After many false starts I'm finally about to start my Savage Tide Campaign.
The only thing I'm changing is no dinosaurs.
These are just a few of the ideas I've had so far
Animals : Lion, Tiger, Leopard, Bat (Dire and regular)
Ahuizotl, chuul, ssvaklor, girallon, Blood Ape, Fire Bat, Giant Ant
Lizardfolk, Troglodytes,Deathcoils, Mudmaw
Giant Spiders, Aranea, Chwidencha, Harpoon Spider
Lhosk ( I intend to create a Lhosk settlement ruled by an exiled drow cleric. This settlement is considered a threat and an abberation by the aranea and the barlaghas of the isle. The party may work against this settlement by attacking it with the aranea or defend it from a from a group of bahlargas intent on destroying it. )
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How do you take a revamp of a classic module from like 1979ish that featured dinosaurs and just decide to remove them? It isn't the Isle of Dread anymore. Part of the draw of this adventure path is revisiting the classic module's elements. If you remove them you are lessening what the module is/was and if your players where playing with some nostalgia you may be letting them down in a huge way.
Isle of Dread - dinosaurs = Island.
And you added Drow?! How did they through the underdark, past the Koa-toa, aboleth, etc. and establish a settlement.....on the surface no less. I can only assume you have a particular love of Drow because it just doesn't make sense otherwise.
Play it how you like, but you wanted opinions. Mine is that you are butchering a great adventure and removing most of the things that make it great.
FH
Dungeons & Dragons -- but without the dragons :P
Just teasing. I'm an older player, and a return to the classic Isle of Dread is a cool part of the campaign for many of us. That's probably not true for most players -- young whippersnappers!
Regards,
Jack
Hastur ftaghn!
I do have to say, the Isle of Dread is the only place in D&D where I have felt dinosaurs were normal.
Any other adventure and I would agree with you. But it's the Isle of Dread.
(Honestly though, it is your adventure and you know what you want best). Your monster list seems fine, though I would expect all of those creatures were on the island already.
I personally agree with the others you a buchering a classic campaign. if you take out the dinosaurs then you wont have that thrilling situation were the characters are wlaking through the isle and in the background they the the terrifying "boom boom boom" and the T-Rex burst out of the trees. I get giddy just thinking about it.
My players have never heard of the Isle of Dread and from discussions we've had on what they do and don't like in adventures they don't seem keen on fighting dinosaurs. They are however intersted in the tropical setting, so I'm tailoring the adventures to keep the sense of untamed jungle just without the dinosaurs.
As for the drow, its a female drow cleric called Nishev who was exiled from the her home miles beneath the isle. While exiled she spent much of her time just below the surface with only a few tropical spiders for company. After many years of lonliness she emerged into the jungle where she found a tribe of Lhosk nearby. She seemed to have a natural bond with the creatures and they with her. She travelled to the glade where they made their home and with their help dug an underground burrow to serve as a living quarters. Nishev rarely emerges during the daytime but she has become a little more used to the sunlight. Over the years Nishev learned to communicate with the Lhosk through a series of hand gestures. She found them suprisingly receptive to learning. Recently a number of Lhosk have returned to the glade severely injured or not returned at all. Some seem to have received multiple spider bites. At first this seemed strange but one day an old woman appeared near the edge of the glade. She said she had a message from the Aranea of the isle. She said that her clan could not abide the presence of her and her monstrosities in their lands any longer and must leave immediately. Nishev was not willing to be forced from her new home so easily and ordered the Lhosk to kill the messenger. Since that day the Nishev Lhosk have been in constant conflict with the aranea.
Personally I think it's cool if you want to tailor it to the kind of campaign you want--you bought the material, it's yours to use as you like. If you feel dinosaurs would be jarring in your campaign then leave them out. They add a cool "King Kong" flavour to the game and I personally do plan to use them but it's up to you--the thing to think of are the outsiders and aberrations and other horrors involved with the Demogorgon worship on the island.
As for your Drow subplot, if you like it, and think it will work and have contextual integrity, go for it!
For my part I'm doing some tweaking too, I'm replacing Lavinia and her
I do have to say, the Isle of Dread is the only place in D&D where I have felt dinosaurs were normal.
Any other adventure and I would agree with you. But it's the Isle of Dread.
(Honestly though, it is your adventure and you know what you want best). Your monster list seems fine, though I would expect all of those creatures were on the island already.
Thats my view as well. I don't allow Dinosaurs in my main campaign area just so that I can keep them unique exotic and fresh when I do run something like Savage Tide or Isle of the Ape.
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An easy way to do this is not to call them dinosaurs. Simply give your players the description in the MM as to what they are fighting. Heck, if that still fails, give the T-Rex and other dinosaurs batlike wings (but not capable of flight). Your players will think they're in an island of dragons.
This could be the the last refuge of the ...proto-dragons! The prehistoric missing link between ancient reptiles and the ancestors of current true dragons; assuming of course, that like me, you consider dragons to be just spell-casting lizards, and don't have some artsy-fartsy background where dragons gave birth to the world, of course...
Seriously, you could always replace the huge green dragon with an innocuous, stupid-looking dinosaur. A Dimetrodon-style creature could work, thanks to the central frill/crest which is a feature of green dragons. Then surprise the PCs by having it speak, and/or breath a huge cloud of gas at them, depending on their actions up to that point, such as teasing it, or openly discussing how much xp it's worth...!
I like the proto-dragon idea. In my homebrew world there exists the legends of a draconic empire, of dragon-worshipping/admiring reptile folk. No one knows what happened that made this empire decline or die off but all its descendants are decadent or degenerate. (Yuan Ti/Troglodytes etc) This had been an age of reptilian creatures! I think I'll steal that idea, thank you.
If you've got an interest in "drow-oriented" adventure, you couldn't do better than to pick up either or both the Drow of the Underdark book (fantastic...no, essential for a drow campaign) and more so, Expedition to the Demonweb Pits.
The last issue of Dungeon also has an index for drow adventures, namely one that ran a while back about Lolth's daughter, or something. Maybe they'll have a portion of the index indicating key elements of each adventure, and you might be able to assemble your very own, I dunno, "Vengeance of the Drow" Adventure Path.
Personally, I like the dinosaurs, as they're oft overlooked opponents, and bring back fond memories of playing with dino toys in the sandbox as a 4-year old. But hey, whatever works. If everyone's down with it, go for it!
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I like the proto-dragon idea. I think I'll steal that idea, thank you.
No problem; since I wasn't the first to think of it!
You might want to look for an article in an old issue of Dragon called 'The Perils of Prehistory' (don't know the issue no off the top of my head, and I can't get to my archive right now).
It dealt more with actual time-travel to the past, than divergent evolution, but I recall one of the other good ideas was that the PC's deities may not be around to help them, or would have adopted the form of legendary beasts to reflect the nature of the majority of their reptilian worshippers, and so may not be willing to aid these upstart monkey-PCs against the status quo...
My players will be trying to kill the King in Yellow (or his mortal incarnation) in my next Friday COC campaign. It's got nothing to do with this thread (though dinosaurs are cool and drow are boring, though I did once have a drow tribe that were all were-velociraptors), I was just smirking at the name of the OP!
Good Luck with the rewrite - 'cause in a way you are taking out much of the charm of the "Isle" by it.
When the players first saw the map of the island (the one from Dragon magazine) and the illustrations there was immediate "King Kong" associations and dread. None of them is keen on dino-bashing (rather mature crowd) but the whole isle setup asks for it (the Wall, the isolated villages, the mysterious central plateau...). The players were really filled with anticipation what they would face oin that far-away island
And when the roaring T-Rex stormed down the beach after the shipwreck - priceless !
(Bought a toy T-rex model to scale and revamped/painted it for the STAP.... just for this !)
As for the drow - they fit the jungle setting as well as intelligent polarbears ( I find them incongrous in Eberron already, and they have a totally different background there ).... Much too "unsavage", much too well known. Overused too.
...but whatever floats your boat !
Looks like dinosaurs really are a lot more popular than I'd imagined, especially on the isle of dread. I still think I'll stick to leaving them out, but hey maybe I'll throw one in there to shake things up a bit, I'll see how the adventures go.
Good to see everyones so passionate about the adventure path. As far as I'm concerned the dungon crew have really pushed the boat out (pun intended) on this one, and I'm looking forward to seeing if they can keep up the good work with Pathfinder. I'm sure they will.
While I'm here, here's a link to a couple of pirate pics
http://anry.deviantart.com/gallery/
The rakastas are just extinct. I actually thought that was a cool element, it seems like the island's once diverse elements are coming apart.
Linnorms were always one of my favourite mythical beasts btw and I can barely wait for the next issue to start planning to use them.