adventurers pass by.” Ok, so, I guess there is something there.

So, very generic, ideas? As locations. And then weirdly specific read-aloud with the second person thing. But then offloading all of the location stuff on to the DM with that hated word “possabilities.” Overly long, padded out, weirdly specific in non-useful ways and then not specific at all in the ways that matter. Dread was far from a masterpiece, but at least it knew what it wanted to do. This, I think, had no concept of what it wanted to be.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, no preview. Bad designer! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/536769/the-mysterious-island?1892600