The Isle of Dread Reimagined 02
This is part two of my reimagining of The Isle of Dread. Click here for the first part.
There's a lot that is great about The Isle of Dread - that classic 80s wilderness D&D 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. For my reimagining of the adventure, 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 adventurers 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.