Self Published
B/X levels 1-4
Premise: The Mayor of the village on a small island wants you to go map out a lost colony on the island which was founded by escaped prisoners.
What do we get here?
Over 22 pages we get a dungeon that has 49 keyed rooms and another 10 or so labelled sub-rooms.
Usability/Formatting
Most of what you need to run the adventure has been thought of here apart from any description of how you traverse the island. Compared to The Isle of Forgotten Gods this adventure is missing a point or hex crawl leading up to its dungeon to bring the setting to life.
I really like the art, which is done by the author, it is simple and clean really adding to the adventure. It is also nice that you get the map of the dungeon upfront.
Information is easy to track and for the most part the adventure is very easy to read, what it is lacking however is some better descriptions for the rooms. For each room you get a single paragraph and it seems you are expected to expand on that yourself.
All key monster stats are presented in the text for the room they appear in which is very helpful. You also get an expanded bestiary at the end which is nice. Having a bunch of new monsters helps add to the flavour of the adventure.
There is nothing stopping you running the adventure as is, it just lacks a little bit in connective tissue.
Portability
As long as you have a slightly tropical island in your setting you can easily slap this adventure down with no problems.
Recommendation
There is a lot to like here but the adventure does have some problems. Apart from the stuff I already mentioned I have to call out the lack of unique or interesting treasure, which is particular stark when compared to the excellent job with unique monsters, and I also think that the dungeon is not exactly logically consistent with the back story. The colony only existed for a short time and was built by escaped prisoners so where did they knock up an art gallery and library from? Not my go to requirements in a survival situation with a new colony really.
Unfortunately this is a flawed piece despite containing a number of strong elements, it just needs a bit more polish and clean up. Likely I would just advise running The Isle of Forgotten Gods instead of running this adventure.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/347216/The-Hidden-Colony-Of-Layanaka
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