Retrospective: The Dark of Hot Springs Island
Where I offer a retrospective on ten sessions of running The Dark of Hot Springs Island for a group of four players, with little experience in the hobby in general and sandboxes like HSI specifically. I have had only two campaigns that became what I would consider long-form, neither of which published modules, so I, too, am inexperienced with this kind of game. You'll see. This here is part review of HSI, part reflection on my home game.
HSI comes as a single ~A4 book, stuffed to the brim with content. Sometimes, the art or the layout gets too much focus, but overall it works well enough. In the first hundred pages, there is a page for every hex, each with three entries. Major locations, i.e. dungeons, are detailed in what I can only describe as word thickets:
Imagine running that off the cuff!
Another sixty pages offer background information about factions and important characters—in running text, which is fine as part of the prep, but don't bother finding something mid-game. I recommend prepping index cards or similar for NPCs.
A highlighter is a good investment, so are post-its given the lack of whitespace where it's needed the most. I found it challenging to run the major locations without specifically prepping them, which clashes a bit with the player-driven nature of the whole thing. A skill I had to develop is to just go with my interpretation of things, but sometimes small changes in the moment become major hassles down the line, butterfly effect style. I don't have a good solution to this.
Then there is the companion book A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island: A survivor's diary, containing information on most of the fauna and flora, essentially a thick player handout. This Field Guide falls into the trap of providing too much information, leaving little to explore about the minor, everyday creatures. At times, it even gives more info than the main book, which has repeatedly lead to the fucked up situation of me describing a creature, but the players reacting 'It can't be that thing, the book says they're red, but Seb described them as black…'
Don't get me wrong, I dig the idea of a Field Guide for the players to complete, Pokedex-style, but there aren't all that many gaps left. And while there is a warning about its contents being incomplete or even outright incorrect, we haven't encountered instances of that, yet.
In hindsight it was a mistake to give the players the Field Guide right off the bat, as a 'landfall gift'. Maybe, if organically looted at a much later time in the game—maybe even off the author!—it would be less oppressive, and the gaps it does contain regarding most of the high-level events might shift into focus instead.
Also, I banned leafing through the Field Guide unless the characters have time to do that in the fiction, too. 'Let's see what this thing charging us is …'
One invaluable tool has been this encounter generator (<< that's a link), pictured above. The encounter generation procedure as per the book is a multi-step one, spread across several tables and a bit of a pain to run live. Without the tool, I probably would have pre-rolled encounters. Each rolled encounter comes with a succinct thing the creature is doing, think labouring, wounded or even fighting (which automatically combines with another encounter roll) giving you more than enough inspiration to work with. Most of the time.
Most of the time, because I have been struggling to portray well the elementals, a major part of the wildlife. Sure, they're quaint and curious and fun, potentially even fearsome, but I found them lacking actual goals to turn them into more than one-off vignettes. They are very much forces of nature, with unknowable motives and a perception of the world so unlike ours that it's been rather challenging to do them justice, especially compared to humanoid NPCs.
In response, I've been re-rolling elemental encounters judiciously, which I am also unhappy with…
I handed out this blank hex map for the players to fill out or annotate. I would've liked such a map, maybe with a handful of key locations already on it, to be included with the book—in the end I photoshopped a hex grid onto an outline of the island, which works, I guess.
What I didn't anticipate is that the players would take the hexes very literally. 'If we go left here…' or 'that river flows East? On the map it runs South…' At least part of that is on me. Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that we're not exploring metre-by-metre, but rather focused on points of interest. Or that there is a certain level of zoom and abstraction to this, to any map.
Providing a map without hexes might fix this, to a degree, but it would make communicating directions and positions harder. Hexes fade more into the background if the map wasn't entirely blank, instead including some topographical and/or key features. I wonder if HSI as a pointcrawl might work better.
Additionally, the chance of botching a navigation check clashes with adding info to the blank map as it's being explored - I think, for the sake of HSI specifically, one might forego the possibility of getting lost altogether without losing much of what makes HSI entertaining.
Another struggle in my home game comes in the lack of goals and direction as formulated by the players. Thirty or so hours in, a worrisome amount of meandering happens. There is no overarching plot, and none of the hornet nests scattered across the isle have been kicked yet. I suppose (mega) dungeons are at an advantage here, there's always another door to kick in. I'll have to modify the encounters to introduce momentum. Or else place some magic doors in the jungle.
Courtesy of tumblr.com/repair-her-armor
In terms of in-game events as portrayed by the module, there are three things I am unhappy with:
Firstly, there is no safe haven or retreat. No fortified on-island presence for the characters' parent company. I had the characters disembark in a rowboat from a galleon in a hex chosen by the players, but what about a way back? How are they supposed to leave with the accumulated treasures? There are other Martell employees about, folded into the random encounter tables, and the local factions might also provide safe havens. On one hand, this reflects how the characters are thrown into the deep end, on the other, some basic frontier town play could provide rhythm and much needed impetus.
Secondly, and this and the following paragraph are spoiler territory; secondly, the HSI ogres kidnap women to polymorph them into baby making ogres. The fuck. If this ever becomes relevant—my characters have yet to meet the ogres—I'll probably at least remove the restriction to women. Gender shouldn't matter if polymorphing magic is involved. I might remove this element altogether.
Thirdly, another problematic element: The big bad, Svarku, hoards water nymphs in his harem. He also has, quote, 5 pornographic paintings of Svarku and various [nymphs]. I read a suggestion somewhere, that it would be less sexist if Svarku 'just' collected interesting individuals instead, like a zoo. Probably will do that. Still plenty twisted.
Either way, add to the above to the definitely sexist art throughout the book (imagine female vs male fantasy armour and you got the gist of it) and we get a motif I don't care to repeat in my game. What a lovely note to end on… but I achieved what I wanted: Ruminating on issues as perceived by me, hopefully to some benefit to you.
Find me in Discord as #ashtonishing.
Bonus image: Exploding Encounters
