Desert Island

Place: a desolate, uninhabited island

variant: an island in time or outside space (for very advanced characters)

Difficulty: any

Prelude

The characters end up on a desert island. There are several ways this can happen:

— The characters are captured and a ship is taking them to prison (exile). They may free themselves and be shipwrecked. Why and how the characters were captured depends on previous adventures.

— The characters travel by sea and are shipwrecked in a storm.

— The characters cast a spell of high magic, activate an artifact or do something else that transports them to a desert island.

— The characters travel by sea, land at an island, and their crew sails away with the ship.

Life on the Island

The more experienced the characters, the more interesting their arrival on the island should be. Advanced characters escape with nothing but their skins and lose most of their equipment.

Penalties

The characters may have penalties for all sorts of things: prior exhaustion, hunger, thirst and illness.

Hunger, Thirst

Life on the island is no bed of roses, and getting food takes a whole day of foraging. The characters are always hungry (and above all they lack the equipment to hunt successfully). Knowledge of woodcraft is a great advantage (although the plants and animals are unknown, and even an experienced ranger may have trouble here).

The water is foul (without boiling it, a character may fall ill).

Illness

Insects, water, food and other factors can make the characters ill. If they rely on a particular character (woodsman, healer), that character is sure to fall ill.

Fire

Without a flint and equipment, making a fire is the first problem (and without great woodcraft it cannot be solved for a long time). A thunderstorm and a forest fire may help.

Equipment

The less equipment the characters bring with them, the more interesting the game will be (and they may lose even that).

Cold

Without clothing, the characters will be cold at night and may fall ill.

Animals

The animals on the island may be wild, aggressive or too large to hunt. The characters must be ingenious, and the hunt itself becomes an adventure (especially without good equipment).

First Steps toward Civilized Life

Once the characters have secured their basic needs (food, water, fire, shelter, clothing), they can slowly try out various crafts. Players who gave their characters pottery, blacksmithing, glassmaking, carpentry and other crafts will profit here (reckoners, horse riders and linguists, on the other hand, will come up short).

You can let the characters invent crafts and laboriously try to work out the methods every civilization knows.

In time …

Once the characters have mastered everything they need and explored the island, they may find:

— remains of an ancient civilization

— clever apes or other creatures

— savages they can deal with

In the End

It is unlikely that the characters will manage to build their own ship. They may join forces with the natives and use their boats, a ship may sail past the island (if they build signal fires, their chances increase), pirates may land on the shore (though not very willing to take the characters back to civilization), and so on.

Addendum

The characters should not have magical abilities that would help them leave the island quickly and easily. If they do, you can use the variant with an island outside time and space (they then get away only after long study).