The Island that Hides - TTRPG Adventure Module
Ahoy, Esteemed Professors…
The Island That Hides is a supplementary adventure module for the FATE Accelerated tabletop roleplaying game “Of Focai and Academies”, a game where you and your friends play as professors of a magical travelling academy that traverses the land of Gwynfael, avoiding capture, rescuing rogue mages and training the next era of magic wielders. In this adventure, you and your party find yourselves further away from home than anyone could imagine, and amongst the whims of an island that breathes fear and projects might.
This project was created for the QUT unit Interactive Narrative Design and is based on a world created for the same unit.
Creative Influences and Design Inspiration
The primary influence for this adventure module has come from the absolutely staggering amount of time I have accrued losing myself in Rare’s Sea of Thieves, a game about sailing the known High Seas to gather pirate loot, take on fearsome arcane foes and battle other pirates. I wanted to incorporate my favourite aspects of that game, namely the Sirens and the puzzle temples and bring them into the world of Of Focais and Academies. I also drew a lot of inspiration from the intricately crafted world of Ryan Laukat’s Sleeping Gods campaign game, in which players take command of the ship The Manticore and explore exotic islands while seeking out the ancient relics that will allow you to return home. Another key design inspiration for this module was Zelda: Breath of the Wild, who's encouragement of open world exploration and mixture of vibrant cultures provided endless sources of inspiration for me.
Designing the world map
My first map draft , where I aimed to include the starting hex, all the exit points off the island, as well as their critical paths, and all the key hazards.
My second draft where I began to add interesting landmarks and started questioning what those escape points might look like, and what kind of challenges players would need to overcome in order to get to them.
This stage of map development included me refining hazards and landmarks, but I wasn't happy with how uniform a lot of the landscape was.
I added Devil's Ridge as a center-point landmark, and changed some of my forests into sand dunes and deserts while still keeping the Great Forest and the Boggy Marshlands.
This was the final map I had before my play test.
This was the map I edited after the play test. Changes included making the abandoned Fae Settlement look more like ruins, adding gold glimmers to Devil's Ridge, getting rid of the shipwreck to the east, refining the Fae Weystone, tidying the Boggy Marshlands and adding smoke to campsites.
The Final Game Map
Populating the Island
At the same time as that I was designing the world map, I was busy filling it with interesting relics, characters, flora and fauna. I wrote pages of notes detailing the encounters players could expect, and tried to keep true to my design inspirations by incorporating well known creatures like sirens and goblins while still being mindful of the overall worlds Welsh inspired history.
I added plants to aid and hinder, and characters to befriend or betray. The sandy beaches and dense forests were also littered with precious relics of a civilization past and bountiful clues with which to assist players with their escape.
