The Isle
A downloadable adventure
The Isle is tiny, a mere 40 acres of forbidding rock and low grasses. Seen from the sea, the monastery buildings stand adjacent to the peak of the isle, lit by a fire atop a tower. The monks never let the fire go out.
Cliffs rise above the bitter sea, mauled by waves and weather. Fallen stones jut like Frisian horses, big enough to skewer whales. The abbot knows this, because he has seen it.
An adventure for The Vanilla Game or another fantastic or historical roleplaying game of your choosing, by Luke Gearing. Includes the isle itself, the monks that inhabit it and protect its secret, and the large, open-ended dungeon beneath.
The first book in the Spear Witch Adventure Writers' Series. Featuring clean and modern graphic design, the Adventure Writers' Series is a stark showcase of some of the best prose in tabletop role-playing games today.
By Luke Gearing. Editing by Jared Sinclair. Graphic design by Micah Anderson.
A hardcover edition (including this set of digital files) is currently available at Spear Witch.
Purchase
In order to download this adventure you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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Bought the hardcopy of this adventure and really like it but something is driving me mad . . . who's is the severed arm in the Archdruid's prison? Have re-read the book specifically looking for a reference to this but must have missed it.
If anyone can illuminate me I'll be eternally grateful
this adventure is awesome!I found it to be a unique read, and I’d definitely am going to run it.
I’m going to adapt it a bit because I’m running a modern day campaign, but I’m gonna do like a silent hill, style fade into the other world and have the characters go into the past as it were.
Incredibly evocative prose, which is exactly what I want as a dungeon master. I can improv, but I need some thing to build it on, and this has the goods.
🙏🫡
Also, I never posted the excellent Between Two Cairns episode featuring The Isle!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2042709/11236293
Questing Beast did a review!
Q) Floor 1, Room 12 - the map has exits S,E but the text lists S,W?
F1R15 exits don't match also?
There are a few errors that slipped into the first printing. They'll be fixed with the second printing, but they should be pretty straightforward to divine. Room 12 key should have East instead of West, Room 15 is referring to the upper and lower exits both to the West (this one from a last-minute map change that didn't get reflected in the text), Floor 2 Room 22 should be deleted, Floor 3 Room 12 should read West instead of East, and the Sea Thing Growth map should have a connection between 8 and 12. Also the exits from Room 6 of the Sea Thing Growth are a little unclear: North and East are referring to the connections to 11 and 12 respectively.
Thanks Jared, much appreciated. Do you have an ETA on an updated epub file?
Btw, I'm enjoying using that format to read on both my phone and desktop. Never used that format before for an RPG, so it's novel to me!
Everything will get updated at the same time, so before second printing. No ETA at this time. Glad the epub is working for you!
Was this file ever updated? I purchased the hardback on the spear witch website and the pdf it came with still has the errors
As I said, the files with be updated with the second printing, which is soon but not yet.
Bought this off the strength of The Vanilla Game's writing, and your article about making The Isle.
Suggestion - can bookmark the PDF? Very handy while playing on VTT to be able to skip around at will.
Cheers!
The ePub is fully bookmarked and easy to navigate while playing on a VTT, eg. In all honesty, I wasn't even going to release a PDF, the ePub serves every purpose better.
Ah nice one, I didn't even check the epub. Cheers!
Published a "first impressions" blog post, from reading TVG and The Isle and planning how to run a "one shot" of it:
https://starmonkey.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/the-vanilla-game-the-isle-first-impr...
I'm loving reading this! I can't wait to get it to the table!
The print edition contains floor 2 room 22 which is not included on the map. As far as I can tell this is a incomplete copy of floor 2 room 17. I only have the physical copy. So, I'm not sure if this error is in the digital.
Yeah, it's a small mistake, just a duplication we missed.