Patterns, or Lessons from Isle of the Unknown

In many ways, Isle of the Unknown is a mediocre module at best. Its descriptions do little more than state that something is there, and content is repetitive and highly formulaic, as if procedurally generated from a limited set of items. And unlike Carcosa which benefits from a novel setting, Isle of the Unknown is essentially a French medieval island. Thus, it would be tempting to write it off as a dud existing only to meet a hexcrawl quota. But to me, the module is remarkable in how it presents you with the illusion of depth and meaning. I would argue that the formulaic elements conjure up a specific setting that the player-characters gradually learn to anticipate and understand. This is especially true for the magic-users that scatter the island. In Isle, it is fully possible (albeit improbable) to figure out both the location and overall theme of the not-yet encountered magicians once a few of them have been found.This alone makes Isle rather unique. But furthermore, the player-characters might even happen upon an encounter that explains the existence of some of the formulaic elements, thus enabling them to intuit some form of history for the setting itself. Now granted, the revelation is far from mind-boggling. But there is a "there" there, build into the adventure at a structural level and reflected in construction of the book. This makes Isle - flaws and all - one of the landmark modules of the OSR. It is designed to contain something more than what meets the eye.

A mystery.

One of the ideas that spoke most to me in the early OSR was that fantasy games had lost track of the fantastical. The more we play, the less is left unexplained. We have already fought a vampire, we know the HD of a goblin, and so on, and we are worse for it. Hence, the call to arms was to reintroduce mystery and a sense of wonder! And as soon as the problem had been outlined, so were its solutions, such as

- Don't speak in game terms.
- Use unique monsters, or at least pretend that they are unique by describing them instead of naming them.
- Go for weird instead of vanilla.
- Use pulp as inspiration, not Tolkien. And so on.

These are all good to very-good advice. But to me, they miss something fundamental. Neither of the standard solutions create MYSTERY. What they do is create uncertainty. Their idea is to replace some of the known with something unknown, or to recast the familiar as something unfamiliar. But at least to me, mystery is something completely different.

Mystery, I'd say, is the recognition of a logic that you cannot (yet) understand. It's a secret you can uncover, engaging a system that just might be there. A pattern. If this is true, then uniqueness and weirdness might, in themselves, actually be counterproductive. If the setting is systematically strange, it stops being unknown and becomes unknowable.


Following the cue of Isle, I'd argue that the solution to making a setting mysterious is not just to replace the ordinary with the extra-ordinary but to provide the extra-ordinary with its own pattern.