Swept Away on an Unusual Island

[Cornelius]

So last night I was jotting down ideas for a new set of adventures on my Journal of Adventures that will never be played (TM).

The idea is about a group of friends that are shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island by a sudden storm.

When they recover and start exploring the beach on which they have landed, they quickly discover that the island is inhabited by fantasy creatures not very friendly (scratch that: straight hostile).

So, to cut a long story short, the whole catch is that the characters are stranded on a fantasy world (Mediterranean late bronze age) and have to find a way out, before the Olympian gods takes notice and decide to have some fun with them. It's a way to recycle a bunch of old fantasy adventures with a new souse (just like you do with yesterday's leftovers). Nothing really original or new.

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.

I could circumvent the problem having the characters be soldiers. Firearms would give them a good edge, but ammo is limited. Anyway I would prefer my characters to be more average Joe.

So how would you solve this little problem?

[Donny Brook]

I suppose you could start by the PCs being unusually heahtly and strong 'average' joes. They could also stumble upon a cache of good armor and weapons. And then there's the option that they have Talent or something that was undiscovered until they got in a situation where it mattered.

[Flowergarden]

They can be casual sports or martial arts practitioners. Armed or unarmed (jusk KO a god, what's wrong with that). Climbing, camping, making youtube videos about building with a stick, whatever. Just treat them as normal skills and not as sport skills
They can be incompetent at all this basic adventuring skills, this is fine too. They would need to avoid some things, think twice on others. Can be fun, not for everyone, but still.
And with bigger basic stats it would be more manageable.

[whswhs]

I had to deal with this in GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms. I came up with several assumptions that were common ways around the issue:

• Children who enter a portal realm can fight deadly enemies
or go into battle and win.
• Adults whose lives on Earth were peaceful turn out to
have a natural talent for combat.
• Students of a combat sport such as fencing or judo can
go up against foes with actual combat experience, and defeat
them.
• Martial skills learned on Earth are better than those of the
portal realm; for example, fencing skills can defeat armored
foes such as Roman legionaries or medieval knights.
• A soldier or gang member from Earth, trained in firearms,
has no trouble adapting to dart guns, bows, or swords.

On one hand, you can contrive to minimize the PCs' exposure to combat. On another, you can do various rules tweaks to even the odds. For example, you might say that they have the advantage of Combat Reflexes, which they never suspected, because they haven't been in serious fights before. Or you could have them rely on All-Out Defense until the opponent slips up, and then go to Telegraphic Attack to improve the chances of hitting.

[Pursuivant]

Four ideas beyond those already mentioned:

1) Move the time period from modern to historical (e.g., Crusades or Renaissance era battles between the Italians and the Turks, or Age of Sail naval sailors or pirates). That solves the lack of melee combat skills and possibly opens up access to magic via alchemy or mystical traditions which have been suppressed or lost by the modern era. You could also just do a riff off of The Odyssey and have the characters be Bronze Age Greek heroes.

2) Enchanted items. Early on the PCs find a cache of magic items which give them the requisite skills/spells. Alternately, passing through an enchanted portal bestows skills and spells.

3) Possession. Either the PCs possess natives or natives possess the PCs. In the latter case, the natives must have a good reason to possess the PCs, such as being too feeble to fight or cast spells effectively on their own. In either case, the natives inherently have skills and spells that the PCs can use. If the PCs have access to native memories as well as spells and combat skills, it also justifies Area Knowledge, Survival, etc. and other skills needed to survive on the island. As a variation, the natives are symbiotes or spirits.

4) Gifts of the Gods. The PCs encounter a sympathetic Greek god who either gives them skills/spells or reveals the fact that they're all descendants of said god (via gods and demigods doing what gods and demigods do with mortal women) and unlocks their inherent powers. Conveniently, Monster Island's inhabitants are all creations of some unsympathetic Greek god and they're being used to guard some super-powered macguffin that the PC's patron god wants but can't get without mortal aid.

[Varyon]

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.

One option is to start them out dealing with fairly weak monsters. You can also be generous with what lets someone be decent at combat - nobody's really going to seriously question the guy who used to play Little League baseball being good at bashing goblins with a bat. Or maybe you could say these friends are all into HEMA and/or other martial arts (ideally ones that have an armed component to them).

[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).

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

What if you don't solve the problem and make the problem the basis for the campaign.

"What stands in the way becomes the way." -Marcus Aurelius

[Culture20]

Viking reenactors proving they can row to Rome? So they'd have a mix of costume and functional TL3 and TL8 gear, and an eclectic mix of older TL skills?

[Apollonian]

They're all contestants for some kind of survival reality show, and thus have skills to suit. Bonus points if the PCs (if not the players) start the game under the misapprehension that this is the island where the show is being shot, and they just need to find the producer and camera crew, who were on a separate boat...