I’m meant to be writing a proper review of Gary Gygax’s “isle of the ape”, but a nearby bushfire means I’m a bit distracted at present. In addition to not being at my computer.

Most of the last adventures Gygax produced were pastiches of known works of fiction, and Isle of the Ape was no exception. The template was laid down in “Dungeonland” where Gygax took the works of Lewis Carroll and filled them with cunning, murderous foes. Such is the fate of King Kong in this work, although Skull island itself was full of such inhabitants.

What’s most unusual about the work is how much it ties into a version of Greyhawk we hadn’t seen before. One where Tenser summons the players and sends them on a mission of great importance: to retrieve the Crook of Rao before Iggwilv invades with a great host of demons, the Crook having great powers against such fiends.

This is all new. We’d seen glimpses of Gygax’s desire to tell stories through D&D adventures before, but this is the closest he got to the form Tracy and Laura Hickman were so at home in. He’s not great at it, but the adventure is made up of major scenes that occur at regular intervals.

The adventure might appear freeform, but in fact it is very structured. Poor decisions by the players will mean their characters’ doom. Gygax is writing this for high level characters and players, and he introduces quite a few new rules to make life hard for them.

The attrition rules, which mean much of the characters’ equipment may perish if on the island too long are only the most obvious.

For all this, there’s a definite charm to the adventure. Too much boxed text? Almost certainly- it begins with almost two full pages of such! And there is more to come. And though Gygax was not a good writer, he was good at invention, and wonderful ideas come through the badly written prose.

I think you can run the adventure very successfully, though it may require players who understand its idiom. There are assumptions it makes that I recognise, and that I could navigate as a player. Others? That I’m not so sure.

Isle of the Ape would mark the end of Gygax’s career as a writer of D&D adventures. I think it’s better than most assume, but even so, it sits alone as an example of a play style that was had gone somewhere else.