Carcerem - Prison Island / Campaign Diary: Archipelago Adventures - Pt. 33

Oh boy! Our next island is done, and I can’t wait to show it off! I know last week was all fun and games, talking about spells, but today we are going to get super serious and get straight into it.

Welcome to Carcerem!

You know whats better than a vacation resort island? An island dedicated to taking slaves and forcing them to work the mines! Well… maybe not… Crete and Santorini are pretty great islands, and I don’t recall people being forced to mine for smokepowder…

But, this island is different. This is our first story island, and will allow the party to go in and rescue the good people of Nepu-Nepu! As well as befriend a lovable goblin, help some grungs create a behemoth and learn how they can get their hands on some powerful new cannons for their ship!

First off, Carcerem is a tier 2 island, but it can be extremely deadly for a party not willing to be a bit stealthy or using some tactics. Fighting off a hundred goblins is easy when you are a level 20 wizard, not so much when you are level 5 or 6. Be careful if you play through this island, and if you run this island… muhahahahahahah!

The Conflict

This island is focused on mining smokepowder, and the hobgoblins have taken slaves from all over the islands to work here. Unfortunately for the goblins, this place is also home to grung who are pretty territorial and think of other creatures as lesser and they live to take slaves too… Poor goblins are getting caught in between these two powerful forces.

While writing this island up, I realized there is a small problem. Its difficult to explain how the story should flow inside of an adventure, and is something we are going to have to create a chapter for once we get going on this adventure for real. It’ll basically be summed up like:

Running this Adventure

This adventure is designed to be run as freely as you want, though there are a handful of islands that are required for your players to continue the story. Islands #31, 32 & 33 are all required story islands and help further the plot as well as bring about the end of the adventure against the Hobgoblin islands. This isn’t too say that the party will only visit 3 islands during their adventures. Rather, they will be traveling across an uncharted archipelago and putting their own mark on a variety of islands. They may make friends with grungs, help two islands find peace or help a civilization of kobolds fix their island as it splits apart.

When running this adventure, make sure that players hit the following islands at the appropriate level for them.

Carcerem, Island #31 - The citizens of Nepu-Nepu must be rescued from the hobgoblins. (Level 6)
Princeps, Island #32 - A powerful hobgoblin warlord is known to visit this island, the adventurers must come here to steal a powerful item to help them take down the hobgoblin menace. (Level 9)
Victorum, Island #33 - The leader of the hobgoblin army must be stopped from conquering the islands, and your party have been chosen. (Level 11)

That’s the rough idea on our adventure, and it’s going to get more and more refined as we continue creating islands. This adventure is just getting started, and I still have to go back and work on the beginning adventures! … and oh yea, create about 95 more islands… oh boy, someone save me!

Grungs

Our island is hobgoblins fighting off grungs, and the adventurers walk into the middle of it all. Throughout this island, they can get opportunities to learn about the grungs, and the grungs can end up being a powerful ally for the players. While writing this adventure, I imagined a hundred scenarios where the party helps the grungs, fights the grungs or ignores them completely, and that hundred scenarios is what guides how I write these islands. I want them to be open ended, and to provide detail in an overview sort of way. I don’t sweat the small facts when running adventures about what every single building is, but I do need to know an overview about what can be in each section of the island.

And as I want to create 100 islands for this adventure, sometimes I have to wonder why I keep saying the words 100, when I could just say 20…, I can’t be spending all my page space on a single island explaining the complex relationships between NPCs when a normal party is just going to throw a fireball at it and destroying everything I worked on. I like my notes to be fast and loose, and this is exactly what I’m writing up in this… I’m just making it prettier than a bunch of sticky notes that say things like:

- Grungs in north, working on some mad-ass shit.
- Convince party to blow up 10 tons of smokepowder, I kill everyone with it
- Make lovable goblin that will attempt to murder the party in hilarious ways, call him Grunug

Maps

Something else new in this adventure is I added in a few more maps! Now, I love maps… sadly, I’m not super skilled at making them. These maps were created in inkarnate and while that system is largely for creating overworlds, it can make semi-decent settlements if you don’t mind reusing the same icons over and over again.

You’ll have to let me know if you like the maps for this island, and what I can do to improve them in the future. I know some people would want a map for every building their party venture into, but that just slows down on prep work, and I always wing buildings to begin with. Why worry what is in the 200th building when your players will look in, go ‘huh’ and leave immediately?

Also, I know I need to add in resources, I promise to do that soon!

And that’s that

That’s our beautiful island! Carcerem is looking pretty good, and is a great chance for your party to act like bad-ass forest ninjas sneaking into an island doing some black ops shit. I’m a little tired.

For a PDF of this island, click this button!

Next week, we are going to go back to the beginning and keep working on the introduction adventure, as well as more islands! Maybe I’ll finally do that that kobold one…