Interview: Twin Magi Games' Isle of the Ancients

Explore "dino island" and its make friends with a sentient volcano

Twin Magi Games’ has prviously published Goblins! for DCC RPG. Now they’re back with Isle of the Ancients! Its an adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark designed for four to six second level characters. In Isle of the Ancients your group of intrepid adventurers has the opportunity to explore a lost volcanic isle overrun by dinosaurs and ruled by the mad wizard Sibarin. Along the way they may encounter a besieged tribe of lizardfolk, or even a potential patron that lives inside the isle's volcano!

An island full of dinosaurs and lizardfolk sounds like an awesome time. Can you share a fun story from your playtests?

During one playtest the players made it to the "final fight", which features a mad wizard riding on top of a T-Rex. The thief rolled very well on initiative and acted first, scoring a critical hit on the wizard with their blowgun. They rolled on the crit table, and got the entry that says something along the lines of "strike to the neck severs larynx and creature is only able to make gurgling fish sounds." As a judge I was a little disappointed that my wizard was effectively taken out of combat in the first round, but it made for a very memorable moment for the players, and they still had the T-Rex to contend with!

I imagine that this adventure leans more to the sandbox side of things. Is that a fair assumption? I'd love to know more about what kind of adventure that we're getting!

The adventure is a point-crawl style trek around a tropical isle and provides the players the opportunity to choose which parts of the isle interest them. I wouldn't say that the isle is big enough to be called a full on "sandbox" though, the adventure is designed to be completed in one to two sessions, depending how much time the players spend exploring.

Tell us a little more about Fornax! He lives in a volcano so I'm sure all his DCC patron abilities and ShadowDark boons and benisons relate pretty closely to fire.

Fornax was a lot of fun to write! It's a powerful entity that originated in the elemental plane of fire and is worshiped by the lizardfolk, but it wants to get off the isle and needs the help of the players to do so. You're correct that the abilities it bestows are mostly fire and lava based in both the DCC and the Shadowdark versions of the adventure. In the DCC version its Invoke Patron abilities range from lighting things on fire, all the way to creating an actual volcanic eruption, if a player rolls high enough. Shadowdark doesn't really have a patron system like DCC does, so we made our own! Shadowdark players of the adventure will still have the opportunity to create a bond with Fornax, which grants them access to a separate table of constitution based abilities that they can roll on at the GM's discretion when they complete tasks for Fornax, or when they level up. Strengthening their bond with Fornax will also cause Shadowdark players to develop "patron taint" just as DCC wizards do.

Can you tell me a little about the process of creating an adventure for two different systems? Were there any unique qualities about DCC or Shadow Dark that meant you had to alter any content to better suit that system?

We've really enjoyed our interactions with Goodman Games when marketing for GOBLINS! and initially wrote the adventure for DCC. Between the two of us we have ongoing games for both DCC and Shadowdark RPG, and we've really enjoyed getting into Shadowdark and thought it would be cool to adapt our adventure to fit the system. The great thing about working with both DCC and Shadowdark RPG is that they share a lot of the same core precepts.
We had fun converting the adventure for Shadowdark, it was almost like we were boiling the adventure down to the notes that you would want in front of you when running it at the table. I think deciding to make a Shadowdark conversion helped us flesh out the DCC version as well.

I see most creators using DriveThruRPG for digital fulfillment, but you are using itch.io. What do you think itch offers that makes it more appealing for you?

A lot of creators that we're interested in have a presence on itch.io, such as Luka Rejec and Leo Hunt. Itch.io also takes a smaller cut from sold content, which is a big benefit to folks like us that are using what we make to fuel our future projects.

Thanks for taking the time to share with us! Anything else that you'd like folks to know about?

Isle of the Ancients goes live on Kickstarter February 1st as part of Zine Quest 2025. We're just a couple of guys that have been friends since grade school, and we're really excited for the opportunity to share some fun from our table with yours! We're looking forward to continuing working on a few new projects once the Kickstarter is wrapped.
You can sign up for our email list to hear about our upcoming projects at https://twinmagigames.wixsite.com/home.

So besides dinos and lizardfolk, what kind of weird islands do you want to see?

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