Isle of the Unknown
At first look, it's nice. It's very pretty, the layout is nice, and it's easy to read and attractively illustrated. It's a sandbox, and a pretty big one. And pictures help a lot - plenty of "you run into this!" illustrations.
On the other hand, it seems like it would take a lot of work to run - it's pretty bare-bones, because of the size - and there are some crazy-odd monsters. Like a ankylosaurus-looking raspberry. An axe-handed rat (life is worse than for the hooked horror, probably.) A killer koala. At least two say "continuously drenched in its own blood." They're unique, I'll give them that.
I think idea was that I'd sure find a way to mine it for ideas. Which I will. I'll dig around through it and try to get a review up when my schedule has a hole in it for writing about what I'm reading.
Whooie, for myself, this is one of the two worst OSR purchases I ever made. It's obviously a bunch of hexes populated with a random generator with little concern for coherence or an overall view on how to fit things together, and few to no actual people to interact with other than fighting them. The monsters range from the silly to the totally silly, and it's just a damn mess. The admittedly beautiful art's really a wasted effort.
ReplyDeleteI can see that. The unifying theme does seem to be "these are all inexplicably gonzo weirdness!" Even the non-combat encounters are mostly puzzles with no solution and no prize as written, but not enough pizzaz to make the want to come up with one, either - the clock guy and the twin time-warp locations.
DeleteAh, the product that brought up a dispute between the RPG Pundit and its author. From what little I read, it seemed the Pundit was right: too much weird with little context, though I'm sure some of the individual encounters might be fun.
ReplyDelete