RPG Review: Visiting “The Isle of the Unknown”
When I reviewed Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I complained that the game wasn’t weird enough. Well, that’s not a complaint I can make about Isle of the Unknown, a supplement using the LotFP rules but easily converted to any fantasy RPG, especially a retro-clone. Isle of the Unknown is not just weird, it’s bizarre.
This handsome little hardcover is illustrated throughout with full-color pictures, mostly of some truly outlandish creatures. The book presents a hex-based map of a strange island, detailing an encounter for each of 330 hexes. Most of these encounters concern monsters, magical statues, or spell-casting NPCs, and none are longer than a paragraph. After the hex descriptions, the book includes 5 indexes: monsters divided by hit die, magical statues, magic-using NPCs, clerical NPCs, and towns and cities. “Designed to be placed in any fantasy campaign,” the descriptions are vague, with no mention of mundane feature such as culture, motivation, or rationale. No mere oversight, these gaps are left intentionally in order that a GM may tailor the Isle to suit his game, laying his campaign’s culture over the magical bones of the book.
And what do the hexes of the Isle contain? A random sample includes: a 6-limbed albino gorilla that slithers along the ground, a forest full of the laughter of forever-unseen children, a statue of an Amazonian warrior who springs to life and tries to kill any males present, and a town that lives in fear of diabolic sea worms. There is little treasure or beneficial magic in the book. There are plenty of traps but few puzzles, dozens of NPCs but no personalities.
The author states that, as each hex contains over 80 square miles , the listed encounters are only possibilities. Indeed, the book seems intended to serve as a background for the GM’s own adventures. Alone, the encounters of the Isle have a random and Gygaxian feel to them: almost all the strange creatures will attack the PCs, as will many of the NPCs, and even the statues. The creatures are given no personalities, backgrounds, or desires. In most cases, they have only a physical description and combat stats. A perfect example is the strange creature found in hex 0602: an 8’ tall bipedal swan-man with 3 sleeping faces in his torso. This is a wondrous creature, but while we are given its stats and its combat abilities, we are told nothing of its purpose, its likely reaction to PCs, or – most notably – the 3 human faces in its chest. Isle of the Unknown is a bizarre and wonder-full book, but it is not a complete setting. If simply plopped down into a campaign and run without alteration, I fear the players will tire of outlandish creatures and objects that simply try to kill them while offering no tangible rewards and want to put their rudders to the island in very short order.
However, if a GM takes the time to fill in some of the unknowns of the isle – creating a rationale for the island’s strangeness, a culture for its mundane folk, personalities for at least some its creatures, and rewards for the PCs – then I think this book is a treasure trove of ideas. Isle of the Unknown may not be a complete setting but, with a little work, it can be the foundation of a weird and unique setting.
