Week 12: Islands and changes

The Islands

I went back to making islands like I was doing before the drawings, but using previous islands' names, drawings, and stats and oracle prompts (where present) as starting points instead of coming up with new names and drawing new outlines. The new islands created here don't have anything to do with the originals, so I haven't linked back to the first versions.

Vermouth Island

Elevation

280 m

Area

6.5 km2

• 3: Impression: Graveyards everywhere, dotted with apocalyptic drunkards spewing as much doomsday prophecy as they do vomit.
• 5: Path: A winding funeral procession has stopped on its path; the coffin reeks and the mourning party lies listlessly in the sun or makeshift tents.
• 4: Focus: A wayside shrine just off the crumbling tarmac road, stuffed with airmail letters smeared by rain and home to a family of aggravated shrews.
• 6: Event: A small explosion from the mountaintop—plumes of green smoke and fire running down the slope.
• 1: Focus: A burnt-out dune buggy rusted on the roadside, motor quietly revving, two dead gunwomen in the front and a small suitcase full of foreign bills in the back.
• 9: Impression: Desperation looms over the island like pyrocumulus ready to descend, annihilate, and purify.
• 2: Path: The tarmac road loops round the mountaintop, giving great views of the tiny bustling settlement on the smaller, Northern island.
• 10: Event: Bells ring from somewhere underground; a metal hatche in the dirt swings open and a solemn gas-masked watcher steps up to take measurements of the green smoke.
• 7: Impression: It's clear from up here: no matter how the clouds move, the island is always in strong sunlight, a perfect cut-out that withers all the grass.
• 8: Path: The tarmac leads down the other side of the mountain, trailing off into rubble leading to a cliff edge rimmed with broken car lights and slavering dogs.
• Event: Desperation descends. The sounds of life wafting from the smaller island turn to gunfire and screams; the bigger island stays silent, impassive to the end. We speed back to the docks before the mood makes a turn for the worse.

Reasons to return: To pick through the ruins. To interview the mountain's experimentalist(?). To take meteorological measurements.

Plough Island

• 5: Path: Festoons of moss run in big sweeping arcs down the crumbling petrified ruins of a gargantuan tree—the last flake of bark still standing.
• 4: Event: The tide starts to roll out, dragging sand with it and exposing a swarm of sleeping uranium-yellow crabs.
• 1: Path: A footpath round the base of the bark is clearly marked with little yellow flags; three distinct sets of footprints, and at least one large, loping dog.
• 6: Impression: Solemn defiance blots out the sun. The tree still casts its shade, still stands against the sky.
• 11: Event: Lightning strikes the top of the fossil, a bolt from the blue that leaves a red-hot furious scar down the rock-like wall of ancient wood.
• 3: Focus: The remains of a camp in the shade, now lit by the bitter flame of the old tree. A book on astro-paleontology sits wedged open with rocks
• 2: Impression: The soil here is fine, dusty, like bone-white chalk; campfire pits dotting the island are little grey blots against the black of night and white of day.
• Event: The massive slab of petrified wood snaps in half and crushes the little campsite; its wounds bleed flame and we decide to leave it to burn.

Reasons to return: Review the results; evaluate the wildlife; redraw the path.

The Can Opener

Elevation

71 m

Area

1.1 km2

Temperature (day)

22°C

Temperature (night)

12°C

• 3: Impression: Luxury cars hang out of opened containers and lie scattered on the deck like cheap plastic toys melted and smashed by kids with lighters and hammers.
• 4: Focus: A group of armed men and women play cards with a novelty poker deck themed around cigarette mascots. The stakes look like tyre air valve caps.
• 5: Event: Someone accuses someone else of cheating—and us of being complicit. He almost draws a gun before the others settle him down and shout us away.
• 6: Path: The walkways leading round the ship to the superstructure are slick with oil and busted through by carelessness and poor maintenance; a labyrinth of traps for drunken sailors.
• 1: Impression: The smell of roasting fish wafts all over the ship.
• Event: The superstructure erupts in bullets and broken glass just as we reach it. A deal gone wrong? We sprint for it, barely getting safely off the ship as the battle spreads.

Reasons to return: Make the deal we were meant to make.

Mourning Island

Prompt: (SIX_HEARTS) flags

Elevation

420 m

Area

6.3 km2

• 5: Focus: The mast of a beached ironclad rises out of the Eastern shallows, flags stiffened by salt, almost frozen flat.
• 1: Impression: Limp, withered scrub, dry grass, and animal bones. No two bones are alike, and there are no skulls.
• 9: Focus: The port town has a gemstone-like lighthouse, the only spot of brightness; as night falls it casts dim, opalescent light over the shores—useless for passing ships.
• 8: Path: A straight dirt road leads to the hilltop observatory complex; rust and blue paint flakes mark where there was once a guiding fence or property line. We drive slowly round the ridges.
• 4: Focus: Among the observatory staff, only the elderly chief astronomer deigns to talk to us; we hand off the replacement lenses and she invites us to a late dinner in the complex's cafeteria. Crab and stale bread.
• Event: The chief astronomer collapses during dinner. The other staff proceed as if nothing happened. We make our excuses and leave.

Reasons to return: To investigate the lighthouse. To scavenge from the beached ship, if there's anything worth selling on. To do the next drop-off.

Sluice Island

Elevation

720 m

Area

5.7 km2

• 6: Path: Tetrapod wave-breakers form an arc along the island's one significant beach, like waddling animals stuck too far up the sand to return to the ocean.
• 3: Focus: A monument nestled among dunes. Grave-markers clustered around a central pillar formed from whalebone, with semi-legible writing.
• 2: Impression: Faint hooting can be heard from everywhere on the island, echoing from the treeline.
• 12: Event: A klaxon wails and is strangled. The surface of the beach vibrates like it's not grains of sand but a carpet of mites.
• 5: Path: The Eastern slope of the mountain has a vast gap between the trees; a completely denuded strip of land without even a scrap of moss.
• Event: The treeline quakes and the hooting intensifies—until the outermost line of trees crumples like paper, falls flat, and is swept into the silent forests by some unknown force.

Reasons to return: To make our way into the forest interior. To trace the monument's inscription.

Scuttle Atoll

Elevation

3.4 m

Area

4 km2

• 1: Impression: Rust. It's all rust. A fur of ruddy metal flakes that grind underfoot—and yet the hull still feels stable and strong underneath.
• 3: Focus: A porthole, cracked glass. The room below is full to the brim with water and the sunlight-ghosts of drifting jellyfish.
• 4: Path: Melted stairways and railings along the Southern edge of the atoll provide a hazardous route into the guts of the ship.
• 5: Focus: Barnacles cluster in a painfully jagged and sharp colony on the rim of a doorway, mouth-like, repurposing the war machine.
• Event: A mighty wave comes from nowhere and crashes onto the side of the nameless ship, smashing it, all but erasing it from the map. Our ship picks us from the wreckage, mercifully unharmed.

Reasons to return: Sift the wreckage, try to identify a flag, see what remains of the weaponry that could be decommissioned and sold to the highest bidder at collectors' auctions.

Cradle Island

Elevation

94 m

Area

1.2 km2

• 1: Path: The ridge between the pinnacles provides a tricky, but passable route up the island, past mutely-confused giant penguins native to the island who somehow manage the steep slopes without the use of hands.
• 4: Focus: The lesser pinnacle is covered in small holes, rough in texture, coated with sky-blue lichen. The smell of sulfur bubbles up from below.
• 3: Focus: The greater pinnacle is smeared with bird droppings to the point that it's almost hard to climb (not just because of the smell). A few penguins stand at the top, looking almost insulted that we reached their place of privilege. Still, no eggs.
• Event: A storm's rolling in and there's no shelter worth speaking of up here.

Reasons to return: Catalog the species, see if there's any natural resources hidden under the island, try to find the eggs.

Thoughts and Changes

I feel like the game does lose something in not drawing and naming the islands, but it does make things more convenient.

Next week I think I'm gonna do the same thing, but add a few short oracle prompts to each old island I re-use.

My plan after that is to try a different take on the same rules: draw, name, and stat the islands as normal, then come up with one Impression, Path, Focus, and Event each, and finally write a brief history in a few vignettes (not trying to be comprehensive, just characterful). This'd be a bit more like Atlas of Remote Islands, one of the major inspirations for this game, which spends a bit of page space detailing each island, then a bit of page space on historic (semi-imagined) vignettes.