The Isle of Dread Reimagined
When I was a 15-year-old gamer, I loved the D&D "Blue Box" Expert Set. Now our D&D games were free from the narrow confines of the dungeon! Into the wilderness! Horses, castles, armies, hex maps! Plus a bunch of boring travel rules.
Unlike the "Red Box" Basic Set, which contained two separate booklets - one for players and one for DMs - the Blue Box combined them into a single booklet. To make it up to us, they included 'The Isle of Dread' a big, sprawling, sandbox adventure module set on a lost island, written by legendary old-school D&D authors Tom Moldvay and David "Zeb" Cook.
I did not care for it.
The vibe was all wrong. Tropical jungles were not D&D. Dinosaurs were definitely not D&D. Why would I want dinosaurs when there were dragons around? Dragons are the same thing as dinosaurs, except they can fly, breathe fire, cast spells and have tense conversations with burglarious treasure-hunters.
But that was a limitation of my adolescent sensibilities. In retrospect, I can appreciate that it was designed to introduce players to the idea of wilderness adventures, back when "the dungeon" was the main setting for D&D games. And unlike the linear published adventures of the day, in 'The Isle of Dread' you could just wander all over the place, encountering what was there to encounter.
Which was a rich and motley assortment. In addition to dinosaurs and various tribes of indigenous inhabitants, the Isle of Dread had pirates, zombies, dragons, sinister cat people, friendly monkey people, giant animals of all sorts, ogres, lizardfolk, troglodytes and a brand-new evil mind-controlling species called the kopru. It's a big island, but still - that's a lot to manage.
The Isle of Dread Reincarnated
A lot of people have fond memories of this module, largely because it was shipped as part of the Blue Box rules. So it was something of a common experience for 80s-era gamers. In 2018, a full 37 years after the original module was published, Goodman Games put out a new version of 'The Isle of Dread' updated for fifth edition D&D.
(That wasn't the only time the Isle of Dread returned. In the mid-2000s, Paizo published a series of "adventure paths" - a series of linked adventures - in Dungeon magazine. One of these, "Savage Tide", took the player-characters to the Isle of Dread for several sessions.)
But Goodman Games updated more than just the mechanics - there's new encounter areas, new monsters and new story ideas. Reading through the "reincarnated" edition gave me two thoughts: 1) hmm, you can just take a classic D&D module and make all kinds of changes to it; and 2) hmm, maybe I want to run "The Isle of Dread" after all.
But ... I didn't want to run it using fifth edition D&D. Not long ago I finished a fifth edition D&D campaign that lasted over two years. It was super fun, but it's probably the last time I want to run a campaign using a contemporary edition of D&D. I love a lot about them - cool art, lots of neat character options, interesting settings - but the total lack of narrative mechanics plus every combat encounter taking at least 45 minutes; it's not for me anymore.
If not D&D, then what system? Shadowdark is the version of D&D I have most enjoyed in the past couple years. It's the perfect balance of old-school vibes and flexibility plus new-school streamlined mechanics. It's designed for dungeon-crawling games, but I have faith it can handle the Isle of Dread.
There's a lot that is great about the original adventure. It has a wide scope - leagues of dangerous jungle filled with monsters - and a genuine feeling of mystery. What lies beyond the safety of the Great Wall guarded by the villagers of Tanaroa? (This is a nice bit; players can easily imagine the wall from any number of King Kong movies. Role-playing games aren't novels; they are often at their best when they lean on shared tropes.)
And, of course, there's plenty that isn't great, or is weird, or seems boring. I went through the original 1981 module and the Goodman Games revision published in 2018 to see what needed changing - at least for my table.
Colonialism
Let's get this one out of the way right up top.
One might expect a role-playing game product written in 1981 depicting a South Pacific island culture to be alarmingly racist. For the most part, "The Isle of Dread" is not nearly as bad as you might fear. There is a dominant human culture (very) loosely modeled on that of the Pacific Islands. That culture manifests in a number of villages and personalities that the player-characters are intended to interact with. They are peaceful but not simple, and they have their own agendas when it comes to other groups on the island, as well as the distant mainland.
So by and large, the people who live on the Isle of Dread (presumably they have a different name for it) aren't presented as "savages", but as people living in an isolated place, albeit one that's chock-full of dangerous monsters.
My knowledge of Polynesian culture and folkways is scant, but it's easy to see that the culture of the people depicted in the module is simplistic and not really informed by any real-world analog - they have the Elk Clan and the Sea Turtle clan and so on. Which is probably fine? A D&D game is not necessarily a useful vehicle for anthropology or cultural studies.
But you can see how American pop cultural portrayals of the South Pacific (well before Moana came along) heavily informed "The Isle of Dread". The island's inhabitants are less technologically sophisticated than the player-characters are presumed to be - instead of swords and magic they have taboos and zombie-masters and canoes. It is assumed that the player-characters are able to dominate them if they wish, though one imagines that medieval European explorers shipwrecked on a Samoan island would be at a distinct disadvantage compared to the native people.
The island is literally a "Lost World", a haphazard mash-up of the colonial-era adventure and exploration stories in which the perspective was always that of European colonizers.
But even real-world-ish D&D settings are never historically accurate, of course. They're always haphazard mash-ups of history, folklore, fantasy novels and genre movies. So I don't find great fault with Cook and Moldvay's efforts.
Still, you also want to feel like your player-characters are heroic adventurers, rather than Cortes despoiling peoples' lives and lands.
The Village of Tanaroa
My first thought was that the player-characters could simply be native inhabitants of the island. One of the useful conceits of the adventure is that most of the human population lives on a small archipelago and mostly avoids the bulk of the enormous island - the village of Tanaroa is centered here; one of seven (basically identical) settlements. Lots of room for plucky locals to explore and adventure.
But the D&D rules - or, in my case, the Shadowdark rules - do not port easily to the folkloric South Pacific, and I certainly don't know enough to hack that. So we'll keep the premise as adventurers from the distant mainland shipwrecked on the island - but as I dig into the village section, I take out some of the more primitive-flavored stuff and spend a little more time on the agency of the villagers.
Zombie masters. In the villages there are "zombie masters" who raise the dead. But the dead in such a small place are everyone's deceased relatives. So the module presents them as the "walking ancestors", summoned from the hereafter to protect the villagers and perform other onerous tasks. The people respect them, but it kind of creeps them out, so the zombie masters are figures of renown but also somewhat sinister.
I don't hate it. But it's also not really relevant or worth the time to introduce and explain them. The action doesn't take place in the villages - it's basically the starting zone where you get clues and supplies before heading into the jungle. So I cut them out.
Language. The original module kind of hand-waves this. Obviously explorers washed up on this remote island wouldn't speak the local language. And it seems fun to have the player-characters kind of in the dark about what's what. So I'm going to make communications challenging - but I'm also adding Tama, the daughter of the chieftain, who hung around a previous gang of visiting treasure-hunters enough to pick up a few things.
The chieftain's bargain. I was never satisfied with D&D characters going on dangerous adventures solely for love of the game. One of the things I like about games like Fate or Burning Wheel is that the characters have motives for going into dark caves full of walking skeletons.
The classic Isle of Dread starts with the characters being shipwrecked. So I added a wily chieftain who is concerned with the growing threat on the island (see the next section for more) and strikes a bargain with the characters: if they venture onto the sinister central plateau to investigate, the villagers will repair their badly-damaged ship.
Local color. Since I yeeted the zombie masters, I added a few more elements to give the villages a little flavor: trained war apes that serve as companions and guardians; a wise woman living alone in a hut made from a dinosaur skull who can offer information and useful minor magical items; and bamboo golems.
Now, what do I want to change?