‘”Welcome to Fletcher Island! This is the isle where the wildest fantasies will come true! Be a hero for one day, find the spouse of your dreams, or discover fabulous treasures!” The guide, an elegant man in a white costume, welcomes the newcomers while native girls offer garlands of flowers and motion the tourists toward open coaches. “Please come and visit our estates, take a tour on our flying carpets, and enjoy your time at the many inns on the beach! Welcome to Fletcher Island!”’
The Kingdom of Ierendi is widely held to be the worst of the series of Gazetteers detailing the D&D setting of Mystara. But I wasn’t quite prepared for how skin-crawlingly excruciating reading the whole book is. An archipelago of tacky horrors you’d avoid like the plague in the real world, what possessed the writers to think anyone would want to visit it in their escapist fantasy?
How does this sound as a location in a world of perilous adventure, swords and sorcery …
A tourist destination for wealthy mainlanders, who are mobbed by tour guides on arrival. The capital city even has marinas for your luxury yacht (try the Mage Marine), fast food cooked by a mage at the All Night Long restaurant, and the Ierendi Public School (where you can learn basket weaving and sand painting, cooking and dance). There are theme parks (such as Gastenoo’s World of Adventure), but don’t worry there’s no real danger – you’ll be fitted with a Damage Belt, the Mystara version of laser tag. A retired pirate will take you to explore sunken ships to find treasure, but the gold coins are fake and gems are coloured glass. Included in the Gazetteer is a tourist brochure describing the cruises, with trips where ‘visitors wishing to experience a bit of the native past will enjoy the quaint burial grounds of the Makai people… Bargain with the natives for exquisite feathered apparel and accessories!… Swordfish and marlin are among the fine sport fish found in these waters, and the trophy-minded visitor can purchase boating time and a seasoned guide to aid in in “bringing home the big one!”’
If that’s not enough, this is from the description of Safari Island:
‘”Eeeiw! Totally gross! What is that disgusting thing, Harald?”
“Relax, Martia, it’s just a slime limpet, my dear, and, if I know anything about these ‘Wild Wilderness Adventure Tours,’ it’s as phony as an orc’s navel. Did you hear the guide laying it on with a trowel back there?…”’
There are bits I liked, hidden amongst the dross:
Another island, one of three that remain after volcanic destruction sunk a vast land beneath the waves, is now the home of a highly secretive mage community. Their secret – there is an open portal to the elemental plane of fire, wrenched open by the eruption. Their fireships are powered by fire elementals that drive hidden paddlewheels with superheated water vapor. The catapults mounted on the deck fire a magical burning jelly that acts like white phosphorus.
The Whitenight druids, driven insane after being infected by ether weirds’ dreams of immortality, never speak a word to outsiders. The white apes that roam their island are their fellow shape-shifted cultists, trapped in a state of sleep walking, while the doves are the trapped souls of the dead, collected for some future dark purpose.
This is the worst rpg setting book I’ve read. There is, however, a morbid joy in seeing just how many repellent, gut-wrenching ideas they could fit into one book. And it is hard to believe that this is the same company that brought us Isle of Dread. But that’s also how I’d save it – advance the timeline on by a few hundred years and you have a pulp fiction archipelago. The savage natives have thrived, the lizardmen returned, and beneath the fetid jungle roots lie the remains of a once opulent, hedonistic civilisation brought to its knees by indulgence in the worst of human vices. Rather than it being a playground of toothless diversions for the rich, take the theme parks’ (inspiring) maps at face value – the Lair of the Lizard Lords, the Temple of Doom, and pterodactyl riders circling the crater of a dormant volcano.
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