[Dread] The Isle

[mykelsss]

I'm working on a scenario that I'll release to the community once it's done. So far it's been pretty fun so I may make more when finished. I have several ideas for other projects.

All credit for these amazing art pieces goes to IRIRIV on deviantART
All credit to him and his art again for fueling my creativity.
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The Isle
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The Isle has the players crash-landing on an uncharted island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Within the course of their adventure they will encounter tribes of primal sentients and must evade the wrath of two incredible aberrations of nature.

Characters
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THE PILOT
THE ENGINEER
THE BUSINESSMAN
THE VETERAN (CORPORAL)
THE PROFESSOR
THE STEWARD

There are two NPC characters as well that I'm not revealing yet.


Creatures of the Isle

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The Elgor: Brutish, shamanistic, and fiercely territorial, the elgor are sentient bipedal elephants that inhabit the Isle.

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Uruk: Worshiped by the inhabitants of the Isle as a living god, Uruk is an undead tyrannosaur. Kept alive by a millennia-old ritual, Uruk feeds on weak elgor warriors and cattle brought to him as living sacrifices. His body is a decaying carcass, and his bones protrude from his back as carnivorous birds rip off strands of flesh from his back.

The Isle: Scroll down to the end for spoilers on the Isle.

Summary of Play:

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Act I is a bit on the skimpy side at the moment, mostly because it is largely player-controlled; they will be mostly acting as opposed to reacting in Act I and most of Act II.

Act I

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Crash Landing: The PC’s plane impacts with something huge in the air and crash lands on the island. They of course cannot see what it was because it is thunderstorming and visibility is low. Spoilers are contained in the last part of Act III.

Surviving the Night: Typical survival stuff a la “Beneath the Full Moon”. Survive hypochondria, search for survivors etc (There aren’t any survivors other than the PCs). In the night some figures will be seen watching from afar. They will be realized to have been elgor later on.

Sunrise/Exploration: The PCs explore their surroundings on the Isle. Will be detailed more later. Basically just a nice interlude with more cool survival encounters which just serve to get juices pumping and make the PCs pull a little.

Act II

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Hunger: Hunger leads the PCs further into the island where they witness and may kill some strange animals. Leads directly into the next encounter.

Attack of the Elgor: The party is besieged and must fight an elgor hunting party. They are doomed to fail.

Enslaved: Vastly outnumbered, the PCs are captured by the elgor and participate in a brief gladiatorial match between them and an elgor brute. After their loss/win, they will be allowed respite and will be locked in a cage while the elgor decide what to do with them. During this interlude, the players will receive a call on their radio from the pilot of a private jet who touched down on the island upon witnessing the downed aircraft. The PCs will have to devise a plan to escape from their captors before the aircraft leaves without them - or worse - they are all killed.

Sacrifice!: Before they are able to make any sort of real plan, the PCs are bound and carried to a huge cavern. In the center of this cave, Uruk stands amid a large pool of blood. The elgor plan to use the PCs as sacrifices to their prehistoric lord, and the players must think fast and escape or risk losing their lives in a most gruesome fashion.

Act III

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Uruk’s Rampage: As the PCs escape, Uruk springs in to action. For the first time in centuries his prey is trying to escape, and he will have none of it. He barrels after the PCs but is too large actually leave the cave, giving the players a marginal head start. It doesn’t take long before he begins ransacking his cave and he is able to pummel through the entrance. Uruk chases the PCs unwaveringly while the elgor attempt to subdue him. The elgor fail, but do manage to slow Uruk down enough to where the PCs can reach the shore.

Escape from the Isle: Reaching the coast of the Isle, the group is able to find the jet relatively easily. An ominous booming is heard in the distance once they are in sight of the plane, and only grows louder as they approach and talk to the pilot. It becomes apparent to the players that the plane will not be able to take off before Uruk reaches them. A gun is on-board but can the PCs use the environment to their advantage as well? Well duh, of course they can. But some of the PCs are going to have to buy the group time to take off!

Final Confrontation: Almost immediately after that adrenaline rush begins the climatic showdown with

THE ISLE!
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As the party takes off and feels all hunky-dory about their victory, they will feel an impact exactly like the one they had before their original crash-landing. Only this time the jet they are on is going to have to set down in the water. With the help of the PC pilot (if he is still alive), the NPC pilot is able to put the jet down in the water without much damage to the jet, but with barely enough time to launch a life raft before the jet sinks. Getting into the life raft, the PCs will see that they are a mile away from the shore if the Isle. Of more immediate attention though would be the Isle’s arms (tendrils) which rise like towers into the sky. Once again the PCs are going to have to manipulate the odds as the Isle proceeds to beat the sh*t out of them.

If Uruk represented the action-movie aspect of this scenario, the Isle is definitely much more within Lovecraftian standards as the PCs will absolutely have no chance to do anything but escape out to sea. But once it’s over the NPC pilot will reveal that he ripped the black box out of the jet (or if he’s dead it can be found in the raft) and within two days everyone is saved by another plane. Or a merchant vessel or something (The Isle swims away once the PCs are out of its range).

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Any suggestions/comments/critiques are all welcome. I will include the suggested pulls: sections as in "Beneath the Full Moon". Just keep in mind I'm summarizing the story here, the player part is a little bare-bones at the moment.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

You've got to have The Stewardess!

I'd suggest rethinking Act II to be a little less linear. One of the joys of Dread is watching how the interaction of the players and the characters-as-written changes the direction of the story. Stick to the narrow-wide-narrow approach; it works especially well in Dread.

 

[kitsune9]

Wow, pretty cool pics and story!

 

[mykelsss]

I'd suggest rethinking Act II to be a little less linear. One of the joys of Dread is watching how the interaction of the players and the characters-as-written changes the direction of the story. Stick to the narrow-wide-narrow approach; it works especially well in Dread.

I agree. It may seem like I have it made to be linear but to be honest the only thing that really needs to be set in stone in Act I-II is the fact that the PCs get captured.

I see exactly what you mean though, the hunger and subsequent fighting sections are going to be completely customizable and not nearly as rail-roady as they sound.

Stewardess sounds good though

Here are some more pictures of certain things:

Uruk in his cave.
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The elgor gladiator.
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One of the friendly NPCs I mentioned but have not yet included. It is of a different species than the elgor.

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Annnnnd for the sake of making this another huge post, my very brief and to-the-point ideas for other scenarios. Tentative titles.

White

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The party is a group of canadian tourists who are all staying at a lodge adjacent to a huge iced-over lake.

Monster involved:

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Ogre

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The party are several campers taking a vacation in an isolated area of the Appalachian Mountains.

Monster involved:

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[Janx]

I like the core premise, a plane crash on an island. The familiar intro will lull players into expecting a Lost clone. Having the mysterious Others watching from a distance ensures it.

I would suggest making your Acts revolve around tower crashes or pulls.

Basically make stuff happen/force pulls to reach a certain point, then allow success and a shift to the next act with a revelation.

So for more death, each collapse is a shift to the next act. Make the crash a full airliner, and let them pick a new survivor for the next character. You might even pre-gen all of them (a whole Flight 815's worth).

Otherwise, since a tower can take about 45 pulls (if I recall the stats), make each act be 15 pulls worth.

I would be VERY wary about dictating that the party gets captured. That's railroading. I'd be more inclined to use Capture to explain why a PC didn't actually die or why the whole party didn't die.

Instead, I'd plan for 2 predictable player patterns. They will either try to find the Elgor, or they will try to stay away from them.

If they pursue the Elgor, they find their camp (see smoke, hear drums) and see a survivor (from the other half of the plane) caged, or about to be sacrificed (depending on how shakey the tower is. This will culminate in them being detected and the Chase scene for Act 3.

If they hide from the Elgor, then of course the Elgor will hunt them, and you can do a scene where they run from that which isn't seen. The t-Rex it turns out is let loose to find them, so it makes the same noise as the Smoke Monster.

Use parallels from the show Lost, to convey fear. They know the Smoke Monster is bad, so when they hear the t-rex roar (and we all thought it was a T-rex before we saw it on TV), they will get that same feeling.

 

[Wycen]

Well, the art is evocative enough that I think it would be fun to play no matter the genre:

fantasy, check
steam-punk, check
pulp/noir, check
modern, check except modern is my least favorite,
future, check.

 

[Desdichado]

For some reason the thread title put in mind the idea of playing The Isle of Dread as a Dread scenario. Heh.