A Thousand Thousand Islands

Posted 19 Jan 2025 to Fantasy

Also Het Thamsa and Reach of the Roach God

XP Card

Sessions GM'd: 8
Sessions as Player: 0

I Used

We used Shadowdark as our game system, and it was a really good match. Our opening adventure used the Het Thamsa adventure (by Mungkao) and our home base town was Mr-Kr-Gr. Our second adventure was the first part of Reach of the Roach God, the region of Quiet Lake. I intended to combine the setting with Yoon Suin, but our adventure was short so we never got to that part.

Overview

A wonderful fantasy setting that is dripping in flavour. The writing style and art style are so complimentary and create an evocative setting that was a good break from traditional pseudo-European fantasy. No orcs, or goblins, or elves were seen here! Most of the players were from Europe and USA, and had no problem getting into the South East Asian setting.

The Good

Wonderful art. The art really brings the world alive, and I was eagerly sharing screenshots with the players during the game. Without this, I definitely feel the world would not have felt as alive and engaging.

Rich implied setting. The setting is a wonderful mix of down-to-earth grounded world, with a wondrous and unexpected magical flair. For example, NPCs hardly wear armour and use simple gear, but players will meet talking animal people (like a yak merchant). We got to meet talking crocodiles, a wasp-obsessed play actor, and orangutan naturalist.

Terse, direct writing style. NPCs and locations are described in a few words, but with enough direction to guide me on how to run them. I did not need to read massive introduction fiction to understand the locations. None of the books start with "A thousand years ago...".

Great maps in Reach of the Roach God. Maps are very useful for me. The Reach of the Roach God book has several, and they were great. Maps of cave systems, and how they connect are great, and have great verticality. However, I didn't find them easy to join together, see below.

The Not-So-Good

Lack of story hooks. The locations of the booklets are provided without any reason for the players to go there. That is left to the GM to invent. The locations generally do not have much of a plot or situation unfolding. They tend to be a location, with a few curious NPCs, some of whom might hire you. Again, some work from the GM is required. The Reach of the Roach God also has no treasure (really), just a race of insects wanting to invade the surface.

Lack of gameable content in the TTI booklets. Each of the Thousand Islands booklets has a few pages of interesting items, like magical fruits or curiosities from the region. But many of them were not really gameable. For example, Tohey Leather from Mr-Kr-Gr, is a waterproof fabric made from woven palm fronds. Interesting, but ... so what? Maybe you could make them into setting-specific and interesting trade goods for the party. A missed opportunity. Maps are generally not provided. Adventure locations (like dungeons) are not provided. For me, this is the meat-and-potatoes of GM preparation. I should add that the Het Thamsa adventure we played is a great improvement on the other TTI booklets, as far as gameable content goes.

Cave Maps are confusing. The first part of Reach of the Roach god features a series of caves. The caves are connected to one another underground. Each cave map is given separately (although some of the caves are unmapped, like Horsehead Cave), and then a diagram on page 43 indicates how they join together. This ought to work fine, but it doesn't. To indicate how the maps join together, they sometimes use the room names and other times use the map name. I had to redraw it. Also, the main boss is in a part of the complex which is unmapped. Players are definitely going to encounter the main threat of the adventure, so they should have provided a map for this location.

Random tables could be longer. Basically every random table is a 1d6 table, which starts to give repeating results quite quickly. I guess they are intended merely as a starting point for the GM to add to. When we were exploring the caves in the Reach of the Roach God, I started to get repeating results almost immediately because each chamber of the cave was a result on a 1d6 table.

Verdict

The creative team for Thousand Thousand Islands have now dissolved, and the two people are working separately. I really enjoyed the adventure from Mungkao about the automaton temple of Het Thamsa. I look forward to more work like that, and I think it was more easily gameable than the Thousand Thousand Islands booklets. I find the setting really rich and would love to return to it.