Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Unmoored

Everyone's favorite public domain island.

​An island pointcrawl by M. Allen Hall, levels…you don’t deserve to know
Written for Pirate Borg
  There’s a great old co-op game called Forbidden Island, one of the first mainstream co-ops. While the gameplay was decent (perfected in the superior Forbidden Desert), I’ve always been intrigued by the great premise…mysterious island, Myst-like, with an ancient civilization’s ruins dotted about, the players have to sweep up McGuffins while the island floods and sinks. Seemed like there was potential for a TTRPG session in there, and M. Allen Hall agrees with a sinking dozen-location island outlined in eight pages. It’s Pirate Borg, so better than Normal Borg at least. You’re on thin ice buddy, but I’m giving you a shot.
  Premise is fun enough, as you see up above in the cover page. “What if the baddies from Pirates of the Caribbean 1 fought with the baddies from Pirates of the Caribbean 2&3?” Lich and his undead army fighting off Deep One cult continuously trying to sink the island, eventually after the thing gets sunk and raised one too many times it becomes a wandering island, well and good. Players are invited to the island for a McGuffin heist, a lich assassination, a cult leader rescue, or of course just get shipwrecked. Functional, although I’m amused that the setting sort of assumes a dark cult dedicated to drowning all the Earth are just yet another group of guys they get friendly quests from. The cult is sinking spots as the character wander from point to point.
  Beyond my already-admitted fondness for the premise, what I liked were some of the encounters between the skeletons and the fish fans, they have some dynamism and would make for interesting play at the table. I like the lich’s ability to explode his skeletal minions, dealing bone-shard-damage, that’s a good boss fight ability. I like the setting, there’s a fun stuff with waterlogged jungles that have coral bits as well. I like the idea of there being waterlogged treasures from the deeps scattered throughout the islands…
  …but what can be improved first of all would be making those treasures more, well, treasure-y. A lot of the tables could use another editing pass for adding more verve. There’s also a need for less handwaving for what exactly get entailed by “the next location sinks”, there’s a lot of the adventure riding on this aspect but there’s nothing remotely gameable, alas, about the environmental effects. Another “you didn’t do the work” is the lich’s castle, the centerpiece of the module for most quest. Gimmie a map, a sketch, heck a stick-and-node diagram…this doesn’t have to be a lot of detail, but something in a couple pages to let a group plan sneaking, conniving, or assaulting the location. As it is this appears to be expecting that everyone just waddles up and politely knocks.
  All this makes the best use case for the module as a Pirate Borg one-shot, which to my understanding is how Pirate Borg is supposed to be run. I’d have some concerns about the time management, a sufficiently motivated Borgrunnar could probably make a “campaign” out of this, but I guess then the suffering is the point.
  Final Rating? */***** because it’s a bunch of excited idea but it lacks all the most key elements to turn this into an actually satisfying session. Pity, because I really do like this premise. 

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