Exploration and Elementals: Hot Springs Island Review

 

Overview

Hot Springs Island has big aspirations. I'm not just talking about the 270 locations, 87 NPCs and 300 new treasures. The scope of the story is big. Multi-planar, in fact.
Your players will trudge over hundreds of miles of untamed wilderness. Their decisions will ripple across the island, impacting factions and individuals that they may never meet. After a campaign lasting 6 sessions, my players only explored 24 of the 75 locations on the map. I could play this campaign a hundred times and I'm sure I'd never experience the same game twice. There are too many variables and decisions to make. Hot Springs Island, much like your body, is a wonderland.

One of the most unique and interesting parts of this game is that it comes in two parts: the Field Guide to Hot Springs Island (a player-held object that exists both inside and outside of the game) and the Dark of Hot Springs Island (the "DM" adventure book). I suppose that you don't need the Field Guide, but I highly recommend getting it, if only because of its uniqueness. With so much riding on the GM to know everything about everything (and boy, is there a lot of everything), the guide removes a lot of the pressure of describing and explaining the monsters. Essentially, the guide is like a monster manual, though not all of the information is completely accurate. It's still accurate enough to be useful to players, especially because they'll need every advantage if they want to survive on this brutal and mysterious island.

Story

HSI’s world doesn’t have a story in the sense of traditional quests. What it does have is a series of situations, spiraling naturally from a central problem.

As the Alexandrian so brilliantly articulates, it’s better for GMs to prep situations instead of plots. Here is how he defines the difference:

"A plot is a sequence of events: A happens, then B happens, then C happens. (In more complicated forms, the sequence of events might fork like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but the principle remains the same.)

"A situation, on the other hand, is merely a set of circumstances. The events that happen as a result of that situation will depend on the actions the PCs take."

 

HSI is a melting pot of situations, and it’s up to the players to discover their options and goals. It almost feels hands-off compared to my default style of game mastering, but it led to some unexpected choices from my players that I never anticipated.

Here's how the story situation looks from the players' point of view:

• There is a tribe of terrifying yet surprisingly civilized ogres are constantly being attacked by an organized group of elementals.
• These elementals, called Feugonauts, seem to really hate the ogres, and are doing whatever they can to get into the good graces of someone called Svarku.
• Huge, obsidian “elephants” have been seen crashing through the jungle, terrifying everyone, but an ogre witch was able to kill one a few days ago.
• Smaller obsidian statue-creatures are known to exist, but most of them stand motionless for long periods of time.
• There are countless ruins full of monstrous terrors and wondrous items. The locals don’t go there out of fear.
• A group called the Martel Company has many expeditionary teams determined to pull every piece of treasure from the ruins. They’re well-equipped and not always friendly…

Characters

In the back of the book, you’ll find a glossary of characters with a sketch of their personality and motivations. There are 46 in all, of which I used 6, but made up twice as many due to the needs of  the game.

If you’ve ever played a Fantasy Flight game, they often find ways to squeeze a great deal of flavor text into an outrageously small space. This is REALLY hard to do well. The character paragraphs in Hot Springs Island are similar in that they’re around 100 words and simply swollen with information.

There’s a great variety here. Everyone has their own goals, connections, fears and occasionally minor magic items. They offer even more spicy situations to sprinkle into the main game, creating wrinkles and complications galore.

"Mouth Feel"

To match the "desert island" feel of the gameplay, the books are illustrated in a sketchy "explorer's journal" style art. I came to love it after a while. The art and writing is occasionally R-rated, which is unique in a world where RPG books are aimed squarely at the mass market. You'll see exposed breasts, depictions of drug use, and references to all manner of sexual acts. In the lore, the elves who used to inhabit the island were deeply perverse and outrageously hedonistic. It follows that their culture is built upon drug-fueled orgies. It's presented in a sensible "matter-of-fact" kind of way. Sensitive GMs could easily omit the explicit descriptions while still capturing the right "feel." It's not a book I'd let children read, but it makes for a unique experience that's not afraid of being "real."

Systems

If HSI is a box of LEGO bricks, it's one that includes no instructions. Essentially all you get is the picture on the box, or in this case, a few paragraphs explaining timekeeping with poker chips (a brilliant idea, by the way). If you're the type of DM who wants to buy an adventure that's ready to go out of the box, this isn't it. As a Kickstarter backer, I had my copy of the game early, and that meant there were no monster statistics available online, because the game is system neutral. Some of the monsters exist in 5E's Monster Manual, but most of them are unique. And that's to say nothing of the stat blocks required for all the different named NPCs. This is one of the reasons I first considered running this game in an old-school system; it's stupidly easy to make old-school monsters. Certainly, it's more simple than creating or even modifying monsters from 5E.

Originally, I planned to run the game in Dungeon World, which is more narrative and less “crunchy.” I created an almost-complete monster manual for that system that was so good, I was able to use it during my actual campaign using 5E. You can find that right here.

But narrative stats will only get you so far in 5E. I had the stats for perhaps a fifth of the flora and fauna in the game, and I improvised the rest. Even now, a quick web search will provide the stats for all of the game’s beasts. In a year's time, you'll probably find a completed bestiary for free online.

Hot Springs Island comes with a clever series of tables that “simulate a simulation” of the island being alive. I liked it quite a lot, although I later supplemented those tables with some others, so look for that blog later.

All in all, this game is exactly what I needed to grow as a DM. It pushed me outside of my comfort zone in terms of story preparation (virtually impossible in a sandbox), systems creation (read about those here) and ability to improv based on a few prompts (random tables can cause mental acrobatics sometimes).

To put it in other terms, it’s like buying an antique fixer-upper car. Sure, it will drive you home; but if you spend the time repairing, upgrading and maintaining it, you’ll find yourself with a beautiful vehicle that impresses your friends.
...And you'll have learned a lot.

Gameplay

Hot Springs Island is an amazing tool kit, and a great game. It trusts the person running it to modify or remove any part of it. Or you could take your favorite bits and roll them into Tomb of Annihilation. Or just take the tables for simulating wildlife. Or use all of the dungeons in your own hex crawl. It's modular to the extreme, and I freaking love it.

One challenge this game presents is one of storytelling. In a world where players can go anywhere or do anything, how does a GM structure narrative beats? How do you give players direction outside of an NPC announcing "I've heard there are Daedra in the borderlands!"

I have no love for D&D games where the DM gives no direction or motivation for doing anything. A challenge of running this game is figuring out how to make it interesting for your players.

Good player motivations (and situations) are one of the things that separates "good" D&D from "bad" D&D. As Matt Colville puts it, "good quests require good verbs." Shortly before the HSI Kickstarter finished, the creators put on a live stream of a group playing the game. I was disappointed when the entire starting quest (or verb) was "go find a particular flower from the slopes of a volcano," which means the key verb was "fetch." I was shocked that in a world with so many interesting problems to solve, the GM gave them something that was, frankly, boring. I swore in that moment to have good verbs for my players, especially when they're on a volcanic island surrounded by many dangers. It shouldn't be hard to motivate players.

...But I'm not sure I ever gave them anything other than "explore." It turns out, I was too quick to judge that flower-hunting party. There's an embarrassment of riches in terms of problems to solve, and yet I found myself with analysis paralysis a number of times. The Ogre leader Glavrok once gave the players a quest to kill a giant boar, and I immediately had World of Warcraft flashbacks.

Running this game is incredibly hard. In fact, this is the most difficult game I've ever run. 

Note: I have much to say about the systems I used, created and modified to make running this game possible, but this review is already too long. You can read my system post right here.

Closing Thoughts

When I learned of this game, I was intrigued. Here was a concept I'd only distantly heard of: An open-world exploration game (AKA, a hex crawl) which as far as I knew was an old-and-forgotten method for playing D&D. This took me on a year-long journey (rather like a hex crawl, actually) to figure out what makes this type of game great.

If I hadn’t experimented with other hex crawls, I don’t think I would have been prepared for Hot Springs Island. I also wouldn’t have appreciated its intricate, overlapping layers. It’s so good that it makes every other hex-crawl product I played before look bad by comparison: This is the first one that has something to see in every single hex, instead of hundreds of miles of nondescript wilderness occasionally broken by a wizard’s tower or a freaking river.

For many DMs (especially the fresh new generation of people coming from internet streams), this style of game will be dramatically different from what they’ve come to expect. In fact, I think that most DMs would struggle to run this game effectively. It’s incredibly difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. I certainly didn't.

However, I think that if you want to grow and develop your skills, not to mention deliver a totally unique experience for your players, you need to do yourself the favor of playing this adventure.

Recommended. And if you see Jacob Hurst running a Kickstarter for any of the other Islands (pictured above), do yourself a favor and back it! You can learn about how I cobbled together a few different systems to make the game run the way I wanted by clicking here.