The Isle: The Review (Mostly)

Well shucks. I read The Isle (Luke "Fever Swamp" Gearing's minimalist "masterpiece"), knowing many people loved it, knowing I hadn't loved the demo of Wolves Upon the Coast, knowing this type of module isn't really even my style. But Gradient Descent (also by Gearing) is one of my all-time favorite adventures, so I figured I'd give this a shot! Wouldn't you know I was thoroughly unimpressed with the Isle?

I shudder to call this a review because that takes so much effort and there's certainly a chance I "didn't get it", but that is what this is in essence. The core inspiration for talking about it in the first place is as a kind of ideological wrap-up for the pseudo-trilogy of posts I made this week. In The Glamour we talked about the overwrought, overproduced nature of modern tabletop games. In Coloring Book Game Design we discussed the benefits of maximalism, and how scaffolding can be incredibly beneficial to a certain kind of play and player. And in The Isle: The Review (Mostly) I want to discuss my frustrations with minimalism.

Anyways this is coming off of Silent Hill f absolutely fumbling its game design and spending maybe too many hours this week hosting and not enough playing Dynasty Warriors: Origins, so this may come off as a little mean. Luke if you're reading this, you're wonderful and I love your stuff and I hope sincerely hope you keep making modules :3 (And also they can't all be winners ~ )

What Is The Isle?

The Isle is a faux-Catholic island monastery, inspired in part by the very real and very beautiful Skellig Michael and the history in the areas surrounding it - A natural beauty that I'd actually say Gearing does justice to in the book's opening pages. The ways he blends hostility with natural awe are sublime:

"Cliffs rise above the bitter sea, mauled by waves and weather. Fallen stones jut like Frisian horses, big enough to skewer whales. The abbot knows this, because he has seen it."

Chef's kiss! Love it! Minimalism at its finest ~ We all know what an island looks like, but these description add the detail that makes the island feel alive, dynamic even! Very excellent, even very foreshadowing.

The monks of the monastery lead spartan lives which conceal an ancient entrance to a vast dungeon complex beneath the Isle which is the meat of the book's hefty 80 page span. Outsiders aren't privy to this information BUT... but...

*checks notes*

You uhhh might be a Viking! Here to raid according to Gearing... And if you do... *checks notes* then pull up the floorboards! ... Then shatter the seal! ... Then you can get into the catacombs you have no context for, nor reason to believe there's any treasure within! And they're pretty deadly too!

Or... or maybe you're on a mission from the church! Of course! One of the monks has gone missing! And he's... In one of the coves... And also super easy to miss... Because there's literally no clues that'd point you there...

This I think was the core (and common) issue that took the wind out of my sails early on. Even in the most crass antagonistic player hook of being raiders, where every threat of "the enemy escapes and kills all the monks on their way out" means nothing, there's still no indication of a tomb to rob and most of the good loot is buried so deep that I couldn't in good faith set this in an open world and actually expect players to peel back all these layers. Especially when the module is just downright mean. Maybe if one ran this like a secret location a la The Painted World I'd feel different, but I'm not sure that's what this book is fully going for either.

Roll the Dice

I play in a semi-regular game of Greg "OSR Publishing" Gillespie's Barrowmaze (run in OSE). There's a lot of instant-death nonsense, plenty of "and now 2d10 skeletons appear" and a riotous cornucopia of traps, monster closets and classic dungeon crawling. We've used every advantage we can to get through, brought in seige weapons, smashed spikes to create safe passage, gone through gallons of oil and holy water and sent more hirelings and PCs to their doom than I care to count. There's been more than a few trial-and-error "puzzles" and arbitrary traps, and while they're not always my thing they certainly fit the ambiance and "tactical infinity" of Barrowmaze.

But I can't confidently say they fit the vibes I got off The Isle (Is The Isle a tense investigative dive? A splapstick funhouse? Both? Neither? I'm still not sure!) The Isle insists that "The dungeon relies heavily on supplies and practical solutions using rope, iron spikes and the like." before throwing in countless examples of non-telegraphed "puzzles" like "If all twelve lower figures are removed and the upper ones remain untouched, the secret door to Room 19 noisily rumbles open." [[Points added for these statues foreshadowing an enemy's move-set, points deducted for this sentence being the first time in the entry that you learn there's 12 figures on the lower shelf (of which there are 8 permutations) - Again I have no idea how this "puzzle" is meant to be solved besides blind luck]].

Touching some things permanently aggresses some enemies (with no means of getting the loot otherwise), touching others saves you their ire - All the while even just another sparse few sentences could've helped telegraph such actions so it didn't all feel so arbitrary.

There's also a LOT of enemies in the dungeon and a LOT of calls for encounters - A common issue I have where such repetitive slug fests or constant running just exhaust the whole experience.[*1] The module all at once demands trial and heavily penalizes error, and don't forget you're on a very isolated island where retreat and resupply is also incredibly and invariably dangerous and costly.

Too Little Too Late

The Isle feels like a clear exercise in minimalism - There's no art beyond the cover, and the sparse but effective layout makes a CV look lavish. The maps, however, are frankly insulting - Minimalist sure, but difficult to use and full of so much black ink that if one wanted to print and mark up such maps you'd have both less space to write on and wetter paper than nearly any other "minimalist" map I've encountered.

What the module lacks in art it's able to pick up the slack for in vivid description packed into brief sentences:

"Complex amalgams of starfish, seaweed, barnacles and crustaceans retain a vague memory of humanity—a chaos of wet life, teeming with purpose. Language has long forgotten them."

Never let it be said that Gearing is anything but a masterclass writer. Methinks this is where a lot of love for the module comes from, and I really do get it. Rarely did I feel visually lost, and the added details of smells and sounds painted a far more vivid picture of the (albeit often mechanically dull) damp rooms in the belly of the Isle than most adventure art I've encountered. In many ways the stark contrast of this enticing and exciting writing is what makes the bland design feel all the more grating.

It's Fine

There's a twist(?) at the bottom of the Isle. It's pretty well telegraphed and set up. It wowed a lot of people. I thought it was fine. It's an opportunity to jeer and go "Oh foreshadowing from what few murals were on the walls! Dark Souls Storytelling!!!" [To the point where there's literally a Dark Souls fog wall before it] - The boss that follows is delightfully vivid, can have a fun impact on the wider world (much like many of the Isle's mini plot threads) and generally Is Cool.

But frankly? I was... pretty underwhelmed. It felt like the nail in the coffin of "There is literally no reason for anyone to go down here if they don't know what's happening." and cautious players paying attention will likely miss it altogether. Yes, there is something very fun about history so layered on itself that the true threat at its base has been forgotten to time, and curiosity may kill more than the cat (except also not because the Abbott knows everything and just won't tell anyone). Yes, there's something neat about pulling back those layers and piecing together a quite coherent and historically resonant tale of subjugation. But also it just really really didn't do anything for me past a "Oh that's neat."[*2 - Spoilers but also important in my opinion]

Much like the Story-Eater, whose vivid dreamlike description was absolutely captivating, but ultimately was nothing more than another vapid stop in the fun house, it was cool but didn't feel meaningfully dynamic. In most encounters in the Isle your options are "Kill it/By Interact with it, locking yourself into a path of combat" or "Don't touch it" -- And y'know as someone who loves Choose Your Own Adventure books I earnestly think the Isle had the potential to be a sublime one with its heavily binary design.

The Thing About the Sea-Thing

Starting on Page 56 there's something that absolutely utterly ruined The Isle for me. Through a clearly living crustal passage, you can enter the body of the Sea-Thing, a titanic pseudo-kaiju that has latched into the side of the Isle by chance (or possibly by the call of the end boss?) and is spewing out some of the oceanic horrors you can encounter.

Within these scant 17 rooms is a fully realized ecosystem, tricky locks without keys, killer doors into the sea (which give you plenty of chance to get back in) and a parasitic worm looking to take the reigns (whose alliance is delightfully fickle). In the 10 pages it took to digest this digestive titan,  I was infinitely more gripped and excited to bring this to the table than anything I'd read since the Island's surface (and even that had issues).

Everything in the Sea-Thing was dynamically gameable, most of its dangers are clearly telegraphed, what it lacks in treasure it makes up for in raw interactive might, and its invitation to make the rest of the crawl easier upon completion.

Nowhere else is the Isle this eager to let you experiment. Only a singular intrigue (two warring brothers on an earlier floor, one of whom is notably less hostile and carries less loot than the other) is as compelling as the choice to let this worm take over the Sea-Thing.

It's. So. Good.

Had it not been for the Sea-Thing maybe I'd have been less harsh to the Isle, but this proves Gearing can pack dynamics in his minimalism!! ((I still greatly prefer the ironically shorter Gradient Descent but y'know~)) This was earnestly what convinced me to write this review, because I went from reading thinking "maybe I just don't get this" to "Oh I think I get this I just don't like a lot of it."

Forsaken 

There's a brilliant bog post by Nova "Playful" Void called Forsaken Easter Eggs. In it she perfectly exemplifies the issues I have with adventures like this: "Forsaken easter eggs do not help the referee better run the module, but they are referee-facing rather than player-facing. They’re easter eggs, because they’re a secret message, and they’re forsaken, because they’re the one so well hidden that they’ll never be found by the kids on the hunt."

There's so many details that help (emphasis on help) a GM piece together what might be happening that just never hits the table. There's so many ambitions and moving parts that often have no means of dynamically interacting with the player beyond "I'll fight you to the death now for lying about the state of the world (this was not telegraphed)" or "Thanks for being honest about that, I am at peace [dies]" (this is a real example) -- It's all just so arbitrary and (ironically) inorganic. It feels like to bring the Isle to life you need to add so much more in the way of hooks, telegraphs, dynamics, supply lines, the wider world.

I'm sure there are GMs who like the minimalism of this module because "It Doesn't Get in the Way" but to me this "Doesn't Get in the Way" in the same way a tourist asking me for directions in a museum I've never been to doesn't. Sure it doesn't ruin the experience, but we're all none the less lost for it. The whole point of having a module is so I have to do less work, and the Isle seems to be asking me to do more.

It's too minimal to be as directed and helpful as Gradient Descent, but too specific for me to just riff off of and do my own thing with like Mythic Bastionland. It has neither drawn me an owl to color in, nor told me to draw a cool version of an owl from my imagination; It was given me some weirdly placed vivid details of its owl then told me to draw the rest of it. It's an issue I frankly have with a lot modules...

Anyways I didn't like the Isle, and am likely not the target audience. I found the descriptions beautiful enough and the Sea-Thing interesting enough to feel like I didn't waste my time reading it. If you want to check it out, it's neat and I'm sure most readers will get at least something out of it. If your GM is running the Isle make sure to thank them for all the effort they're about to put in to make this module work ~

If you liked the Isle and modules like it, what did you like about it? What gave you the confidence to want to bring it to the table? What hooked you? Pricked you? Do you feel this hit your sweet spot of scaffolding and direction? If so, what about that sweet spot makes the game feel easier or more interesting to GM for you?

[*1 : I really should elaborate on this more, but the reason I don't usually appreciate combat focused OSR stuff is not because I feel like combat/running is a fail state, but because the encounters always feel so vapid and repetitive - A core problem I have in a lot of video games and most recently with Silent Hill f. A few monsters in The Isle have fun little wrinkles (ways to appease them for which there is next to no telegraphing in some instances) but again I have almost no interest of ever bringing something like this to the table, which may be more of a personal taste thing.]

[*2 : So the whole thing is pretty much "not-Romans grab the Arch-Druid, replace him with a faux-Druid and lock the real Arch-Druid in the Isle's basement and then time erodes etc etc eventually the Abbott is on top serving the same guard duty." It works. It's neat. Fun fact though; the word Druid first shows up on page 73 and nothing about Druids on the mainland is remotely established or even mentioned before this! ... And yes you can pick up on the symbolism if you know the real world history, and much like the real world history you can assume they're persecuted and in hiding or w/e but UGH... It's very "Oh so I gotta make the rest up, huh?"]