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Review Summary. Avoid the ‘Red Isle’ like the red death. I can’t imagine what they were thinking when they sent this to the printer.
What you get: For your US$2.99 you get a soft cover 16-page d20 adventure for 4th to 6th level characters, authored by A. A. Acevedo and published by Alderac Entertainment Group. ‘The Isle’ is the first adventure of the second run of AEG’s instant adventures (numbered 8321) that can be played in a session. It is in the weird format of a folded A4 paper that became the standard for mini-modules published both by AEG and by Fantasy Flight Games. The artwork is sparse and average in every sense, while the map in the middle (aesthetically) is below average.
Spoiler warning: stop reading here.
The story: This is a typical dungeon crawl. The story behind it is that the characters shipwreck on a remote and deserted island, the infamous ‘Red Isle’, former home of the bloodthirsty pirate Alik the Red. Alik is apparently dead, but his lair is infested with all kinds of dangers and undead, including himself. The obvious goal is for the characters to take the spoils from Alik’s lair.
The strong points: I appreciate both the creativity put into a product and the risk taken in order to market it. When one markets something that appears to be a lamely written draft of a product though, I am not going to spare him. I am sorry, I just can’t see any strong points in ‘The Red Isle’. The magical item, the Scepter of the Damned, is not that bad. When one reaches that final page being totally enraged though, I doubt he will notice the qualities of a relatively good magical item.
The weak points: On the contrary, here I don’t know where to start from and where to end! Pirate stories are accompanied by mystery. The location of the Red Isle, a ‘small rocky island (...) several days sailing from major shipping lanes and outside of a settled seacoast area’, as stated in the module, is almost a myth; men have died either trying to find it or trying to keep it hidden. How do the characters get there? Their ship, while on a standard commercial route, wrecks and they conveniently wake up on the island. You guessed right, with nobody else having survived the storm. Not to mention that the characters can’t do anything to help the ship avoid its watery death. There goes the mystery of the pirate island...
What is on the pirate island is even worse though. The island hosts nothing but a poorly designed lair accessible from the shore by stairs. I repeat: the home of a notorious pirate has nothing but one single lair. Not even a secondary lair, or some hidden outposts just in case. To be fair there is one outpost inside the lair, but this is obviously not adequate.
The so-called lair is an exercise in inconsistency and illogical placement of rooms. It appears more like a sum of rooms randomly put together. To make my point more clear:
-The crew’s quarters are accessible only via secret entrances. This means that Alik’s own crew had to pass secret entrances in order to go to their quarters. In order to get to their own mess hall they had to pass a secret entrance. If they wanted to avoid the mess hall (in which, apart from the secret entrance, one can only go with the help of a... winch (!) ), they could only go to their quarters through a trapped secret staircase. Yes, trapped every third step. How many crewmen did Alik lose on that staircase because they sidestepped? I wouldn’t want to be part of his crew.
-Alik’s quarters and vault are the last ones the characters can reach, passing through other quarters. Obviously, if Alik wanted to go to his quarters or vault, his first mate would have known it every single time. Ingenious from Alik’s part to build his lair that way… No wonder why he later ‘became increasingly aloof; he began to suspect his crew of subterfuge and treachery at every turn’.
-Alik the paranoid and conspiracy-seeing pirate leader had quarters and vault without a second entrance. Paranoid and stupid I presume... So if his crew actually mutinied he couldn’t have done anything but get sliced like a ripe tomato... But then, we wouldn’t enjoy the characters finding the second entrance to the lair first thus bypassing the whole compound, right?
Also add that the product has typos, further impeding the reader’s valiant efforts to just understand the module. I have read it four times to write this review, so I must be a very patient man.
Conclusion: Disappointment and rage is what this product evokes. The d20 Open Gaming License brought both quality and worthless products in the market. The ‘Red Isle’ is one of the second. This product can’t even be used as a draft to create your own pirate lair. Admittedly expectations from this kind of mini-modules are not that high in general. The ‘Red Isle’ is not about high, average, or below-average expectations though: it is simply about buying one of the worst products in the d20 market.
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The 2011 re-examination: It was terrible then. It is as terrible now. Worthless. Thinking how these short adventures sell in the secondary market, giving (or asking) money for this one is an insult.
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