OSR Front Line - X1 Isle of Dread By David "Zeb" Cook and Tom Moldvay & OSR Deep Dive Session III Report

The battlefield rages across California, Nevada, & parts of Arizona while bands of heroes struggle with influx of alien monsters, weird creatures, & bands of raiders. alien arbarian warlors  are taking over parts of the prime material plane at will or so it looks like?! 
Bands of divine inspired adventurers are pushing back but can they save Earth without battling themselves?! And what of the mysterious prehistoric island just off the California coast?!



The mysterious island just off the California coast is of course X1 The Isle of Dread. So let's get the module history out of the way; "The Isle of Dread is an adventure for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The adventure, module code X1 , was originally published in 1981. Written by David "Zeb" Cook and Tom Moldvay" What does the appearance of the Isle of Dread as an adventure location mean to a campaign?! Short answer is a lot.. There's an excellent thread/article on the history of the Isle of Dread on the Board Game Geeks website. Now even though this thread is over five years old the information is still relevant & yes Goodman games has published Original Adventures Reincarnated #2: The Isle of Dread .
But instead I wanted to go back to the original module & the source material now according to the history of X1 The Isle of Dread; "The adventure itself owes a great deal of inspiration to story of King Kong (less the giant gorilla) and the Isle of Dread is based therefore on Skull Island. Note the villagers behind their huge wooden palisade, protecting against a savage landscape of dinosaurs. The central plateau is further reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World (and was itself the inspiration for King Kong). And of course I should also mention Jules Verne's 1864 novel Voyage au centre de la Terre which started the whole lost-world-with-dinosaurs genre."
I cracked open my copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World & began to draw a bit of inspiration. 


So what's this got to do with my Cha'alt/Godbound campaign? Quite a bit, you see what no seems to realize is that just because there are prehistoric creatures on the isle doesn't mean that their gonna stay on the isle.. Now we know that the drug Red Zoth has been blazing its way through the California underworld. And things have really been heating up with the raiders from Scourge of the Slave Lords (A1–4) showing up & start taking full advantage of the planar chaos.
This campaign is basically the end times when the Hyperboreans from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea come from the inner Earth to retake the surface.Did the Isle of Dread appear by design or merely interdimensional circumstance?! Only play & time will tell.



I was looking around for a monster that could crush a mecha easily. And then I came across Antediluvian miniatures megalosaurus. This is a misidentified Victorian dinosaur that was according to the wiki entry over forty foot long; The first reconstruction was given by Buckland himself. He considered Megalosaurus to be a quadruped. He thought it was an "amphibian", i.e. an animal capable of both swimming in the sea and walking on land. Generally, in his mind Megalosaurus resembled a gigantic lizard, but Buckland already understood from the form of the thighbone head that the legs were not so much sprawling as held rather upright. In the original description of 1824, Buckland repeated Cuvier's size estimate that Megalosaurus would have been forty feet long with the weight of a seven foot tall elephant. However, this had been based on the remains present at Oxford. Buckland had also been hurried into naming his new reptile by a visit he had made to the fossil collection of Mantell, who during the lecture announced to have acquired a fossil thighbone of enormous magnitude, twice as long as that just described."

The Antediluvian miniatures megalosaurus is based on the Crystal Palace reconstruction & is perfectly suited to take on many of the alien fauna of Cha'alt. And their being occultly summoned into the harbors of California from the Isle of Dread. 

 Antediluvian miniatures megalosaurus 
Basically these are an alien dinosaur that is being summoned by some unknown faction or alien wizards. Could these be connected with the alien Lumerian wizards that were fighting with Hypborean forces last week?


Warlord and Guardians of Lemuria from Antediluvian miniatures 
The player's PC's have run into the Lemurian forces before & there is a lot of bad blood between them. Party members have died at the hands of these bastards. It is known that wizards from Lumeria have been using the drug xanthium-183 for years to keep their slaves in line & productive. They had clear dealings with the alien overseers of Cha'alt & Fuchsia Malaise. 
They use Grimlock terror troops straight outta the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First edition Fiend Folio.



Russ Nicholson Grimlocks from the
Fiend Folio 

The Lumerian forces have run amok against the slavers several times & there's been several on going battles between Slaver Giants & Grimlocks right at the evening around the docklands. But will the characters survive?