Review On Adventure Seeds: Islands From Taskboy Games For Your Old School Campaigns

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There are any number of old school generators out there but islands have always been one of the more interesting old school elements for adventures. They can hold everything from micro lost worlds to pirate bases and they're influence goes all the way back to the earliest adventure fiction. With writers like William Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Jules Verne and beyond into the annals of today. Now taskboy games has entered the fight with a six page true system neutral island generator. This allows for quick on the fly adventure location generation for plug and play generation. So this is a pay what you want title and its well worth a couple of dollars. The material here is very well laid out with no frills DYI fill in a quick adventure elements as the DM likes. According to the introduction, Islands have long been a favorite setting for literature, poems, songs and paintings.
A better metaphor for isolation is hard to imagine. In that isolation, protagonists are often challenged with opponents that threaten the security, sanity or morality of the context that the protagonists came from. In role playingadventures, island venues represent tactical challenges. The player characters have a limited store of
 supplies and henchmen with them. Help, should the party be captured or trapped, will be long in coming. Of course, in real life, some islands are big enough to support a year-round community. Living on an island offers a slightly different RPG experience, but one that fits very well into most games. One imagines a campaign in which the characters begin their career clearing out tidepools of minor beasties, perhaps  exploring a few creepy sea caves and fending off pirates. Eventually, the ambitious characters will depart home for adventures in the broader world.

This generator can be used for everything from ship wrecked or lost WWI or II soldiers, to islands for the pirates of the Spanish main or even as a resource for DYI post apocalpytic island hopping location generation. All of this is covered in the parameters of the product to work with the Dungeon master's choices  of campaign material. For the price the dungeon master get's a plethora of random chart options. And as a fan of random charts and adventure location generation this where this product shines.
Everything is done with the same amount of care that the author has done with Tranzar's Redoubt.
Reading through the material I rolled up several small mirco island environments and it put me in the mindset of Robinson Crusoe or some of the Lost World style Edgar Rice Burrough island novels. It could also be used as a tool to generate any number of Celtic islands and simply add in your own SRD monsters as you see fit. The Adventure Seed Islands has a stripped down no nonsense approach to island generation and that in my mind is a good thing.

I was also reminded of the classic Tales of the Gold Monkey television show because this generator could be used to create any number of small or larger scale islands rich with possibilities for PC's to exploit in a modern or pre modern game. In fact this generator could be used to generate a micro island location that can be used in an OSR game adventure only be recycled later as a modern destination with other critters on it. This is something I've done several times over the years to save on time and energy simply take an island you've already come up with and add in different monsters or creatures to get the best out of your PC's. If one of the old PC has died there even better as the players run across the skeletal corpse and loot.

This sort of generator has all kinds of possibilities for games such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess, part of the Lamentations formula is the isolated and highly dangerous location. With a few toss of the dice this generator can be used to create any number of island locations just waiting for the adding in of a demon or two or hold over monster. Good candatiates for just this sort of thing are some of the monsters of classic Greek or Celtic mythology. This generator could with very little work help to support something not often seen in this type of game. A stable island location for ship supplies, sundries, and fresh water,etc. Are part and parcel of island hopping or trading campaigns and this generator could come in damn handy to create any number of stable islands or as locations for an Eli Roth style cannibal base or adventure location.


So bottom line do I really think that   Adventure Seeds: Islands  is worth your time, energy and money? Yes I really do because there's so much that can be done with it. This product matches some of his other efforts including How To Hex Crawl ,The Evil of Witches Fen or the incredible The Manse on Murder Hil. 

So in my opinion grab this one and get generating some really nice island adventure locations tonight.