Hot Springs Island endures as a popular and oft recommended module in the broad old-schoolish D&Dish sphere. But while reviews and recommendations are quick to point out the slick layout and quality art, more lacking are actual play reports and criticism of the actual adventure itself. So, I hope to add my perspective here, after running it over 14 sessions.
To set the stage: I ran HSI online for a small party of 3 or 4 players, around level 5-6 after they had already made a modest fortune and bought a ship. We played using the Whitehack 3e rules. The party was well equipped to fight many of the inhabitants, and there wasn’t much in the way of wilderness survival needed, having a ship anchored off the shore the entire time.
HSI is well realized for the most part, and manages to feel ‘alive’ much more so than other modules. Every named character and faction has motivations, secrets, and fears. The large list of monsters and plants provide a well rounded ecology that feels distinct from the average D&D milieu. The large amount of art for named characters is also a plus, and I found myself cropping and sending pictures to the players almost every session, which the players were fond of.
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| My players named their ship after Meltalia, and are still sailing it to this day. |
Once past the slick layout, the most unique selling point of Hot Springs Island is a surprising commitment to a lack of stasis. What I mean by this, is that in many modules, a room key describes both the static objects and set dressing, and also an encounter, frozen in time, ready to unfreeze at the moment the players enter the room and interact. Think the wounded lizardmen in room 5 of The Caverns of Thracia. Without DM fiat, they will always have just survived a centipede attack and are binding their wounds.
HSI adamantly refuses stasis in its location and room keying. It describes nothing other than literal static objects. All creatures and people are to be rolled for on random encounters. To replace the hand crafted flavor that other modules would write into the keys, HSI provides an activity table. In HSI’s favor, this provides a degree of unpredictability and replayability to every dungeon, which would be valuable if my players ever revisited dungeons, which they didn’t.
The downsides are many, however. With no NPCs stocked in rooms, the DM needs to roll an encounter and activity for every single room in every dungeon. This is time consuming and exhausting. Luckily, one can always preroll the dungeon and spend time figuring out what the hell all these NPCs are actually doing in the dungeon and how they interact, filtering out nonsense results (like gambling bugs or an orgy of adventurers at a mass grave). Of course, then you’d have simply recreated the static presentation of other modules, just with an overly complicated restocking table.
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| The book would have you roll on this table 53 times for Encounter and Motivation each. |
All this might be forgiven if this created engaging and interesting dungeons, but following the book as written creates absurdly crowded dungeons filled with to the brim with representations from every single faction. Every room key gets an encounter, and many keys are just different parts of a larger room. My players couldn’t turn a corner without interrupting an earth imp arguing with seven salamanders with an angry wydarr in tow. This made dungeons feel less like dungeons and more like navigating an endless party, interrupting small talk and drama while the players awkwardly distracted the eleventh drunken salamander to steal yet another golden bust of Svarku.
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| Never got tired of rolling a combustarino though. Love these little bastards. |
This doesn’t seem exactly like the intended experience, or a fun one. So I quickly started to adjust stocking to be less crowded, and grew used to ruthlessly cutting impossible encounters. Which in my book is a massive failure. A huge party of rolling for encounters is the element of surprise, and the challenge of fitting in the result in a way that makes sense. That is a huge element of how these games come to life, but in HSI the encounter tables are reduced to a suggestion for the DM’s improvisation too often.
The dungeons themselves, structurally, are very small, and tend to lack in interactivity, with most interactivity being offloaded onto encounters. For us, they lacked a certain magic, and felt small yet tedious. The realism of the dungeons, while fantastical, means there’s not much in terms of mysterious levers, traps and ambushes. And a surprising amount the content is also left as an exercise for the DM, such as the portal to the plane of Ash and the Ash Barons, or the entirety of the Bathhouse Trap. The Trap in particular is a very cool idea and led to a very fun session, but it was left entirely to me to come up with a procedure and mechanics to wander around a mapless area.
Perhaps the right kind of DM could thrive in the high improv, chaotic, and dense mess that most HSI locations are, but for me, and I suspect for most, the effort is not worth the reward. Especially since most of the plusses for this style don’t emerge until replaying and revisiting dungeons.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, HSI provides a daunting amount of lore and history. While in depth, the lore is absolutely a strength of the setting, and the dawning realization of how much of a piece of shit Svarku is or how long the nereids have been captured were great to play out.
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| Perhaps the greatest city map of all time? |
But even then there are some baffling decisions. Important to much of the story is a mysterious cataclysm that led to the elves abandoning the island a long time ago. This cataclysm is left unstated, perhaps to make it easier to integrate into any campaign, but what absolutely sucks is that nowhere is it stated in the book that that is the intent. It’s easy to rapidly flip through the book looking for details on the cataclysm (even for trivial details, such as how long ago it happened) only to be left hanging dry while the players wait for a response. A simple timeline of events on the island would be great for quick reference.
Other parts are strangely segmented off as well, such as the giant crab attack and eruption of the volcano. Both things that are talked about but not hooked into any other events, leaving the DM to decide arbitrarily when such things happen. Again, not a deal breaker, but just another thing I needed to come up with myself instead of relying on the book.
As for positives, in particular the conflict between the nereids and Svarku is compelling. Especially Svarku, who is a superbly characterized bastard. Anyone who reads his description gets exactly how to run him and how to make the players hate him.
The descriptions are, unfortunately, very wordy, making them something you internalize when reading ahead of time rather than something reference-able in game time.
But overshadowing this problem is perhaps my single greatest gripe with HSI. The simple combination of highly improv dependent encounters and pages of detailed history are at odds with each other. Improvising is difficult when it is at risk of contradiction. Randomly running into a friendly nereid can lead into a massive exposition dump if the players are interested.
That being said, the game doesn’t fall apart from this tension, but it left me as the DM constantly referencing the book and stopping to figure out what the hell is even happening. That mental exercise combined with constantly stocking whole dungeons on the fly, not to mention statting out every monster and NPC by myself, led to way more prep and crunch than expected.
The author’s insistence on non-stasis keying, randomness, and mechanical neutrality all lead to a very impressive looking book, but do not lead to a better game.
Some modules can easily be discarded from a read through. Much harder is knowing if a module is perfect for you without actually playing it.
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