Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Magi of the Misty Isle

A campaign by The Nameless Designer, all levels.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  I’m ascending slowly in page count and scope. This is the ultimate, a massive sixty-four-page module that’s designed as a “campaign”, a 75-mile-wide island full of numerous side-quests and monstrous problems, built around a main dungeon crawl and a plot about an ancient order of magi. It’s a Nameless Designer project, which I’ve enjoyed before, and been critical of before, but that always means it’ll be bright and colorful, well-formatted with a ponderous but solid layout, loads of AI art, and a workmanlike prose that’s gone through a ChatGPT editing pass or two. At this point I’m mostly just charmed by the quixotic nature of the whole Heroes of Adventure project, but it’s mostly not my thing. Similar case here, but that’s an impressive size of sandbox. 

​  As mentioned, our plot is pretty trad, the titular magi of this misty isle summon the magical PC(s) of the party to their island to complete a trial, winners of the trial get to become apprentices of the magic order. The main trial is going into a magic citadel that mysteriously appears once every ten years, but all the side quests of the troubled island are also part of the process, the benevolent high magi wanting to see their potential recruits being good people, too. There’s a side-plot about The Empire’s secret black cloaks spying on the island and rival explorers, plus frog people displaced by a wyrm, barghasts in the woods, illusion-witches preying on villagers, and a mutant “trul” troubling an old lighthouse tower. It’s all very dense with adventure sites, plus NPC details, random encounters, history and lore drops, plus a bunch of possible “next steps”.
  In a project this extensive, of course there will be a lot of what I liked. I like the somewhat-wonky illustrations of smaller adventure site locations, where the outdoor areas are keyed before jumping into the DungeonScrawl inner maps. It’s a little goofy, but it’s charming and hey, there’s also a dragon here:

​  I like some of the dungeon maps, which are simple but have enough spokes and loops to explore. There are a lot of little dungeons around the isle and a party will enjoy the exploration. The main dungeon, The Citadel, has a fairly simple map but it’s big enough to be a genuinely interesting piece of exploration gameplay, with multiple points on ingress, three levels with some okay interconnection, a water feature beneath…it’s a genuinely fun dungeon, a fine capstone for this tradgame adventure module.
  I also, as mentioned, like that there are both good hooks coming in but even moreso there are a ton of new adventures suggested at the end, with all the possible outcomes, successful or failures, leading to new paths. Well done for the “world integration” part of this, and it makes me believe that those thanked playtesters actually did some playing here.

​  What can be improved in some cases will be to taste. My own game preferences are less about WoW-esque “yellow exclamation point” quests and more about raiding lost ruins filled with monsters for gold, but for that style this does support player agency and isn’t a railroad. However, you could still improve things along the tradgame/3.P axis by making the details stronger and the rewards more explicit. The woods are presented as a pointcrawl with forest paths, whereas a more neutral set of points-of-interest would help more exploration. The island is also way too big with those 6-mile hexes…3-mile hexes would be better, and I think the scale the adventure is actually instinctively assuming may be all the way down to 1-mile hexes, so something like a 6 or 7 mile-across island. The size between sites will means a little more wasted time and it’d be better served in general with tightening.
  Now best use case here is probably “play it with a Heroes of Adventure group” but in all fairness I think it’s trying to be reasonably adaptable. Sadly, despite all the effort that goes into this, I don’t find myself excited by the prospect of working into adaptation of the bits, and the individual pieces, while fine, aren’t worth the effort to me.
  Final Rating? ***/***** as a product that inspires admiration without love. Can’t beat the price however, once again the guy never allows a single penny to flow his way for these things. I certainly hope his quixotic quest continues. 

These Grippli make me uncomfortable.