Crapshööt Mönday: This Free Thing I Föund ön Itch.iö…The Island öf Par

​An island hexcrawl by Igöör, level not specified because…
Written for Mörk Börg
  Okay, we’ve been entirely too positive around here. Not only is January blessed with adventure site reviews, and even the usual Crapshoot Monday depressant has been underperforming with a couple decent modules in the past two weeks. What can we do? Mörk Börg to the rescue, those are always miserable. In the Island of Par we have six pages to describe a decent-sized island with half a dozen questlines and multiple sites of interest. Ambitious to the point of being confusing, but it’s trying really really hard. My eyes don’t hurt from yellow, it’s in a slightly pixelated black-and-white, so that’s automatically made this my favorite Burk Mhurg adventure.
  The premise is…interesting. “I see your assumed end of the world campaign frame and I reject it.” The titular island is isolated from the standard crapsack world and is a somewhat less crappy sack with its own unique cosmology about sleepless ancient creator giants, sentient growing mold, and generational curses that I’ll call “Goblin False Punch Machine”-like. Should be a GLOG adventure. The six “quests” are encountered procedurally and tell a bit of a story while weird nasty dangers get bumped into in several cases. Factions also exist with at least notional motivations.
  First piece of what I liked has to be the map, it’s well-illustrated and has a flow that’s both coherent and naturalistic while still being interesting for a campaign. I also like the setting’s history and story setup, it’s a little bit gonzo and a little bit derivative at times but it’s also generally pretty cool. I love the Wrong Sheep, fake sheep-lures tethered to a cloud-sized hidden psychic predator with hallucinating effects. Some of the factions are nicely adventure-spawning too, set up for conflict via PC proxies.
   …but for all that, what could be improved should be fairly obvious. This thing is six pages long. I mean, they’re big landscape spreads, don’t get me wrong, but all the admittedly cool ideas and actionable seeds in the world kind of struggle when the execution phase comes, particularly in such a low-procedure rules-slim game as Mörk Börg. I should be the biggest booster of this module, I love regional campaign frames with precisely this level of interest and incident, but as punchy as the individual ideas are here, in the six pages there’s just not enough details to actually run this thing, not without the DM having to invest a lot of time in the prep. Laudable ambition that needs about twice the page count to properly turn it into the campaign it desperately wants to be.
  That said, if you’re the victim of a Mörk Börg game the best use case for The Island of Par is to run it as a high-effort, handwavey-at-times campaign, it’s certainly a lot better than anything else I’ve ever encountered for the system. Admire the ambition, it might just not have the support available from the system proper.
  Final Rating? **/***** which while not great, is more because it misses the usability mark rather than any fundamental issues. Not quite breaking the positivity trend here.