Today we are looking at Last Isle of the Dread Legion, a level 1 adventure by Grim Games. This is a sort of point crawl across an orc-infested jungle island where the party has been shipwrecked. 

Check out that cover art. It looks like it was made by an extremely talented 6th grader and I mean that in the best way possible. Up at the front we’ve got a couple of fighters mixing it up against some classic pig-faced orcs. One of them is dual wielding a sword and a mermaid. And then in the background the wizard and thief are up to some kinda shenanigans with outfits that were ripped straight from an ‘80s comic book. There’s no priest in sight because healing spells are for weaklings. And the pallete could best be described as “EGA”. It’s a vibe for sure.

We start with a map of the island that shows 12 points of interest. There is no sense of scale and we are told “After PCs travel a few lengthy geographical areas, trigger nightfall and use torch time”. Nope. You gotta give us travel times or hexes so we know how quickly resources are consumed and how often random encounters come up. It’s part of the core rules and you can’t just leave it out or expect the GM to design that part of the adventure for you. This is a game where time is critical and the tension it creates is a key part of what makes it fun.

Speaking of random encounters, we get four entries. A couple of them are broken down further like “Encounter wild fauna: 1. 1 gorilla, 2. 1d3 apes, 3. 1d6 spiders, 4. 1d3 cobras, 5. 1 panther, 6. 1d3 giant frogs”. But again, the actual design of these encounters is left to the GM. We aren’t given any guidance on how to make an encounter with 1d3 cobras interesting or how it fits into this setting.

The adventure begins thusly: “The party regains consciousness on the Shipwreck Shore and deals with the initial orc encounter. Each surviving PC then rolls for a rumor as they begin to plan their next move.“ Here you would hope the rumors would be something that spurs the party to explore a particular location on the island, or to achieve a particular goal. But instead they are mostly general information like “The brutality of orcs is well known throughout civilization. However, the Dread Legion variety was especially nefarious for consuming their victims in ritual feasts, celebrating anything from a successful raid to the conquest of a kingdom.” That’s a nice fun fact but it isn’t terribly relevant to our beleaguered PCs, it’s already kind of assumed that orcs are brutal by anyone familiar with the genre and this knowledge won’t impact any decision that the party makes. 

The first area, however, does a decent job of kicking things off. After being shipwrecked the party is being dragged off by some orcs. They know their captain had a magic scroll that will probably get them home but it’s already been looted by the same orcs. His corpse is nearby and his key is missing. A strong start. From there we get descriptions of the individual areas. They’re a bit on the wordy side. You’re not going to run this straight off the page and actually it was a bit confusing to try and piece together how the areas fit together. More on that later.

It’s difficult for me to understand how the author wants the GM to adjudicate travel. As I mentioned, the map does not include distances. In the text, the only distance ever mentioned is “far”. We also get this note: “GM reminder. Traversal to any far zone in this adventure takes hours. Be sure to roll encounter checks as outlined in Shadowdark pages 82 and 90, occurring 3:6.” Page 82 refers us to page 90. The travel/hexcrawl rules on page 90 are dependent on having defined distances and lengths of time. You need to know how many hours the party is on the road to know when to roll random encounters. And in order to determine how many hours, you need to know the distance and terrain. “Far” is ok for a spell range but not usable as a travel distance. In this adventure distance is abstracted to the point of being useless. So the rate of travel and frequency of random encounter checks will be arbitrary.

If it’s not obvious, this drives me crazy. In a game about exploration, where you’re running an adventure exploring a jungle island, you’ve got to give the GM information for how the adventure will interface with the game’s systems for exploration. Or if you must, create and describe new systems. But you can’t just handwave it. Well, I guess you can but you shouldn’t.

The areas themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. There’s an interesting harpy encounter with a variety of possible approaches and outcomes. That encounter also includes this magic ring:

“Ring of Water Breathing. Carved whale bone, etched with the blessings of the forgotten god of the deep. Benefit. Once per day, the ring grants you the effects of Alter Self, but only to grow gills. Personality. Neutral. Pacifist towards all creatures of the sea. Subtle whale vocalization morphs into audible weeping with the death of any sea creature within near. Mourning sounds last for 1d4 rounds.” Ok look, whales famously do not have gills but I do like how this takes a pretty traditional magic item and adds a lot of flavor. Well done. 

The party will also meet some mermaids preparing a jungle excursion to rescue one of their own that’s been kidnapped by the orcs. If you’re wondering how these legless fish people plan to get around the island, I’ll kindly refer you back to the cover. At any rate they’re willing to team up with the PCs to fight the orcs.

This adventure is intended to be played in Theater of the Mind and a lot of the area descriptions highlight the pitfalls of that. In one jungle area we read “Unsprung traps. DC 9 WIS to spot a net trap. DC 12 WIS to detect a covered pit with a cobra inside. DC 15 WIS to see a wire that frees a swinging trunk for 1d8 DMG.” It’s unclear where these traps are and under what circumstances they will be triggered. If there’s not a map that defines their location, you need to describe it exactly in the text. Otherwise how can we know which PCs are affected and when?

It also becomes an issue when the party arrives at the orc fort. They need to get inside to recover the magic scroll that will get them home. Since we don’t have a map of the fort or any information about patrols, possible entry points, etc, we’re left with the finite list of ways that the adventure presents as avenues of infiltration: the party can fight (combat with some orcs), they can sneak (roll DEX), they can try a disguise (roll CHA) or they can try a specific distraction that halves the number of orcs present. 

The advantage that TTRPGs have over just about every other kind of game is tactical infinity. To quote S. John Ross: “In Chess, the White Queen can’t sweet-talk a Black Knight into leaving her be; in Squad Leader, a group of soldiers can’t sneak through an occupied village dressed as nuns. In an RPG, you really can try anything you can think of, and that’s a feature that thrives on anarchy.” So if you really want to take advantage of the medium as a designer, you want to create situations and provide information that will allow the wonderful anarchy of tactical infinity to thrive. 

Paradoxically, that means providing some structure to the fictional world where we are playing. Tactical infinity doesn’t mean a lack of rules; it means a wealth of possibilities rooted in a predictable reality. If the players don’t understand the physics of the world or the motivations of the NPCs, their choices become shots in the dark rather than clever maneuvers. In this case, that means providing a map of the orc settlement, patrol routes and timing, maybe give some orcs a personality, etc. Enough foundation to allow the players to predict how well their schemes will work, and to allow the GM to adjudicate them. As it is, we’re left with the few strategies the designer thought about and anything else will need to be improvised.

In another area, the party is traversing a mine until they reach an obstacle. “Hours pass, but eventually PCs come to a huge boulder blocking the way forward. DC 15 STR to push it out of the way, revealing a secret entrance to the Undermountain Lake.” Ask yourself, what is really the purpose of this check? How many times can it be attempted? What are the consequences for failure? Think about how it will actually play out at the table. The party rolls up, the GM says “there’s a boulder in the way”. The party rolls – if they succeed, onto the next scene. If they fail you either let them try again until they succeed or tell them to turn around. There’s no gameplay here, no decisions to be made or creative solutions to be found.

Placing obstacles in the party’s way is good. But it’s not good because it gives them a chance to roll dice. It’s good because it gives them a chance to use some creative thinking and to make use of that tactical infinity. It’s good because it allows them to make choices and weigh the consequences. They get to engage their brains. So a good obstacle will have space for myriad solutions, enticing rewards for success and somewhat obvious but dangerous consequences for failure. 

This is also the area where the party will meet some drow slavers. It would be cool to form an alliance with the drow against the orcs, and the inevitable(?) betrayal would be fun to play out. But we’re told they aren’t interested in stirring up conflict with the orcs and avoid orc territory. Wasted opportunity. That doesn’t stop the GM from allowing such things, but it doesn’t help them either.

Eventually we get to the showdown between the party and the orc chieftain. There are actually two paths to get here – one through the jungle and another through the caves. But it isn’t actually explained how to get into the caves. I can sort of infer from the map that there’s an entrance in the mermaid cove but it doesn’t explicitly show or say that the two areas are connected. It would be easy to miss about half the adventure. The party can also enter the caves from the orc chieftain’s room but at that point they will have the scroll that teleports them home, so they might not bother. 

They might also miss the coolest part of the whole thing: in the last room of the caves there is a shrine to Ramlaat where, if you sacrifice the chosen of Ramlaat (currently the orc chieftain) you become chosen where you gain “Benefit. +2 points of STR and Onslaught. 1/day, ADV on STR and CON checks/saves, +1d4 DMG (5 rounds). Curse. Hunted. Chosen servants of Ramlaat vaguely sense your presence. They relentlessly seek your blood to obtain the blessing you possess. When challenged, you must defeat your enemy and ritually sacrifice them to maintain Ramlaat’s favor.” Pretty rad. Unfortunately by the time they find it, the orc chieftain will probably be dead and the opportunity missed.

The biggest sin of The Last Isle of the Dread Legion is that it feels incredibly restricted. The author had an idea of how the adventure would go and provides little to no support for deviating from it. Many of its problems could be solved by a map clearly showing the relationships and distances between areas. But despite the obvious enthusiasm that the author has for the game and for the genre, this fundamentally doesn’t feel like a Shadowdark adventure. It’s not set up to support the kind of open-ended exploration gameplay that Shadowdark is made for. It feels more like a scene-based 5e adventure. Or possibly an early ‘90s LucasArts adventure. You move from screen to screen, interacting with the world in the ways the programmers has seen fit and staying on the path.

Also the monster and NPC stats aren’t anywhere in the book. Friendly reminder that those are covered by the Shadowdark 3rd party license and are OK to republish. 

On a scale of 2-12, Last Isle of the Dread Legion gets 4 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/557700/the-last-isle-of-the-dread-legion