Tailspins & Tiki Gods:Smoots Guide Ile Trouve

Ile Trouvé

Location

The Island of Ile Trouve is located in the largely-uncharted sub-archipelago New Hibernia, or as the French call it, Nouvelle Hibernie.

[NOTE: Storywise, it’s historically JUST outside the range where it would be convenient for people to fuss over. Not totally remote- but just a bit outside of "arm’s reach". But it’s a new age- of COURSE we can get there! --Smoot]

[GM NOTES:

Name: New Hibernia, or as the French call it, Nouvelle Hibernie. I'm riffing on the names of the real islands of New Caledonia and New Ireland. The natives of course would call it something else.

Location: Vague. It's location is a matter of plot, rather than geography. Sometimes it's Melanesian, sometimes Polynesian. It can be equally distant from Australia, the Philippines, Tahiti or New Guinea. If I had to pinpoint it on a map, I might pick somewhere around Fiji.

Size: Again, its size can seem to vary according to story needs. On the map, it may seem to be a dot, but on the ground it might seem to be as vast as New Guinea and Borneo. --Glyptodont]

Land

The out-reefs have mainly palm trees with brushy undergrowth. The hills roll up in lush grassland, until you reach the jungle highlands. E'snui Werarawa, the volcano at the heart of the island, is slow and inactive. The natives don’t talk much about it. [The name is Maori for “That’s much too hot”, but that’s kind of between you & me. Make up a fakey “the Hill of the Earth’s Fury” translation or whatever! ]

One of the reasons they don’t go up there is not because of taboo, but because the gases that leak from the caldera could knock a grown man out well before he saw it. And THEN he’d be in trouble.

Ile Trouve is not on Thomas Cook’s tours. It hasn’t been a place tourists sigh over. But the invention of the seaplane is probably going to change this: the lagoon isn’t great for big-tonnage ships, but it’s perfect for outrigger-equipped planes. (It has always been perfect for the Polynesian outrig-catamaran style boat and other light-draft vessels. The biggest ships simply have to stay outside the main lagoon and use lighter boats to get back and forth.)

It also means that everyone who stayed away because it was too far is going to be MUCH more able to get there.

[NOTE: I’m going to leave it up to you whether it’s a volcanic island or a coral lagoon. My personal notion is that it has a lagoon, but isn’t just a lagoon. It has hills and such. It has a steaming volcano in the background, because why the hell SHOULDN’T it, in a pulp adventure! --Smoot]

Weather:

Generally speaking, hot and humid. Rainfall is pleasant and warm.

Nov-April, it’s hotter, more humid, rainier. (Typhoon season is in this area. You get 2 days’ notice, max of a typhoon in this era. The rain is hard-driven enough to lay a grown man out.) May-October: Cooler, drier, lower humidity. sailing season.

Transportation:

Tramp steamers stop by sometimes. (There’s reason to come, but not much reason to SAY you came, if you get my drift.) There’s a consistent trade in porter/stevedore work, as larger ships find the channel into the lagoon too treacherous- lighters go out to the ships and bring in as much as they can carry. (There is a tugboat to guide in the really stubborn, which seldom sees much use, serving mostly as a houseboat the rest of the time).

A new addition are the sea-planes, which are still a subject of great excitement (people come out of their houses to see if they’re going to hit the house this time, kids run after them on beaches and wave, etc). Nobody’s seen an airship or autogyro in these parts, and it’d cause a lot of hubbub.

Communications:

Telephone: There are no phones in Porte Cochere, the monks don’t want them, and the Kamakama wouldn’t trust such things being installed.

Post: A mail-plane arrives once a week, bearing important news and also packages from home. It routes through the colonial capital. Other than this, almost all ‘ground level’ packages or messages are borne by porters or couriers. (If you get a Western Union telegram, it’s been carried a LONG way.)

Overseas mail takes weeks to get here. There is such a thing as international airmail, but it’s inhumanly expensive. (“You’d have to have Samuel Goldwyn’s money to do it regularly!” )

Wireless Telegraph: There’s a shortwave telegraphy shack at the edge of the shanties, with its own generator and fuel supply, and a really enthusiastic young guy who can try to tap the word out for you. (He has a mic, but the taps are more reliable).