Swordfish Islands

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This is the cover for the player's book. The Field Guide to Hot Springs Island is written "in character" for the world, and is an in game object. Players are encouraged to reference it at the table to help identify plants or monsters that are eating their companions.

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Field Guide - Intro

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Field Guide - A translator for elven and ancient runes is included. We're in the process of making these runes into a font so the GM can type up and print out any sort of messages they'd like to taunt their group with.

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Field Guide - Herbal. 24 plants that grow on the island are detailed out in this section. Some magical, some mundane, but all of them *do something*, and act as potential calls to adventure.

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34 monsters are detailed in the Field Guide. Survivors tales have been compiled to write each entry. Some may be true, some may be false, some may be somewhere in between.

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There are 6 factions on the island. 3 live there. 3 visit.

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Field Guide - Trade. Everybody wants something, and everything can be cut up into useful parts. So if you start killing creatures with no pockets... what kind of "treasure" could their body be turned into?

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There's no cover for the Dark just yet, but it's in the works. This is the book for the GM, so this hex key shows the terrain types that make up each of the island's hexes. It also details out an alternative mechanic for dealing with overland exploration.

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Each hex contains three locations, and each hex has it's own page in the book. Each location has a paragraph of information that should be immediately available to players when they arrive (e.g., this stuff is obvious) and a paragraph or so for the non-obvious stuff.

In the upper right hand of the each page is a mini-hex map reference to show the hex's neighbors, as well as a quick reference encounter table and a list of sensory words that can be used to help the GM spitball up terrain descriptions on the fly.

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Some points of interest on the island deserve their own map. Namely dungeons and villages.

These are structured in such a way that all the information you need is on ONE page spread. No flipping back and forth between the map of the dungeon and the details of what's in room number 9.

When the party arrives at a sub location, the GM rolls 3d6 on the "What's Happening" table, to give determine a macro level event for the whole area. Because it's a 3d6 table (as opposed to a d20) the results are on a probability bell curve so there are common, uncommon, and rare events. Rare events are very much game changers.

There are also encounters and motivations for those encounters. It's possible to roll up each encounter on the fly as players reach a spot, but we prefer to roll all the encounters and motivations up at the same time, so then we can figure out how they fit into the big picture.

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There's a full breakdown of the monsters that make up each faction. They get a few paragraphs of description, but the guts of the entry are the "What do they want?", "What do they NOT want?", and "What else?" sections.

Want to know how to roleplay the imps differently than the salamanders? Or want to know how your players could bribe a salamander? You can find that info here in quick bullet points.

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Yeah, and there's like 300 fucking treasures.

>>47933908
Won't be able to look at this till tomorrow, looks cool.

>>47934282
Sweet project anon better than a lot of shit ya see nowadays .

Looks dope. Do the waterfalls south of HS-24/HS-25 have details? Or the cool looking arches east of HS-18? Either way seems like a lot of effort and love went into this. You should let the OSR general know, they'll flip their shit.

>>47934594

There's a dungeon behind the one in HS-25, but the arches and other falls are mostly decorative

>>47934628

That's okay. Seems like there's tons of material anyway. I'd pay for/read/run it from the stuff you've posted so far.

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Very interesting project, looking over your website as well. Quick question, is Hot Spring Island the only one that's this polished at the moment, or are the others also this detailed? What's the future for this project, collected PDFs for purchase?

>>47934780
Hot Springs is the only one this polished. The plan is to do a kickstarter to get it printed up _really nice_, but not 'till the whole thing is finished for real.

I've made a couple zines that have been pretty well received (got a full 6 level dungeon up over here: http://shop.swordfishislands.com/item/the-lapis-observatory-a-zine). I'm kinda thinking I might stick to that format going forward instead of a giant megalith like Hot Springs has turned out to be.

PDFs are definitely on the table, but I need to lay them out. If you straight port my book layout to pdf, the margins do unhappy things.

>>47933908
Looks pretty fucking good to me, OP, but why wouldn't you stat it up for B/X or some similar OSR edition of D&D? It would still be pretty straightforwardly usable with 5e that way and you'd have covered the system needs of most players.

>>47935588
We've been running it with 5e and pathfinder and b/x. In a way I view table top systems like video game systems. I think more content needs to be made "clean" and the localized for the various platforms that are out there.

To the best of my knowledge, I'd have needed to have picked a system from the get go, and then probably would have had to wrap things up into something like the OGL. I didn't want to tie myself to anyone from the beginning.

>>47936264
And once again copyright laws are making life harder than it should be.

That's the level of polish and detail I dream of anon, congrats

>>47933908
Is that map style influenced/based on Xenoblade Chronicles X? Reminds me of it heavily.

>>47933908
Shiiiiiny.

>>47933908
neat

>>47933908
What's the scale?

>>47939297
2 mile hexes

>>47933908
Hey OP, you it this job one link? Not multiple pages?
Looks Hella awesome!
Might run it in gurps :)

>>47933908
It's like if Morrowind and Monster Island got drunk and horny together.
All my thumbs up, anon!