D&D 3E/3.5 X1 - Isle of Dread

Mannahnin said:

So yes, you could place one or more stone circles on the Isle- perhaps one is destroyed by a tyrannosaur attack right after they arrive or something.

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That’s a good idea and would definitely throw them into the action.

I suspect I may well end up rewriting big chunks of it just to take out the elements that haven’t “aged well” or are too fantastical for the campaign. An island full of dinosaurs is one thing but a race of cat-people is a step too far …

Bedrockgames said:

Also if the issue is the players don't take well to sandbox, my advice is either don't run a sandbox or give the sandbox more mission focus

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That’s exactly right - the idea of the group arriving as the stone circle is damaged is probably a good set up and the plot can then be more of finding the items needed to repair the stone circle.

Possibly it’s then just a case of hooking these items into the set location described in the adventure.

Personally, I find the dungeon at the heart of the island a bit anti-climatic considering what all you had to endure to get there. Granted, as is typical of modules of the era, the module is not at all intended to be complete or run as is, and even if you weren't converting it you'd probably need to do scores of hours of work to make the module meaningful as more than a series of wandering encounters and a monster big game hunt.

Savage Tide has a great mini-campaign around setting up a trading port on the island. My own campaign used the island as an adventure for characters of 8th-10th level with a "race to get the black pearl" before an enemy necromancer who needed it as a final component of his artifact, and made extensive use of my own ideas concerning a slave revolt against the Kopru and the ideas found in Dungeon and Savage Tide, as well as adding many more encounter locations from the remains of the ruined Kopru civilization and a much expanded final dungeon that was also inspired by Black Rock Mesa from Half Life.

Erekose said:

That’s a good idea and would definitely throw them into the action.

I suspect I may well end up rewriting big chunks of it just to take out the elements that haven’t “aged well” or are too fantastical for the campaign. An island full of dinosaurs is one thing but a race of cat-people is a step too far …

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Cat people being too far? That's a new one on me. When playing X1, some of the best interactions I had with PCs was with the Rakasta & Phanatons.

Pretty much every monster in the OG AD&D X1 should have a 3/.5e equivalent. Now, whether those 3/.5e monsters (I'm going to stop typing that and just do 3e) have a CR that matches the HD of the AD&D version is... entirely irrelevant, actually! Stick the 3e monsters in their hexes or dungeons and if the PCs sometimes cakewalk them and other times get steamrolled, well, that's the sandbox magic.

I've used Savage Tide as an update. Kopru ruins can be any ancient precursors type dungen.

Places like Farshore also fleshed the place out.

Stormonu said:

Cat people being too far? That's a new one on me. When playing X1, some of the best interactions I had with PCs was with the Rakasta & Phanatons.

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The Phanatons I kept as feeling appropriate to the island and being really novel.

The Rakasta feel tacked on, trite, and like they properly belong somewhere else.

Celebrim said:

The Rakasta feel tacked on, trite, and like they properly belong somewhere else.

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I'd always wondered if the Rakasta were somehow based on the Kzinti (by Larry Niven) and fantasied up.

Anyway, in the game I ran, the Rakasta were a break-away faction from Ylaruam and traded between the Tanaroa and (secretly) the Kopru, as well as having a secret trade route back to the main continent. They were a sort of trading post where characters could get/trade exotic items and a rumor source for pushing the characters toward the Plateau (and into the hands of the Kopru).

My two favorite encounters from my Return to the Isle of Dread convention game:

Planned: a Gamma World death machine was located in a blasted crater, which was littered with magic items (the only thing remaining after the robot disintegrated opponents). It would not leave the crater, but if anyone climbed in it would begin to target them (random secret 1d4 roll for number of rounds for the shot to get off). Getting his was instant death. Centuries of powerful fools having tried to take on the machine, or steal the items, meant that there was lot of randomly generated loot to gather. Would PCs brave the crater in hopes of winning something way OP? Yes! Did some of them get disintegrated? YES!. Did any make it out? One -- because two went in from opposite sides, hoping it would confuse the death machine so much that it would not attack at all. Instead it rolled randomly who to disintegrate.

Random: When doing hexploration, I am big on using random encounter charts, and trying to make the results interesting. So when the party settled down one night I rolled a ghost encounter. I had the PC on watch witness a spectral young woman run to a nearby cliff's edge, look longingly out into the water, and then throw herself from the precipice. I expected the party to shrug and move on, and instead they spent a good deal of time getting down to the rocks and searching, so I decided that the young woman had actually fallen in love with a triton and the "engagement ring" he gave her was supposed to transform her as she leapt into the sea, but the not-Ursula hag he had gotten it from had tricked them and now the girl was a ghost and the boy was a tortured soul. The party found the ring in the rocks and used magic to learn the story, then killed the hag who lived in a nearby sea cave.

Stormonu said:

I'd always wondered if the Rakasta were somehow based on the Kzinti (by Larry Niven) and fantasied up.

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According to this post over at The Piazza, they were:



We know that the original Known World campaign that Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick ran before working at TSR had Kzinti as a PC race. Later Schick was credited with the tabaxi in the 1e Fiend Folio, while Moldvay worked on X1 with Zeb Cook. Moldvay apparently worked on the lower island so the stuff down there is probably his creation including the rakasta. In that link, Schick is quoted as saying that both the tabaxi and rakasta were based on the Kzinti. I'll definitely take his word on the tabaxi, and this seems to be good enough proof for the rakasta.