​Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Island of the First God

An island adventure by Avaricious RPG, for levels who knows
Written for “OSR”
   I’ve had a pretty decent experience with the “Appendix N Jam”, it’s a simple four-pages-including-cover size, usually focused pretty well on a simple scenario, often with fond bits of nostalgia bait around the edges. This one does have the $4.59 sticker and the usual format, but rather than keys we have a large number of tables and a few descriptions of spaces outlined on the map. This is a danger sign:

    Uh so this island is right off the world’s edge, outside of time and space, where the god Time sleeps inside of a volcano about to wake up. He’ll in fact wake up every few weeks, cause and eruption and mass destruction in a tantrum, then revert back to sleeping state and reset everything because Time Stuff. There are also all kinds of interesting people and places scattered throughout the island, all refugees and wash-ups from a thousand worlds, complete with multiple factions each with goals and lairs and everything.
   …we are given to understand. Actually, because, as mentioned, this is only three pages of content so its abstracted and fuzzy and generated randomly by tables and actually nothing matter because, as mentioned, there’s a huge reset button. ‘kay.
   I’ll swiftly go through what I liked because there’s only one thing, there’s a pretty good event timer showing the sequence of disaster, that’s nice for this kind of scenario.
   What can be improved otherwise is almost infinite because we’re in the realm of “more pages needed”, so I’m not going to speculate about details. Each bad guy area needs a map with keys and/or order of battle, the island itself needs more map details and random encounters, the mysterious fate-programmer-spider needs motivation and a plan, everything need loads and loads of detail…or else the island itself needs to be massively de-scoped, made much simpler. As it is this is a fuzzy idea for a little campaign, not a practical one-shot like the page count really wants. “Guy excitedly telling you his idea for a story” problem, classic.
   That’ll bring us to the best use case, as a universal lesson on how not to properly scope out a module. There’s no details to use here because he ain’t got no details, the tables to generate content make some pretty darn generic content, and the island/concept itself is so bespoke that there’s nothing to port away.
   Final Rating? */***** that’s a swing and a miss.