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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3304702" data-attributes="member: 4937">With the original Mystra there was alot of straight-up real-world pastiche, especially in the original presentation.  On the whole, I think mixing elements and extrapolating according to the setting is a much stronger way to write than simply saying something like 'this is pre-WWI europe in a fantasy setting' or this is 'ancient egypt'.  I tend to be attracted to writing which isn't straight up anachronisms.  Changing to a more well realized and original setting than Mystra is or should be a great thing.There are two things that have happened to the Isle of Dread that represent not taking it in the direction I would have.  They aren't necessarily 'wrong', but I consider them a little more trite than the way the story could have gone.The first is making the Kopru end villains just another race of demon worshipping bad guys, rather than the more alien/Cthullan Mind Flayer/Aboleth style bad guy that they came across to me as.  It wouldn't be too bad to have that as part of thier culture, but it seems to increasingly to be consuming all the other aspects and becoming exclusively what the Isle of Dread is about.   At this rate, someone is going to think its a great idea to replace the Kopru with Drow.  Won't that be awesome?  *sarcasm*Secondly, the description of the natives on the island made it clear to me that they had a religion that was much more primitive than polytheism.  Whenever the natives referred to 'gods' they were referring to the Kopru dominated culture of the earlier megalithic era, and hense in my mind primarily to the Kopru itself (and to some extent the leaders of the rebellion against those gods).  It made sense to me that after rebelling from the abusive Kopru false gods, that the few survivors would be extremely hesitant to entrall themselves to any other dieties - least of all any diety as tyrannical and abusive as the meso-American gods.   Trading the Kopru for Tlaloc doesn't seem like that great of a trade to me.  For that matter, trading Demogorgon for Tlaloc doesn't seem like much of an upgrade either.  Instead, I think that the 'witch doctors', ancestor worship, and the 'stone chief' represent a culture which has soured on formal religion, and now takes a more animistic and shamanistic approach to life and wants nothing of new gods at all.  Tlaloc and his comrades make plenty good foils and villains in and of themselves without demons or mind enslaving aberrations with 'touch this and become my slave' artifacts lying about.</blockquote>

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