A World Bathed In A Red Tide - Thoughts on Red Tide, X1 The Isle of Dread, & More

 "For three hundred years, the last remnants of humanity have clung to the wild green jungles of the Sunset Isles. They have watched the red mist that consumed their world roil a hundred miles off the coast, waiting, a beast at bay. But now the crimson dreams are becoming stronger, and the wild Shou tribes of the west howl their hate at the human invaders. Who shall rise to save a world quenched in blood"''


It's been a long while since the spine of Red Tide: Campaign Sourcebook and Sandbox Toolkit'. But tonight a phone call has me wondering if there's time to dive back into a two year old campaign that's been sitting on the side lines. Ages ago Red Tide was one of our catch all campaigns where the lost & damned ended up from other OSR campaigns of ours. We had characters & PC's from Dark Albion, Hyperborea, & various other LoFP games end up here.  Even though Red Tide was created for the Labyrinth Lord Rpg. It was an easy shift to bring over the various OSR games. 
There were two big changes that we made to the Red Tide setting. First of all magick spells became rituals & two there were peace between various Shou tribes. This was a major sticking point with the PC's two years ago when we last played. 
And the setting of Red Tide played an important role in one of our Godbound games earlier in the year
The question that came up was simple. One is the Red Tide setting actually one of Godbound's Celestial Engine universes where said Celestial Engine is breaking down?! Are the red tides actually Celestial Engine energies leaking into the setting & causing many of the mutations & horrors?!

And we included X1 Isle of Dread being another sub realm near the Red Tide islands but tied into the plane of Elemental Water. The elemental plane of water being one of the power sources for the Red Tide's Celestial Engine. 

The real problem came from the fact that the leaking energies were a result of the battles from two extremely alien gods or aliens ala LoFP's Qelong adventure by Kennith Hite. 
And here's where things got very dangerous as one of the PC's got infected with the weird radiations from the artifact left on the battle field of Qelong. 

This infection rquired an extensive journey into the interior of the isle of Dread to find the correct healer to help our PC and then the whole game came to a stop. Due too scheduling conflicts & what not we never returned to this campaign. Now the players want to change that coming up!