{"id":212,"date":"2012-01-30T16:33:24","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T00:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/?p=212"},"modified":"2012-01-30T16:38:50","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T00:38:50","slug":"review-toys-for-the-sandbox-4-hermits-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/?p=212","title":{"rendered":"Review: ‘Toys for the Sandbox #4: Hermit’s Island’"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I agreed to do a review of ‘Toys for the Sandbox #4 Hermit’s Island<\/a>.’ This books is by Quinn A. Conklin, also known as the artist for ‘Homicidal Transients<\/a>,’ with cover art by Rodney Ruppert II, published by Occult Moon<\/a>. It’s a 4-page landscape PDF; the first page is cover art.<\/p>\n

The second page gives us a map of an island, and a short description of the island and its inhabitants, namely, a hermit and a small camp of ‘Orks.’ The map has six keyed locations, and each location has a short encounter description, with three ‘twists’ on how that encounter can occur. The map was nice, although a distance scale might have helped; also, a few of the numbers touched on darker map elements, so they don’t stand out as well as they might. <\/p>\n

The third page lists each of the keyed locations, with three ‘twists’ or plots that can spring from each location. The twists are just short, one-sentence statements, that will probably need to be fleshed out further. <\/p>\n

The fourth page gives a short description of the four important NPCs mentioned so far. This page also has a couple of percentile tables with ‘Items’ (random encounters), and rumors about the island itself.<\/p>\n

‘Hermit’s Island’ will work for any fantasy game, as it focuses on presenting the prospective GM with a bunch of adventure seeds all tied to a specific location. I could see using this in Ars Magica (changing the Orks to bandits), Qin (maybe doing the same), Exalted (making the Orks a Wyld Hunt party, or some kind of rampaging spirit), or any number of other games. Heck, with a few wors substitutions, it could work for many other genres; by substituting ‘planet’ for ‘island’ and ‘hostile alien’ for ‘Ork’, it could work for sci-fi games, for example. <\/p>\n

The only negative thing I can say is that the visuals could use a little work. I didn’t care for the color pallete; the cover page has a kind of sandstone color, which is okay, but the tables had an almost salmon, clay color to them that I personally just didn’t care for. I’d rather see just flat gray, or black and white, than this shade. Maybe it wouldn’t bother anyone else. The cover has a quick sketch of a bearded man, who I suppose is the hermit, but it would’ve been nice to see at least one, non-sketchy illustration of the hermit, or the other NPCs mentioned. Note:<\/strong> When I spoke with Quinn Conklin, he said that all of the products in the Toys for the Sandbox line have a slightly different color pallet from one another.<\/p>\n

Overall, ‘Hermit’s Island’ is the sort of thing that’s useful for GMs like me; we love to game, but don’t always have a lot of time to prepare. It’s short, but for $0.99, it’s not a bad bargain. If you need to get an edventure going without a lot of planning, and you have some NPC stats you can pull for the important NPCs (or can make them quickly), you’re set. I say, if you have a buck and need to get game going, purchase ‘Hermit’s Island<\/a>.’ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I agreed to do a review of ‘Toys for the Sandbox #4 Hermit’s Island.’ This books is by Quinn A. Conklin, also known as the artist for ‘Homicidal Transients,’ with cover art by Rodney Ruppert II, published by Occult Moon. It’s a 4-page landscape PDF; the first page is cover art. The second page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8GPIr-3q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invulnerablog.imperfekt-industrees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}