Escape From Skullcano Island

 

One of my purchases at North Texas RPG Con was Escape from Skullcano Island written by Levi Combs. I happen to stumble across the Planet X Games' booth while he was tending shop. I think the booth monkeys were out having a cigarette or something another. While the author and I were busy talking, I saw the two-headed King Kong and knew which book I was buying from the table immediately.

Me not being a straight-up D&D-hed, you'll have to bear with any inaccuracies I get in the background here. This source book is "Rated 5E" and it is meant for "Tier 3-4" PCs, which I think would be 9th to 11th levels in T&T, assuming there are five tiers to D&D's current scope of Adventure metrics. The book goes from discussing the concepts around the material and then dives into a couple adventure hooks that should be used as prologues to the upcoming campaign. 

Then the "Kaiju" that inhabit the island are discussed. These are basically monsters that populate the Godzilla and Gamera movies from the 50s and 60s through our own current post-plague movie theaters. King Kong is a newcomer to this genre, only meeting Godzilla in the late 70s, but a two-headed 80 meter tall ape, makes you wonder, where has it been until now. Each of these creatures are discussed in depth, including their possible origins and their "cults." These cults being the humans, maybe humanoids, that see the beasts as deities or at least expressions of the universal truths that shape their reality. It goes from cyclops lizards, to crabs the size of small towns, to gigantic spiders, to of course the two-headed gargantuan gorilla promised on the cover.

Meanwhile, the reader is introduced to the Doomsayers a cult, with human/humanoid members, that are using the Kaiju and the island of Skullcano itself as a doomsday device. The information gets more detailed as the campaign begins to form from there. The last parts of books had me turning pages back and forth with intense interest for a few hours. Levi as a dungeon designer trusts the GM reading things to garner the tones of the tales that he has crafted, it really made the read fun.

Overall, I am impressed with the work. At first, I would rate it a "Bigfoot"  on my Smurf to Godzilla scale of things. Despite my own rating system, I am just not a big monsters, nor a big robot, guy. But the quality of the book in front of me, complete with some absolutely great art and fine production, Skullcano gets a Godzilla. A perfect Adventure Gamer experience waiting to be had.