Dread Beginnings

Okay, first a bit of background.


Against all reason, I've started up yet another D&D campaign at the Brooklyn Strategist. Technically, it's only the second real campaign hosted there—the first being a weekly Eberron game (for which I keep a blog here).

Circa 1981. That's crazy, yo!

So what's this new one all about? Dungeon Module X1:  The Isle of Dread. All right, so what's that all about?

The Isle of Dread is a beloved and infamous adventure module published in 1981 for the D&D Expert set of rules. I was little more than a dumb little kid at the time, and I didn't own it (or any other D&D books) until the late 80s when it was already an oldschool product. It's just one of the many battered adventure modules I adored, but never actually ran because I didn't know many people who played D&D. So it was mostly my brother and I fidgeting around with the rules and making up our own stuff based on the artwork.

Fast forward to 2012. I've grown up, published a bunch of fantasy and sci-fi stuff (like this novel and this anthology) and even some RPG design. (The unequivocal proof is that I made myself an author page of Facebook—you can't be more legit than that, can you?)


Wizards of the Coast has already announced that the next "iteration" of Dungeons & Dragons is in development and is even gathering community feedback on the playtest materials so far...so it seems to me that the 4th Edition of the game is in the swan song phase of its official existence. The books are still out there, DDI—D&D Insider, the online incarnation of Dragon and Dungeon magazines—is still churning out 4E articles. (Heck, I write some of 'em.) And plenty of people obviously still seem to like it. I think actual 4E gameplay is a bit sluggish, but the battlefield strategies involved are pretty engaging. Enough people asked me about the possibility of running a 4E game that I caved in and just decided to do it.


And...D&D is D&D. It's all more or less the same game to me, regardless of the rules, and I'm just happy to being playing it.

For example, this happens in all editions.
Bugbears are jerks.

This campaign is going to be a 4E incarnation of the Isle of Dread with plenty of new ideas and twists of my own. Someone familiar with the original module is likely to find only so much familiar ground in these adventures—which is good, because I've got at least one player who knows it. And this blog, with help from my players, will be some sort of chronicle of the saga.

So what's the deal with the Isle of Dread, anyway, you might ask? The Isle is essentially D&D's own spin on Skull Island from King Kong (and its literary predecessor The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle's ): a mysterious tropical island in the remote corner of the world full of dinosaurs and other primeval beasties. And since this is D&D, it's got even more monsters and nefarious villains and magic and traps. Given the fact that each of the PCs has been shipwrecked on the Isle, there might even be a little bit of Lost in all this. With fewer loose strings and tangled knots.


A few years ago, the good folks at Paizo Publishing did a Greyhawk-oriented update of the Isle of Dread for Dungeon magazine, as part of their Savage Tide adventure path. There were some cool maps and ideas peppered among those. My intent is to mine these, the original module, and plenty of other books for some more ideas.


Then there's page 43 of Manual of the Planes....but never mind that for now.


I'm looking forward to some 4E-style battles and some serious high fantasy smackdown, but with decidedly oldschool wilderness and dungeon exploration sensibilities. Anyway, it should be fun. Feel free to tag along.

This book doesn't exist. It's a Photoshop mash-up, duh.

My next post: The set-up and the characters.