One sentence island concepts

[roguerouge]

My player out!



I've got an island hopping trading mission coming up, and I'd like to show case some interesting island cultures. Any quirky society concepts you can offer would be much appreciated.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

Amazon Island All women, no men, they raid every few years for men to impregnate them.


Plant Island, overgrown jungle all plants, not a single animal, not even a bird. Wait, did something just move.

 

[Mighty Halfling]

(I've often wanted to do an island-hopping campaign!)

An island populated mainly by kobolds where the rim is easily accessible, but the further you go in, the more deadly traps you encounter until you find, at the center, is a person/creature whom they worship as their god. The problem is the "god" is actually an unwilling captive of the kobolds who desperately wants free.

(yeah, I know it's two sentences.)

 

[Pure Puppet]

1. The island is populated by feral elven cannibals.

2. The islanders worship a Chaotic Good aasimar warlock as 'an incarnation of the starry sky'.

3. For no reason that anyone can understand, it has been snowing on this island continually for the past seventy years.

4. The only thing the islanders have to trade is an addictive, narcotic fruit that causes Wisdom damage - and eventually Wisdom drain.

5. The apex predator on the island is 'Draintooth' - an awakened N Dire Weasel.

 

[Peni Griffin]

Lilliput. Brobdingnag. Laputa. The Land of the Houyhnhnms.

If you have an Amazonian island, you should also have an Athosian island for them to raid and where they send the male children. Consult your gay friends for suggestions for both.

An archpelago of halflings, one clan per island, with an elaborate kinship system in place of a government.

A gnome island, which started off as a boat.

An island at the bottom of a dimensional vortex, inhabited by people who have mysteriously disappeared from other places. Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Bathurst, Ambrose Bierce, Glen Miller, the Roanoke Colony, Judge Crater - they're all here. One of the island's primary resources is odd socks, and their currency is all in small change. This island is extremely difficult to sail away from - it keeps sucking you back.

Island of the Lotos Eaters.

Circe's Island.

Island of Polyphemos.

 

[heirodule]

The island where the skarn (magic of incarnum) rule the cities and rilkans fight a war of resistance

The island of the lost (magic of incarnum) with lost templated adventurers that the PCs met or heard of before leaving the mainland.

 

[jasin]

For quirky isolated communities, you could do worse than picking up Vance's Dying Earth.

For example, from there you could lift a society where the women work, and men laze about on pillars of numbered stone blocks. "They absorb a healthful flux from the sunlight. [...] The higher the column the more pure and rich is the flux, as well as the prestige of the place." As you can imagine, the single quarry-man who produces the stone blocks enjoys the mixed blessing of being constantly fawned upon by the women, but also constantly pushed to work.

 

[bodhi]

A gnome island, which started off as a boat.

Hey, that's the Raft, from Snow Crash. Started off with a decomissioned aircraft carrier, which circled the Pacific, and smaller craft glommed onto it, and now it's a floating ecosystem unto itself.

For that matter, you kind need to have some version of moving island. Giant turtle, piece that broke off the mainland which prophecy states will one day be rejoined, island that only appears under certain conditions (full moon, once a year, once every hundred years).

 

[Jolly Giant]

A safe haven for pirates, protected by a red dragon (in return for some hefty tribute, of course).

A society of Vikingesque orc raiders in longships.

An Inka-like society of wild elves, performing sacrifices on top of great pyramids.

A quiet, peaceful, rural society of goblins, kobolds or orcs (or something similar).

 

[Jack Morgan]

an island inhabited by a cyclops and some sheep. I totally just thought that up.