While Dungeons and Dragons Online’s newest expansion will be coming out in this advanced year of 2022, its origins are from time immemorial — also known as “1981.” That’s when Isle of Dread was first published as a Dungeons & Dragons module with a freeform 350-mile-wide landscape.
It’s this pen-and-paper module that the team at Standing Stone Games used to construct Isle of Dread. In a new dev blog, fans are taken behind the scenes to get a glimpse of the journey from tabletop to MMORPG.
“A tabletop Dungeon Master adjusts the game on the fly, but video game designers have to make many choices up front,” SSG said. “Some choices were fairly easy. We quickly decided we wanted dinosaurs to be the main attraction, since they had been scarce in DDO up to now. We wanted to add a cat-like player race, and this module gave us the perfect opportunity. The original module included the Rakasta, and the Fifth Edition Tabaxi was a good fit for our version of Dread.”
The studio said that the Isle of Dread’s plane-hopping trip ended up roping the lich-god Vecna onto its shores. Apparently she’ll be at the center of much of the isle’s mysteries.
Isle of Dread is scheduled to release on June 22nd.
