Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Mysterious Islands, Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, & the Original Adventures Reincarnated #2: The Isle of Dread By Goodman Games .

I keep a careful eye on the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea rpg system  & one of the pieces that caught my eye was this artwork for an upcoming Viking & AS&SH style adventure. The Kickstarter is coming up soon.  The artwork got me thinking about the seas around Hyperborea & my own Castles & Crusades on going campaign. But it also got me thinking about the Original Adventures Reincarnated #2: The Isle of Dread By Goodman Games 


I've postulated that 'the sea of worlds' that surrounds the Isle of Dread makes the island drift into other worlds & its possible that the island itself is only one of a handful of other such locations. Its an alien 'lost world' unto itself. But there's been implications that this lost world is one of many with Goodman Games's  titles offering some tantalizing hints. 
A ship wreck, an expedition to the isle, any excuse really to maroon the adventurers on the isle & some dark hints within the Goodman Games adventure all hint at the possibility of there being far more to the sinister island then even the adventurers can guess?! 



We know that the island of Dread  itself has often slipped between worlds & that its planar seas border many different locations. This got me thinking about another fictional island location with a its own alien ecology. I'm speaking of course about Caprona (also known as Caspak) a fictional island in the literary universe of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Caspak trilogy. Edgar Rice Burroughs Caspak books might have well been part of the inspiration for X1: The Isle of Dread. And of course if you haven't read them I highly recommend them  going with The Land That Time ForgotThe People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss.[1]
This is an island with mysterious secrets & deadly  alien species looking over the artificial ecology of the island; "In the first novel, Caprona is described as a land mass near Antarctica and was first reported by the (fictitious) Italian explorer Caproni in 1721, the location of which was subsequently lost. The island is ringed by high cliffs, making it inaccessible to all but the most intrepid explorers (the people who first explore the island accessed it by taking a submarine through an underground tunnel).[2] It has a tropical river teeming with primitive creatures extinct elsewhere and a thermal inland sea, essentially a huge crater lake, whose heat sustains Caprona’s tropical climate.
Burroughs postulates a unique biological system for his lost world in which the slow progress of evolution in the world outside is recapitulated as a matter of individual metamorphosis. This system is only hinted at in The Land That Time Forgot; presented as a mystery whose explication is gradually worked out over the course of the next two novels, it forms a thematic element serving to unite three otherwise rather loosely linked stories. Dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and primitive humans coexist on the island.[3]
The island is also called Caspak by its native humanoid inhabitants – thus the name of the trilogy"

In Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea there are any number of lost islands at the edge of the bowel of the world. These are places that different in & out of the planes, time, etc. It is not a stretch to conclude that these islands might have dire impacts on the lives of adventurers. The fact is that I've run X1 isle of Dread with AS&SH any number of times as a introductory adventure & it worked stellar. In fact there is a long line of mysterious & deadly phantom islands within both Pulp literature & mythology.
I've used Brasil or  
Hy-Brasil myself several times in AS&SH game campaigns with some very dangerous connotations; "Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil or several other variants,[2] is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean[3] west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached." 
Clark Ashton Smith used a wide variety of lost lands,islands, & other occult laden lands for many of his stories the implication is that X1 is one such land unhinged on the planes whose a ;weirdness magnet'. It continues to draw in travelers from across the planes Prime. 


Abraham Ortelius' map of Europe from 1595
For my own alternative World War I campaign I can see using these phantom islands in such a way to draw in the adventurers perhaps to their doom. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerer's of Hyperborea & X1 Isle of Dread are definitely going to have a place at the table. 

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