Secrets of the Sacred Isle: Design Goals

Our newest Zineshot for Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E is here! To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to share a bit about what was going through my head while designing Secrets of the Sacred Isle. Apart from the obvious reasons (dinosaurs are cool, aboleths are Great Old fun, and chuuls deserve far more exposure), there were a couple of specific goals I wanted to achieve with this adventure.

Taking a Shot at a Hex Crawl

Before Secrets of the Sacred Isle, I had never designed a hex crawl adventure. Sandbox-style, hex-by-hex exploration isn’t really part of the mainstream Fifth Edition play culture, but it has always fascinated me. There’s something exciting about creating a tiny self-contained world, complete with different biomes, factions, landmarks, and mysteries, and then letting players loose to explore it however they like.

Designing a Hex Crawl for a Modern D&D Audience

Most people associate hex crawls with old-school D&D and the OSR movement. Because these adventures are often packed with creatures, locations, and situations that require improvisation, it’s easy to argue that older systems (with their faster combat and lighter rules) are better suited for covering multiple hexes in a single session.

As a fairly typical modern D&D player living in a 5E bubble, I found myself wondering: why should the OSR crowd have all the fun?

Secrets of the Sacred Isle is my attempt to bridge the gap between 5.5E and old-school design sensibilities. There are a few encounters that can lead to exciting tactical combat, but there are also plenty of random encounters and situations that are genuinely dangerous for 4th-level characters if they insist on solving every problem with violence. Players who pay attention, gather information, and come up with clever non-combat solutions will usually fare much better.

A One-Shot Hex Crawl

For many 5E players, the best-known hex crawl is Tomb of Annihilation, which hands the party an entire flipping continent to explore.

Even in OSR adventures, hex crawls often grow into sprawling multi-session affairs full of unexpected detours and escalating complications. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to create something more approachable for groups who were curious about hex crawls without wanting to commit to a full campaign.

That’s why Secrets of the Sacred Isle takes place on a small island consisting of just 21 hexes. The travel procedure has been boiled down to the basics, the objective is clear from the start ("Find your friend Bogomil"), and there’s a built-in time limit to keep the pace moving ("The ship that dropped you off here leaves in two days").

My goal was to create a self-contained adventure that lets players experience the core appeal of a hex crawl in a single session.

Clues and Interesting Decisions

One thing I wanted to avoid was aimless wandering.

The characters should always be able to uncover enough information to make meaningful decisions about where to go next. Some clues are hidden behind skill checks (like following tracks with a Wisdom (Survival) check) but if the party misses those clues, there’s always another lead nearby that can be discovered through exploration or simple observation.

Maybe they spot an unusual landmark in the distance. Maybe they encounter someone who knows part of the story. Maybe they stumble across evidence that points them in the right direction. Every clue brings the players a little closer to uncovering what happened to Bogomil and where he can be found.

By combining opportunities for modern D&D players to roll their sick optimized skill checks with clues that can simply be discovered by paying attention to the environment, I tried to support a variety of play styles.

Random Encounters as Biomes

One of my favorite things about hex crawls is how encounters can reinforce the identity of a region. Different creatures make different parts of the map feel distinct and alive.

Since I wanted to include all the relevant stat blocks in the appendix while still working within a strict page count, I had to be economical with the number of creatures I used. The island contains four main terrain types (coastal, grassland, highland, and jungle) and each encounter table was designed to give those regions their own character.

There’s some overlap between the tables, but I hope the contexts and situations surrounding those encounters make each biome feel noticeably different from the others.

For more information on creating random encounter tables, check out our previous blog post about them.

That's All for Now

There’s a lot more I could say about the design of Secrets of the Sacred Isle, but it’s bloody hot, it’s way too late, and future-me deserves some blog material as well. If you’d like to hear more about the design process behind this adventure, let us know!