#399

May 24, 2026

Books

No books this week!

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

I have finally—finally—finished statting up all the monsters. There’s no reason it took so long, I knew several weeks ago that we weren’t going to be using Whitehack, I was just lazy and put things off.

There’s a pretty nice variety of monsters in the setting actually. Very few of them are just normal creatures you’d find in any old fantasy RPG. Almost all of them have some twist; even most of the animals you can find on the island are different.

They’re definitely clustered towards the low–mid levels (a lot of 3 to 6 HD creatures)1, but that’s probably fine: we played Arden Vul for 3 years and the highest level PC was level 11. There are some higher level creatures too, including a couple of very powerful ones, so if it looks like the players are somehow stomping the island way too quickly I can pull out the big guns. But I think it’ll be fine, I’m having to remind myself that part of the reason the players had a relatively easy time of things in Arden Vul is because they found some very good magical combat gear early on; whereas the magic items in Hot Springs Island are more utility-focussed. In fact, they’re so utility-focussed it’s a bit of a problem and I am going to have to scatter around a few magic swords and whatnot.

Next week was going to be session 0, but we sorted all that out over Discord. We’ve run through the house rules. The players have their characters. We’re ready to go!

I’m going to start them shipwrecked on the island (seems to be a common start) outside the entrance to a small dungeon recently revealed by a rock-slide (not part of the module, one I’ll be adding). I’ll use the dungeon to introduce some of the island’s history and put a minor magical item in it for one of the characters (we have a Hunter, a Marine, and a Wizard), then they’ll have to climb up the cliffs they crashed into and hike across the island to Hot Springs City, to be picked up by the regular Martel transport ship. Ideally this will take several days and they’ll encounter a bunch of weird and scary things along the way. At some point in the journey they’ll find a dead guy who has a copy of the Field Guide in his pack.

I think that’ll be a good opening.

Miscellaneous

Growth in the garden has really exploded over the past month. The whole thing is green now, there are plenty of shoots almost up to my knee and a couple of very large things. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of things that are definitely unpleasant weeds and not pretty wildflowers so I guess I’ll be spending much of my bank holiday Monday weeding.

  1. “But if you statted them up couldn’t you make them any level you want?” Yes and I did. Some of the wildlife is pretty scary, but a lot of it is, like, a fantasy dodo. So most animals are going to be 1–3HD. For intelligent enemies, the island is (pretty much) split betwen two major factions, neither of which is strong enough to just wipe out the other, so that implies that at least those two factions are relatively equal in strength.

    The question then becomes whether there’s a massive power gap between the intelligent inhabitants of the island and the wildlife. It doesn’t sound very fun if there is, as then the players would need to grind against wild animals for ages before they could interact with the factions.

    But fear not, the faction leaders are notably tougher than the rank and file, some of the wildlife is a significant threat, and there’s one monster which is just a reskinned tarrasque.↩︎