Eroding Isle of the Executioner - Play Review
My Monday night group was down a player so it's time to bust out a Shadowdark one shot. There's still some water to be drawn from the mini-adventures well, so Eroding Isle of the Executioner is our next destination. Like Concealed Abbey and Wavestone Monolith before it, this is a single digest page, front and back by Kelsey Dione of the Arcane Library.
As is the norm for these little Arcane Library mini-adventures there's a single paragraph of setup, a 4 entry encounter table, and the description of a magical fruit. The punchy setup provides ambience while the magical fruit is a cornerstone of the adventure's lore.
At the Table
As with some of the other mini-adventures I played we used Foundry with a fan-made map and it was a nice upgrade. As this was a quick fill-in adventure I dropped the party on the western shore of this island saying they came from the mainland.
Eroding Isle is a smash-and-grab but there was good detail to sink my teeth into while playing. A pile of noble skeletons tangled with expensive signet rings. A dead dryad, her wooden body impaled on a venomous dagger. A desperate mermaid entranced with the fruit of a strange tree. Each of these had my players speculating, and fanned their curiosity and caution in equal measure. All these details are interweaved through the 8 keyed locations to build story through the environment.
My party didn't weave together the story, but I could see them wrestling with the tangled skein of ideas. The full tapestry of a cursed dryad budding addictive fruit, the hag addict and the house fallen into ruin around it all was never fully revealed but glimpses were seen.
This one-shot party has no magical items making the Wraith encounter nigh-impossible, but I rather liked that looming threat.
My hiccup was the sinkhole traps. Over the years I've grown disillusioned with traps, preferring to give my players clues and allow them to think through a situation. The odd wear on the tread of the stairs in Wavestone Monolith, as an example. The sinkholes in this adventure gave me little in the way of clues. The description I gave led to them easily disarming and avoiding the sinkholes. I might have been too lenient. Threatening their torches or forcing a random encounter could have made this quite thrilling.
Final Thoughts
Eroding Isle was an engaging one-shot foray and the threads of a fallen house could easily be picked up and woven in to a larger campaign. Eroding Isle does a lot right, giving both an interesting location, mysteries that prompt questions in play and a level of detail that suits a GM who is using the text at the table.
It contrasts favorably to Concealed Abbey where the environment felt less integrated and led me to L'esprit de l'escalier moments in the aftermath. Eroding Isle of the Executioner is an Excellent way to fill 2-3 hours.