Retro Review Of X9 The Savage Coast designed by Merle and Jackie Rasmussen and Anne C. Gray For Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Your Old School Campaigns

The sky is overcast and Christmas looms like a red footed fool ready to trip into the last gasps of December. There are some modules like old friends, things that fit certain times and circumstances. This is the case with X9 The Savage Coast. The year was Eighty five and I was between a rock and a middle school. Many of the kids in Torrington had moved down South and so it was time to start a new group. This was a process that I've gone through again and again.Two of my groups of players are still my life long friends but that's a blog post for another time. The Savage Coast concerns the wilderness adventures along the Orcs Head Peninsula on the Savage Coast. It can be a terrible adventure with the wrong group of players and such was the case at the end of Eighty five. So I had a couple of Conan comic books and magazines and so the process began to create what would become the sand box style of game campaign.



The fact is that sometimes adventures don't click with certain people and this was the case Wiki has a good solid break down of the internal plot of X9 ; " In the safe, seaside town of Slagovich, the player characters set anchor and stay at the inn, where they hear stories of Orcs Head Peninsula. Lost cities full of hidden treasures, terrible beasts and cannibals roaming the coast, gold ore piling up at the mouths of rivers, and a secretive religious sect. What would motivate the adventurers to enter the uncharted jungles of the Savage Coast—curiosity, a desire to help others, or simple greed?"

So basically I took everything within the confines of X9 and gutted it,cut it up and pasted in what I wanted. The pyramid of gold became a mini dungeon and the entire module became a part and parcel of the huge mega swamp of Quagmire!   So for years I felt a bit guilty about gutting this module and really making my own. But then you get older, smarter, a bit more jaded and then you find out that others have been doing that for years.

  Somehow in my twisted little brain at the time the Savage Coast became entrenched with the Deep Ones from HP Lovecraft and that never changed. So the coast became the domain of the Deep Ones and one of the battle fronts between the Deep Ones and the other Lovecraftian races notably the Serpentmen and Lizardmen who used geological and ecological long warfare on each other over the eons. They left behind relics,ruins and legends that the various peoples inherited along with a corrupted genetic heritage. Not to mention the monsters and whatnot.


Much of this Mythos whatnot could be back filtered into The Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh's events but I had that happen further up the coast. The Deep One's reach was supposed to be frightening and there was an underwater portal that connected off the coast of a Fifteen hundred's Spain in 2001  because of the film Dagon and its "Imboca", a Spanish adaption of "Innsmouth" all of this was easily backfilled for a recent romp of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  The was some talk about the Dark Albion rpg's setting's empire  expansionist leanings going up against the ancient powers of the Deep Ones and how the empire might suffer the release of the Kraken errm the child of Dagon in this case.


Basically I've used the Savage Coast as one big sort of  catch all sand box for campaigns and in Hyperborea as a sort of area where the back wash of ten thousand years has caused all kinds of merry havoc with the locals via magickal contamination and horror. Lovecraftian Demons and god things are attracted to the area because of warfare and destruction that had taken place there eons ago with the Great Old Ones and the gods. The Immortals have taken the gods place there after several were murdered by the Great Old Ones. Several biological weapon systems in the form of certain D&D monsters still prowl the waters after the legacy left behind by the Elder Things. Rumors are that they still watch from beyond the veil of the Outer Darkness across the eons.