Swept Away on an Unusual Island

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Cornelius

My problem is that I don't know how to realistically give the characters enough knowledge of hand to hand combat and eventually magic to survive, without resorting to "corny" tricks like gaining such knowledge suddenly by magic.

No, your problem is the endless stream of Gilligan's Island jokes that are going to come of your campaign. Unless you and your players are too young for that...

So how would you solve this little problem?

What if you don't solve the problem and make the problem the basis for the campaign. We don't know how to fight these things in hand-to-hand combat, so we'll have to find some other way to deal with them. Building traps or structures they can't enter, hiding, negotiation for the more intelligent ones, bait and capture for the less intelligent ones, and so on.

You might also shift the challenges from just hostile creatures to environment-as-challenge. Survive during storms, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters; securing food and shelter; making friends with native islanders who are good fighters; etc. Build the island as a sort of dungeon, but instead of rooms and corridors you have different terrains and habitats, and instead of monsters guarding treasures you have hostile creatures in the way of your resources (in which case, the goal isn't to fight the creatures; it's just to get to the resources somehow).