I've collected most D&D books I'm after but the Jakandor adventure/accessory trilogy has me intrigued and I'm wondering whether they are worth seeking out:
- Jakandor, Island of War (part 1)
- Jakandor, Isle of Destiny (part 2)
- Jakandor, Land of Legend (part 3)
These books belong to the 2nd Edition Odyssey series:
TSR Dungeons & Dragons Archive: Odyssey
Does anyone own these books and are are they any good? Apparently the idea was conceived by Jeff Grubb but not actually written by him.
I run a Greyhawk game and a Dragonlance game so I'm not sure what application Jakandor could have to these two settings.
Is Jakandor as cool as the Isle of Dread?
Does Jakandor have default locations for the main TSR settings?
Thanks
Okay, to actually go into detail.
The basic premise is that this is a campaign setting, much like, say, DARK SUN or PLANESCAPE. The only difference is that it was built with a much more limited scope - there were only a few character roles, only one character race (humans), and the scope of the campaign itself was much more limited.
JAKANDOR is an island in the middle of a great ocean. There are two different peoples on this island, both human cultures. Each culture speaks a different language, and hates the other. Cultural traits make negotiation between the two cultures very difficult, at best.
On the western side of the island, there are the Charonti. These guys are under the rule of a single empress, who oversees "civil society". The Charonti used to be great wizards, but a huge cataclysm forced them off Jakandor and out into the world. They are a wizardly people hoping to rediscover greater magics by returning to their homeland island. They explore ruins, and are trying to build new cities from the ruins of the old. They have only one city right now, but it is actually four cities connected by teleportation gates - with each district of the city hundreds of miles distant from the others.
The Charonti are almost all magic-users, and non-wizards are rare. Each magical school is given a "college" in JAKANDOR, and each college competes with the others. These are great roleplaying divisions - there is a school of teleporters who control trade, a school of enchantment/charm that are artificers (and don't really cast Charm Person that much), and the school of Evocation who are lightning-obsessed technology hounds.
While magic is central to the Charonti, they are less magical than assumed D&D. Many spells past 3rd or 4th level are lost, and PCs have to research spells to progress the culture. Many of the old "Standby" Spells like Fireball do not exist.
Oh, and the Charonti re-animate the corpses of their dead, and use them as allies in their explorations.
Each class has numerous kits available to it, and each kit really reflects the "just society" well. Warriors in the charonti are not just warriors; they are "wardens" and lead troops of undead. Clerics exist, but they are not as powerful in JAKANDOR as in other games.
The Knorr are on the eastern side of the island, and they arrived in powerful long canoes. They are barbaric raiders that, conceptually, are sort of a mix between Vikings, popular images of Native Americans, and honour-bound Japanese Samurai. They follow a tight code of honour as they infight among their clans.
The Knorr hate most forms of magic, though they do have their own form of ritual magic that most practice in one way or another. Their priests are not powerful, just like the Knorr, and their only wizards are more like "Wise men". They have an abundance of different fighting styles (read as: kits), each with their own taboos and cultural benefits.
The Knorr gain honour by destroying magic, and find the Charonti's use of magic disgusting; the charonti's "Desecration" of the dead abhorrent. Naturally, the two cultures will clash.
What makes the game so interesting is that it doesn't work like other TSR settings at the time - one culture is not assumed to be "good" while the other is "evil". PCs pick which culture they want to belong to (it's assumed the whole group picks from the same group, the game doesn't really work if they do not), and then they roleplay as usual. There's the usual D&D tropes (exploring ruins, finding treasure) mixed in among an ongoing war to the death, political maneuvering, and moral decisions (you come across outcasts from the other culture, including children. What do you do? Using your society's code as a start, what is the
right thing to do, and do you accept the consequences if you go against that?).
Jakandor is cooler than the Isle of Dread, and this is coming from a guy who LOVES IoD. The setting is much better thought out, and there's a lot of weird things you can do with this game that buck standard D&D fare. It does not, however, fit well into D&D campaign worlds, though you could fit it in with a bit of work.
The three books are different in what they present. If memory serves:
- Jakandor, Island of War (part 1) details the Knorr, the barbaric warrior-people of the East.
- Jakandor, Isle of Destiny (part 2) detials the Charonti, the tattooed civilized wizards of the West.
- Jakandor, Land of Legend (part 3) is a collection of JAKANDOR adventures, some specific to one of the two peoples, and others more open. It has a good intro adventure for putting PCs from other campaigns into a JAKANDOR world (and much great info on how to do this). It also has a full colour map of the world that details the world how it actually is (the other books give a map as the Charonti or Knorr see the world). It describes many interesting locations. It also has a templated dungeon/ruin "adventure" - simply move the geomorphs around, and you can make hundreds of unique JAKANDOR ruin sites.
You can play JAKANDOR with just book one or book two. You can expand the game a bit more if you add in Book 3, and if you want the full scope of the game, buy all three. If you are running the Charonti-based campaign, let the players read over that book, while the other two are DMs-eyes-only.
I'd recommend giving the PCs a basic description of both cultures, and letting the group vote on which culture they want to belong to. I personally find the Charonti book to be more interesting and able to facilitate play, but you can run a game for the Knorr as well.
For a while, I seriously considered a SAVAGE WORLDS campaign using JAKANDOR as my starting place.
