Review: Isle of the Ancients
The setup is that a wizard named Sibarin has set up shop on the island to make weird dinosaur experiments. Meanwhile the local lizardfolk are being terrorized. I'm not sure why the PCs would care to get involved but it doesn't matter because the background tells us "They have acquired a small boat and set out towards the Isle." Don't need to create a reason to go there if you don't give the players a choice.
We start with the typical background and rumors. Some of the rumors are false, and not the good kind of false. If you say "A magic gem lies at the heart of the volcano" and don't put anything in there, or any way to explore inside the volcano, that's just a setup for disappointment. False rumors are fine but they should still lead to some adventure or discovery, even if it's not what the players expected. A few of these will simply go nowhere.
Isle of the Ancients bills itself as a pointcrawl, but it's missing a few elements to fit that template - namely distances and travel times. The map has points but doesn't highlight the routes between them or provide any sense of scale. There are many effects and boons present in this adventure that are measured in days but it doesn't tell you whether it takes 3 days to get from point A to B, or 30. All travel is reduced to "Roll for or choose a random encounter between each connected point." It doesn't even tell you which points are connected.
There are a total of 9 locations, with 2 including keyed dungeons. The non-dungeon locations are mostly an encounter or roll for random treasure. There are a couple of notable exceptions - one being a flock of pteranodons that will try to snatch the PCs and take them to their nest and another being the summit of the volcano where the PCs may make an offering in exchange for a boon. Pretty good stuff, but but when you only have 9 locations I think you spend the effort to make them all that cool.
The first dungeon is the 11-room wizards laboratory Area descriptions are a bit sterile and although clear, aren't very evocative. They also occasionally have the random bolding problem where it's difficult to tell what's really important and what's not. For example:
The jars, body parts and various dinosaurs do nothing. No interactivity or further elaboration. So why are they bold? Why is "golems stand against far wall" in bold rather than "Two metallic golems"?
This room also highlights to other issue with the dungeon: there are a lot of things that look like they should be interactive but aren't. We've got dinosaur organs in jars and dinosaur growth pods and golem charging docks but there's nothing for the PCs to do with them. This is the kind of stuff that they're going to want to experiment with but the adventure gives us nothing. The worst offender is set of tablets etched with ancient lizardfolk history. We're told that only the lizardfolk chieftain can read them. So if the party lugs them back to the village and gets them translated... nothing. It would have been a great opportunity to reveal the location of a long-forgotten and powerful weapon, or the secrets to taming dinosaurs or something that would help the party defeat the wizard. But we get nothing.
There is, in one room, a very nicely described trap that gives us both a tell and a specific triggering mechanism. "If a character examines the door, they notice tiny holes line the door frame. The holes release poison gas if the trap is triggered. The trap is triggered by a small spring-loaded button between the door and the frame which releases if the door is opened without a key." This gives enough details that the players will be able to use creativity and to circumvent the trap rather than a dice roll. Kudos.
The second dungeon is the wizard's 5-room tower. There is no map and each room is a separate floor. How big are the rooms? Nobody knows. But it has the tower dungeon problem of being completely linear. Tale as old as time. Speaking of that song, the place has kind of a Beauty and the Beast vibe with animated furniture.
After battling a couple of the wizard's last purchases from HomeGoods (lvl 1) and two golems (lvl 3) the presumably level 2 or 3 PCs will find the vault - a room containing 1,653 gold pieces among other treasure. Helluva stash It's locked behind a DC 18 door. A thief with +3 DEX rolling at advantage has a 51% chance of success. Smart players will take the money and run in somewhat anticlimactic fashion.
I have to mention this magic greatsword that's also in the stash - it does 1d12 extra damage to burning foes and heals 1d12 damage when you kill a burning foe. Every other party member just became a mule whose sole purpose is to carry and throw molotov cocktails.
Those that lose the lockpicking coin toss will have to go the top floor to face the wizard. There's a little scripted sequence where he says a few lines and summons a tyrannosaurus rex from a pokeball for the final battle. But also, he only has 22 hp and it explicitly says that his back is turned. So if the party surprises him, or even if they just roll well on initiative, they could smoke him before he does any of that. Assuming, I guess, that they can attack from range or cross the undetermined distance from the entrance to wherever he is. I guess that's why maps are important. That would also be really anticlimactic. Anyways I you better just run it like the authors want you to because I get a sense that the whole reason this adventure exists is because someone thought it would be cool to fight a wizard riding a t-rex.
There's a long history of mixing sci-fi and fantasy in D&D adventures, going back to some of the very first publications. But this is a bit of a strange duck. The level 6 wizard Sibarin seems to be a mundane native of whatever planet your party happens to be adventuring on. But he's got forcefields, elevators and robots with charging docks. The dinosaurs wear metal collars that allow them to talk à la the dogs from the movie Up. In my mind it doesn't really fit well with the implied world of Shadowdark (or most other fantasy RPGs for that matter) unless Sibarin was an alien or interdimensional traveler of some sort. But if that was the author's intent, they kept it to themselves. So you just have a 6th level wizard that seems to have inexplicably advanced technology. I'm not opposed to dropping a few laser rifles into my D&D, but this all seems weirdly out of place.
It's also noteworthy that this dungeon was also written for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It's definitely going for the gonzo DCC style. It also follows the DCC trend of being somewhat linear and playing fast and loose with things that are important to Shadowdark, such as the passage of time and treasure values. I think it might be better suited to that system. There are some interesting ideas, but too many of them seem to go nowhere. And it lacks some of the fundamentals that support Shadowdark's style of procedural gameplay.
On a scale of 2-12, Isle of the Ancients gets 5 stingbats.
https://twinmagigames.itch.io/isle-of-the-ancients-for-shadowdark-rpg
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