D&D 5E - [Let's Read] The Sunken Isles (2024)

Our next chapter covers a series of new rules to be used in conjunction with the adventure path. While technically they can be adopted for campaigns beyond the Sunken Isles, quite a bit of it makes references or is specific to elements within the adventure.

Sailing Through the Isles: Journey by Sea covers sea traveling, an element the party will have to do to visit the majority of places in Manaki. PCs and the appropriate NPCs take specific roles during the journey which have their own features, such as a Captain who adds their Wisdom modifier to the ship during combat, or the Shipwright who can restore hit points to a damaged ship with the appropriate tools during a short or long rest. When embarking to a destination, a navigation roll, seafaring roll, and weather roll are made. The navigation roll is an Intelligence check that adds proficiency bonus if the navigator is proficient in navigation tools or the Survival skill, and the DC determines how quickly they arrive at their destination and if they fail badly enough also trigger a random encounter. The seafaring roll is a D20 that adds cumulative +1s for various circ*mstances, and the overall result determines penalties and benefits the party suffers during the trip. This can range from seasickness that poisons them for 1d4 days to gaining Bless spell benefits for an hour from feeling refreshed. Finally, the weather roll determines the weather for the entire week, which typically applies bonuses or penalties to the prior rolls, although by Week 11 and higher magical weather can occur in the form of a living tidal wave that attacks the ship (using water elemental stats but Gargantuan size).

There are of course random encounter tables for sea travel based on the weather, and range from typical combat from pirates and sea monsters to other encounter types such as getting stuck on a sandbar, debris which can be scavenged for valuables, and meeting traveling kia’i merchants.

We also get stats for various kinds of sailing vessels, ranging from simple barges to galleons. Watercraft come with lots of hit points, as even the most meager has a healthy 70, but the main hindrance is they don’t recover hit points as fast like PCs spending hit dice to rest. They have stat blocks much like NPCs and monsters, although they lack mental ability scores and have immunities typical to objects. We have very simple rules for ship combat being half a page, where ships act on their own initiative in combat and have a number of actions equal to the number of crew on board. Actions include things like aiming weapons, firing weapons, changing speed, or changing direction. And ships can be upgraded too, ranging from mundane weapon emplacements from ballistae to cannons, to supernatural spirit carvings and figureheads. Spirit carvings are made by native Manaki who invite spirits into their vessels for various benefits by expending charges, such as allowing the ship to gain an extra action in combat or rerolling on the weather table. Figureheads are dwarven creations designed to ward off evil spirits, but work too well in warding off all spirits so ships can either have spirit carvings or figureheads but not both. There are three figureheads which tend to involve risk mitigation, such as automatically frightening a few weak monsters away during combat at sea or allowing those on the ship to see the stars no matter the weather conditions.

While there are likely much more in-depth rules for naval combat and sea vessels out there, what we get in the Sunken Isles is rather functional. My major concern would be that the time PCs get a big crew and quite a few weapons they can get a lot of actions in ship combat, but as galleons and cannons can’t be bought or crafted, only found during adventures, this is mitigated a bit. There’s also the fact that a lot of adventures take place inland on the islands visited, so PCs can’t always rely on a barrage of cannonfire to save them.

Resources: An Economy Without Gold reflects the Isles’ unique economy. Fiat currency hasn’t been invented, and outside traders don’t use it either; instead people make use of the barter system, and the adventure path dispenses with using gold/silver/copper pieces as treasure. The closest are valuable items such as artwork and gemstones that have listed monetary values. The Sunken Isles has a new mechanic known as Resources, a generic term for a variety of trade goods and valuables that can be used to purchase various items and services. For example, crafting a new weapon may require wood and metal resources, and a magical potion may require foraged goods and monster parts. Resources are measured in Units, and can be gained via appropriate tool checks while harvesting, spending 1-3 days of downtime in searching for resources on an island based on their rarity, and as rewards for services and quests in the adventure. PCs can also delegate resource gathering to the villagers of Makolf (the starting town/home base of the PCs) via Expeditions, which can be done to an island the PCs visited once per week. This frees up the PCs to do other stuff, but expeditions don’t gather as much as if the PCs were directly doing it, and at later weeks the Isles become more dangerous in general which decreases the chances of successful expeditions.

Resources can then be spent by PCs for Crafting. Crafting in the Sunken Isles is a simple minigame divided into 3 parts: a cost in Resources, an appropriate proficiency (typically tool proficiencies), and the amount of time needed to craft usually ranging from 1 to 3 weeks. Crafting typically doesn’t require skill checks, as the item is automatically complete once the resources and time are paid. The things PCs and their allies can craft range from weapons and armor, mithral/silver enhancements, temporary +1 enhancement/+1d6 energy damage to weapons from magical enchantments that last for 1d6 days, a small variety of poisons and potions, and pretty much any kind of sea vessel and carving/figurehead upgrades save for a galleon (which are mostly foreign ships). PCs can also spend resources to make improvements to the village of Makolf, such as building homes for refugees or protective spirit totems and charms to help defend the village.

PCs get rewarded for crafting beyond just new items. When a PC makes 5 items that take a week or longer to craft, they gain a signature enhancement they then apply to all of their items from then on if it’d be appropriate for such items. There are five different signatures to be chosen from, such as stylish artwork that grants the item’s wielder +2 on Charisma checks to adding +1 to skill checks, attack rolls, or save DCs made with the item.

The crafting rules appear functional to my initial. Monster parts can be a very easy resource to come by on account that combat is a big part of the adventure, even if the text stipulates that only magical monsters and not mundane creatures can be harvested from. But as monster parts are used for crafting potions and poisons which are single-use, this is a worthy trade-off. Building heavy armor or mithral armor takes 2 or 3 weeks respectively, which likely means that a party may get access to plate armor much earlier than usual, although replacing said armor or making sets for multiple PCs can get cost-prohibitive. Boats and town improvements take a lot of wood to build, with quite a few taking 3-5 units but some as much as 7 or 10.

As for temporary magical enhancements, they don’t cost resources save for the weapon required and the aid of a specific NPC, and as the weapon is not consumed during this (it becomes mundane) it’s still an attractive option. I do like the idea of signatures representing PCs becoming good at crafting, as they make a nice little reward to encourage them to make their own items rather than relying on NPCs to do all their work. The text does float a variant rule for weapon durability ratings, where weapons built by the PCs break after 1d10 days but anything built by a Makolf native is permanent. Which if anything explicitly disincentivizes PCs from crafting themselves at all, and I don’t like this variant for that reason.

My one other criticism is that while treasure isn’t as important in 5th Edition as it is in 3rd or 4th Edition, the monetary values of treasure found in the campaign have no easy conversion for trading for units. There’s also the fact that the crafting rules are pretty simple in comparison to some more robust third party sourcebooks such as Ghesh’s Guide to Making Things or the Armorer’s Handbook. While having 5,000 gold worth of valuable art objects and gemstones can feel nice, the impact is a bit lessened when parties can’t then use such treasure to obtain more useful things.

Magic In the Sunken Isles is our final section of Chapter 2, discussing the cosmic foundations of the setting. Everything in the Isles of Manaki are creations of the Star Breather, where everything has a spirit. Spirits are divided between animated spirits, which include living creatures, weather, and concepts such as communities. Animated spirits can affect the world in immediate ways, from performing rituals to physical activity. The weakness of animated spirits is mortality, as eventually their time must come to an end to preserve the immortal spirits. Inanimate spirits include natural features such as oceans and stones to abstract concepts like words. Their powers include being able to respond to rituals and anchor the world in stable ways. They are most often incapable of acting on their own, requiring mortal spirits to realize their full potential. Half-immortals are the setting’s closest equivalent to a pantheon of gods, having the best of both worlds. Examples include Kadaur, the oldest island who can materialize a smaller humanoid form as an extension of his will, or Old Shell who appears as a huge decapodian whose soul is connected to his peoples’ homeland of Chitoni. Each half-immortal has a Dominant Domain, which grants them exceptional power in regards to a certain aspect of reality, which is reflected in their stat blocks.

Magic in the setting is an expression of mortal passion, rituals designed to communicate with spirits to realize some action or state of being in the world. When a spellcaster uses magic, they’re calling upon a spirit, and the casting of a spell can take on certain aesthetic manifestations based on the personality traits of the caster and spirit in question.

And of course there are new rules to go with this; at certain points during the adventure, PCs may gain knowledge of Ancient Rituals. They are basically spells unaffiliated with any class in particular, having only a level requirement to be learned and don’t consume spell slots. They still obey typical spell rules such as range and casting time, and have a drawback known as Maledictio which is a price to pay in exchange for working that ritual.

Additionally, the machinations of the Star Breather, Kadaur, and other manifestations of primal energies increase over the course of the campaign, making the Isles a more unpredictable and dangerous place. At the beginning of each session, the GM rolls a Timer Die which gets smaller in later weeks, and the Timer’s value is reduced by 1 each time a spell is cast by anyone during the adventure. When the number reaches one, a Raw Magic Die is rolled and the Time resets. Raw Magic is a d20 table with random effects similar to a Wild Sorcerer, ranging from having a nearby nonmagical casting focus or weapon turn into a friendly poisonous snake, taking 1d4 psychic damage for one round whenever a creature they see takes damage, an explosion of life granting 30 temporary hit points to everyone within 120 feet of the caster, or a flurry of magic missiles shooting out of the caster’s body at random targets and making them suffer disadvantage on Constitution saves until the next short rest. The effects aren’t truly random in magnitude, as the Die starts at a 1d4 during the first two weeks and by the 14th to 20th weeks is a full 1d20. Beyond these particular rules, later weeks of the campaign can see rogue magic come to life, being spontaneously cast out of nowhere during combat as lair actions or the magic a caster uses comes to life with a will of its own.

I can’t say that I’m a fan of the Timer/Raw Magic Dice. Even the largest Timer Die is a 1d8, and as it applies every time a spell is cast and not just per caster this means it will be coming up a lot even in a party with a single magic-user. It can thus end up as a hindrance in slowing down the game by additional book-keeping for the table.

Every hero needs a villain, just as every epic fantasy campaign needs a BBEG…or two, or three, or heck even five if you want to be technical! This short chapter outlines the major figures responsible for the Isles of Manaki’s miseries and the primary antagonists of the adventure. One thing in the PCs favor is that none of these villains are necessarily allied with each other, being comrades of shaky convenience at best (in the Undead Lords’ case) or outright foes at worst.

The Star Breather, Creator of the Isles of Manaki is the primary god of the setting. It existed before the creation of this world, roaming the cosmos and designing many other worlds. Each world was drawn from a part of itself in hopes of making a grand work, much like a painter seeking a magnum opus. The Isles of Manaki are the third world it has created. In spite of being a god, the Star Breather is bound by its own nature, to create and abandon a world before moving on to the next project. It also cannot create or destroy new life directly in a reality once it has been created. Instead, it can reincarnate souls via rituals, where four times a year the kia’i bring dead to the mouth of the Black Atoll, the region of the Isles the Star Breather’s influence is strongest. In exchange for the dead, children born the next year are blessed with health.

Initially inactive, the eruption of Kaldaur’s volcano caused the Star Breather to painfully awaken, for that volcano is connected to its heart. The Star Breather then watches the state of the Isles over time, and deems the world to be a failed work. Like a dispassionate painter, the deity seeks to erase all that has been built up to build upon a blank canvas. To do this it converts the bodies at the Black Atoll into celestials known as ecliptics. Sweeping across the Isles as a single-minded army, they slay all living beings they come across, bringing more dead back to the Black Atoll to turn into more ecliptics. And once all but the ecliptics are gone, the Star Breather’s next great work can begin.

Kada, the Body of Kadaur is a humanoid extension of the island of Kadaur, the largest and oldest of the Isles of Manaki. Appearing like a person forged from the natural elements, his bones are vines, his blood water, and his skin stone. He is a half immortal, having existed as a great hero throughout the Isles’ history and praised by both Manaki and Ikolf alike. It was Kada who used his island body to let civilization be built upon, it was Kada who brought Quing and the dragons to the Isles to act as guardians, and it was Kada who led the forces against Skomm Fylkir. A temple known as Skyreach is built at Kadaur’s volcano, where people make pilgrimages to honor him.

And yet, Kada has become dissatisfied with the Isles he has defended for so long. The expansion of the outside world into this tropical paradise has brought sunken ships that devastate the reefs, poisons and diseases unfamiliar to the natives, greedy opportunists, and destruction of natural resources. Kada has begun to blame the Manaki and Ikolf for letting such foreign influences into the Isles, and at the campaign’s beginning he messed with rituals not meant to be messed with by causing a volcanic eruption. Intending to cover all of the Isles in his magic ichor, the eruption falls far short of this attempt and only serves to weaken him as well as bringing about the inadvertent awakening of the Star Breather.

During the campaign, Kada is a stern and distant authority figure, acting as the closest thing to a ruler over Makolf, but can also serve as a useful source of information to the PCs. His supposedly helpful nature is but a cover for his intentions, and over the course of the campaign he makes pacts with other powerful spirits. As the ecliptics and undead armies lay waste to more and more of the Isles, Kada becomes increasingly resolute in his belief that the lives of mortal despoilers weigh far less than the lives of the myriad plants, animals, and other life of the Isles. If he can kill the mortals and the Star Breather, he can save what’s left of the Isles by returning it to its original form by mixing the divine ichor into the ocean. Kada’s rituals make sea travel increasingly dangerous and also risk sinking the island of Kadaur and killing everything on it. Once it submerges, the volcano’s ichor will mix with the sea. This will doom all life, not just mortal life, as it spreads over time. A rather unintentional nasty side effect of Kada’s intentions!

Unlike the undead lords or the Star Breather, Kada is influenced by a warped sense of protection, which means it is possible for the PCs to recruit him to their side against the other archvillains.

The Undead Lords are an alliance of convenience between three infamous figures from Manaki’s history. Skati Fylkir Af Ikolf is the dwarven king who brought so much death and destruction in his quest for arcane power, first making his own people of Ikolf suffer before turning his attention to the Isles of Manaki. He was the one who created the first undead in the Isles, a monstrous state of being previously unknown to the region, and as he could not be slain in the traditional way Kada instead opted to immobilize him by thrusting the legendary spear Marrow into the necromancer. Pinned by the heart to his own sacrificial temple, Manaki and Ikolf mages quickly got to work in raising power rituals to ensure he would be eternally frozen in a never-ending state of being.

Around the beginning of the campaign, dwarven cultists of Skati will remove Marrow and disrupt the magic, and he wastes no time in getting around to rebuilding his undead empire. He sets about using his forces and strong-arming the PCs into reviving two other notorious undead historical figures to recruit to his side, and makes a nearby set of dwarven ruins his home base where he starts building up an undead army.

Kumuhea is the second Undead Lord, a Manaki druid who had an unmatched ability to command the forces of stone and soil. She could not cross the ocean, and sought to build a set of underground tunnels to bypass the dangers of sea travel to connect the various islands. The other ancient natives disagreed with her goals, feeling that this defied Manaki itself, yet she persisted. At first Kumuhea used decapodian laborers, but their progress was too slow. Then she turned to domesticating wurms, creatures of legend that swam through stone like fish swim through water. Her expansive network was viewed as a great boon, and she developed her own set of written records to catalog her revolutionary spells and works. But pride goeth before a fall, and the spirits of the ocean who had enough triggered a series of cataclysmic earthquakes to collapse the tunnel network, leaving it a fractured mess and burying Kumuhea herself beneath a tomb of stone and water. She now serves as a cautionary tale for children who complain about long journeys and bad weather, and her writings can still be found throughout the Isles but are shunned as forbidden magic by natives.

Skati revives Kumuhea with the intention of making use of her magic and knowledge, for it was finding her writings that made him so interested in the Isles’ potential in the first place. Kumuhea isn’t evil-aligned like Skati and in fact detests him, but she tolerates their alliance for the time being in returning to her project of resurrecting the wurms and reopening the collapsed tunnels. Which in turn Skati hopes to use to transport his undead armies quickly throughout the Isles.

Captain Keelhaul is our final Undead Lord. Originally going by the name of Fiaee Drahl, he was born in a distant land ruled by ruthless merchants. He and his twin brother Anson had differing views on their lot in life: Anson had no hope in fundamentally changing the system, but Fiaee burned with a desire for change. When the brothers built a warship for a merchant, they were cheated out of compensation when the merchant burned down the harbor after stealing the ship. Fiaee caught up to her and sad*stically tortured her to death. Anson was horrified by his brother’s action, but Fiaee disagreed and adopted the life of a pirate. Fiaee eventually gained a fleet of his own with the warship, now known as the Bloody Twins for the two siren figureheads.

Captain Keelhaul would soon turn into a hypocrite, not becoming a Robin Hood savior but instead yet another robber-baron motivated by greed with a convenient target against all merchants. When he learned of the Isles of Manaki, he took the opportunity to use it as a base of operations for there was no effective navy to oppose him there, and the many lagoons and coral reefs were littered with the wooden bones of fallen ships. The kia’i hated what the pirates were doing, both on a moral and ecological level, and with the aid of Anson Drahl they ambushed the Bloody Twins and sent Keelhaul and his ship to sleep with the fishes.

After being resurrected by Skati Fylkir, the dwarf found him easy to manipulate: being a stereotypical pirate, it was all too easy to win him over with alcohol and promises to let him have free reign in terrorizing the Isles. With trade routes disrupted and communities sacked, their weakened defenses and corpses provided ever more unliving foot soldiers for Skati’s new empire.

So in conclusion, we have a BBEG who wants to destroy the world, a BBEG who wants to save the world but may inadvertently destroy it, and a BBEG who wants to rule the world. And all of them don’t like each other due to these opposing goals.

Thoughts So Far: The seafaring and crafting rules are simple yet sleek, adding just enough to make the Sunken Isles feel different from many campaigns. I do feel that they’re a bit too simple, particularly the crafting, which could've been enhanced with more options to have more meaningful choices as the campaign progresses. I like the rundown of magic, but I would’ve liked to see more explanation of how the various classes fit into the Sunken Isles. If all magic draws from spirits in the world, what makes the druid so special? And besides the Star Breather, there isn’t much in the way of religious beliefs so this leaves one asking what would a Cleric PC worship or how their faiths would take shape in the campaign.

I really like the antagonists. Each of them have straightforward goals and serve as persistent threats for the PCs to fight, with enough variety and motivations between them to make them all feel different even if their rank and file forces amount to “monstrous armies sweeping throughout the lands.”

Join us next time as we cover the first parts of the adventure path in Adventure Overview and Our Tale Begins!