My Hook for the Isle of Dread

 Introduction

My previous post about hooks for the Isle of Dread was a bit long, so I figured I'd pull out my personal experience dealing with hooks for this article. No real advice here, but hope you find it interesting and a bit amusing, as I make several obvious mistakes in my zeal to get this adventure going.

My Experience

A fun adventure for starting players
and characters.

Looking back at the way I ran this campaign, it was a glorious mess. It was my first long running 5th edition campaign, and I threw everything into it. The result was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. It was the excitement of building this world for my players, but also fear of screwing it all up.

If I were to run this again, I would probably use the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh for new players, or start in the Guild Isles of Mystara with a cult of Kopru for seasoned players. Then have a few island hopping adventures before getting them to the Isle of Dread itself. A faster turn ramp up to the main event than I actually ended up doing.

Back in 2020, I was still a newish DM. I had tried to homebrew an adventure and failed spectacularly. Then I ran a good chunk of Dragon of Icespire Peak and had a lot of fun with it, before the pandemic shut it down. Now, I'd been playing characters in two regular games for about three years up to that point, but running the game sporadically.

So I was a bit timid to dive right into a nautical adventure, when I had only really run and played in more traditional settings. For some reason I was also convinced that I needed to have the port city be a huge impressive place. So I wanted the time to flesh that out. I started my campaign in a very traditional mountain village with a local problem with a cursed ghost. This town was miles and miles away from the big port city (based loosely on Specularum in Mystara). We ended up spending many sessions with the small village adventure and then overland travel to the city and then exploring the city and finally getting the ship. All of this was a ton of fun, and created so many memorable moments - but it was about a third of the total campaign - too much.

What is funny is that this whole start would have made a great mini campaign by itself. That starting village was great, and the situation and NPCs were a lot of fun. In fact one player admitted that it was his favorite part of the whole campaign. But I did all that, because I was world building like crazy behind the scenes trying to make this impressive city and island adventures for the journey and seeding the main plot.

This trilogy was one of my favorite during 
junior high and into high school.

In my quest to include all my favorite 80s fantasy stuff in one adventure (who knows when I'd get to run a homebrew world again) I took the world of Mystara as a skeleton, overlaid the lore from Dragonlance onto it (with the cataclysm and the gods vanishing) and then added the Chosen One concept, with one player being selected to bring the gods back to the world.

Don't do this. Ever.

Never put a player in the situation where they are the Chose One. It turns the campaign into a one person focal point. It puts pressure on that player. Or worse, you could get a player who abuses this. The poor player I did this to told me later that she really disliked this aspect of the story, and felt it forced her into too many awkward and uncomfortable situations. It was never my intent, I thought it was fun and a power fantasy - but that wasn't why she was playing. 

When I ran this, the gods were being prevented from returning by a powerful ancient monster, Kopru, who needed to be stopped. But first the characters had to find the location of the mysterious Isle of Dread, and then get a crew crazy enough to sail into the dangerous Sea of Dread. I added a bunch of other side stories and elements based on the character's backstories. It turned the saga into a very personal adventure for them - and I really love how that turned out. They were invested in those storylines and it helped build some great character moments.

One good thing about the way this all played out, was that the Chosen One elements and main storyline all evolved organically. It felt like a novel with the characters discovering what role they had to play and how it all interconnected. And yeah that is the writer in me speaking. But a novel and an RPG are very different things. Yeah, my story was linear for the most part - and in a way the opposite of what The Isle of Dread was supposed to be. And yet, the end result was a memorable campaign that ran for over a year. 

Great setting for classic D&D
adventures

For the main port city, I took the Gazetteer: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos and used that as my basis for this opening portion of the campaign. This old school resource is full of great locations, NPCs and plot hooks. You could use it to run a very fun campaign right here. I mainly used it for the town and city locations the characters encountered on the way from the starting village (that I created) and to get to the ship. While I was fleshing out the port city (transforming it from Specularum in the Gazetteer to Mystemere in my setting), I got completely immersed in city creation. I spent way too much time trying to get it "perfect". And while it was fun and interesting. Ultimately the party didn't spend a lot of time here. I really could have spent time on other things especially for the later portion of the campaign. 

Once the characters go their hands on a vessel and crew to sail the Sea of Dread, we were ready to dive into the voyage. But that is another story for another post.