Review - C3 Lost Island of Castanamir

C3 - The Lost Island of Castanamir

by Ken Rolston (1984)

'Competition' modules were a curious breed.  They were designed to be played in a single session, or, in the case of C3, 2 separate sessions, 1 for each part of the adventure.  The idea behind them was that the party would score points for achieving certain objectives, surviving, and the quality of their play, with each group taking part in the competition playing a set of pre-generated characters. The nature of the competition meant that the module designers generally had to create an adventure with a high proportion of puzzles, and tricky, often dangerous mental challenges, after all, competitions are meant to be a challenge

The design goal commonly led to the adventures being somewhat disjointed in feel, with little care being given to the sense of realism demanded by an adventure intended for campaign play.  However, many of the greatest TSR modules began life as tournament adventures, proving that it was very much possible to create a good adventure within the confines of the tournament criteria. C3 is unusual in a sense as it is a low level tournament module.  Most of them were aimed at the adventuring 'sweet spot', mid level characters that were somewhat more robust, and which therefore had more abilities at the players' disposal.

At first glance, The Lost Island of Castanamir looks rather impressive. The cover art is a full page image depicting a bizarre and terrifying creature seemingly emerging from a pool as the party nervously clutch their weapons, but what's that at the bottom? A small, white dog yapping at one of them.  Yes, a small white dog.  Hmmmm, ok, maybe this one is going to be a little strange?

Rooooaaaaarrrrr!!............*woof*

The setting is a remote, rocky island, the party are stranded there and have found an entrance leading to possible shelter. They have discovered the abode of a mad high-level Mage - something which will become quite clear to them very soon. On passing through the entrance they find themselves in a clean, tidy Living Room - meticulously so, as a small metal Cleaning Golem beetles back and forth zapping dirt with its disintegration ray.  Living in a closet are a pair of Leprechauns.  Right away the tone of the adventure is therefore set. 

There are a total of 18 encounter areas split over 2 levels, the intention being that the first tournament session comprises the first 9 rooms on the lower level, and the second session starts when they have found the upper level, and are trying to locate the exit.  Each encounter area is linked by a series of teleport portals which is likely to be frustrating initially, as 'returning the way you came in' is no simple matter.  Most of the locations fit the theme quite well, with the lower level being living quarters, a kitchen, a dining room, guest rooms, and some 'entertainment' areas, and the upper level being mainly laboratories, a library, workshops, etc. There are a few oddities, clearly added to challenge or merely delay a tournament group who are playing to a time limit.

Encounters on the Lost Island are mostly with creatures summoned by the Mage himself, a bizarre race called Gingwatzim, which come in all manner of shapes and sizes.  There are also a few other individuals trapped within the complex, and fights are very much of the infrequent but deadly variety - and quite a few can be avoided - something the players would be wise to do.

Please don't touch the exhibits.

So it's unusual, and rather imaginative, but is it any good?  For the purpose for which it was written, probably, but few people buying the adventure would be doing so to play at a tournament.  Most purchasers would be DMs looking for an adventure to slip into a campaign, or to mine for ideas.  For a 32-page adventure it is short, desperately so.  With the pregens taking up 8 pages, a several pieces of full page artwork, along with tournament notes, the actual adventure is just 13 pages, with 2 of those pages dominated by large pieces of art. A number of the locations can simply be ignored by the party too.  My current group, who can be an ill-focussed rabble at times, completed the entire adventure in about 8 hours and they went in every one of the 18 rooms and poked around quite thoroughly - a more direct group could do it in 5-6 hours quite easily.  Sure there are plenty of other TSR adventures which have a similar number of pages of actual adventure or  even fewer - Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain for example, but they manage to pack in a lot more gaming time within those pages.

One problem is the sheer wordiness of the descriptions.  Take the Library for example, it fills an entire page.  Rather than describe it with rambling text, a diagram of the layout would have been much more effective and intuitive to use.  There is very much the feeling that it is so wordy because the author needed to try to fill a defined page count, but there simply wasn't the depth of material there.  Notes on converting the adventure for campaign play would have been useful, but there are none.

Presentation is very much one of style above substance.  Artwork throughout is by Jeff Easley, and the images look very professional, but they lack personality, and feel out of place in an adventure which tries its best to be weird and wacky.  Jim Holloway's more humorous approach would have been more fitting, and I would have loved to have seen what Erol Otus could have come up with. Also, beneath the gloss are a number of formatting errors - there are several instances of text being erroneously boxed, or missing a box, as quite a few of the 'read-aloud' sections contain information that would only be gleaned by close examination.  Maps are merely adequate, and could have been made a lot clearer - plus they use a ridiculous scale. 1 square = 4 feet?  Why?  Just change that to 5' and be done with it.

In order to use the adventure in campaign play some modifications need to be made, as there are a number of potentially game-breaking items - an Amulet of the Planes for example!  The location would probably need to be moved too, but that's not a difficult job.  I had the party pursuing 2 Thieves into an area of recently-drained marshland, where the Thieves stumbled on the entrance and the PCs followed them inside.  Some of the encounter areas require very specific solutions, thus if used in a campaign the DM needs to take care to ensure the party have the means to solve them at their disposal.

The Lost Island of Castanamir contains plenty of interesting ideas and locations, the Fantasy Room made for some interesting roleplaying for example, but there is simply not enough of it.  The end result is a short, disjointed, occasionally frustrating affair - mostly for the DM as the amount of work that must be put into it in order to run it well simply does not translate into enough fulfilling gaming time for the effort to feel worthwhile.  A group who enjoy a bit of occasional weirdness can get some fun from it, my players seemed to enjoy it, but ultimately that fun will be all too brief.

Presentation: 3/10 – professional artwork masks errors in the text, which is frequently overly verbose.

Brawn:  2/10 – what is there can be tough, but most can be avoided and the adventure is simply way too short.

Brains:  7/10 – some interesting locations, and most of it does actually feel like a Wizard's home.  Some areas though are rather inconsequential and appear to be nothing more than delaying tactics.

Overall: 3/10 – short, convoluted and somewhat messy, requires work from the DM to make it play well.