Isle Of Dread Musings & Beyond

We just finished up a really fun session of "Curse Of Strahd" on the weekend.  I plan to write about that in the next day or so (my notes are at home, including a funny title for the post).

Last night I sat and really digested Isle Of Dread, its a great module. It's open ended.  Of course everyone already knows this.  I'm thinking that we should be wrapping up Strahd soon.  Well possibly (I'll get into that in the session report).

I'd like to run Isle of Dread, with Dwellers of the forbidden city on one of the other islands close to Tanora (or however you spell it).  As well on the northern side of the island I am going to pop B4 in there somewhere (the lost city). Another module I've been kicking around is N1 Against the reptile god, as it works well with the theme.

Since our old school group is just starting to get into mutant future, and the 5e group might be wrapping up, I think I'm going to start working on ideas for a 5e version of all of the above.  A few things are coming to mind however.

Isle of dread is for levels 3 & up, so I might have to figure out a way to run B4 or N1 first.  That might prove interesting.  Alternatively I think that Isle of dread & Dwellers has more than enough things to do to keep us busy for a bit.

Our 5e players are interested in storylines, both of these modules while awesome are more hex crawl open ended type adventures.  (which I like).  So I'm going to have to add some story into the whole thing.  Reading thru some of the entries in Isle of Dread, I started thinking about the certain factions on the island.  Example, the Rakastas.  Isn't doesn't really say a helluva a lot in the book about them. They are camped in the hex, they raid people.  I plan to turn to the 5e DMG npc/bad guy tables and start whipping up personalities and backgrounds for the leader of the rakasta's and maybe his/her second in command.

Of course I'll also have to figure out stats for some of the monsters that never made it to 5e (plantons come to mind... I figure halfing stats would work out). The Aracnea I'm guessing could be a combo of giant spiders and drow, maybe driders that can cast spells perhaps?

I intend to use Mystara as the world, and the races of Mystara.  Which will strip down useable races from 5e.  (no dragonborn, tieflings, yadda).  I'm unsure on the classes thing.  And there is no real gods in Mystara, rather there are the Immortals.  So I might port gods from Greyhawk, or Dragonlance (I kinda like that idea actually).

Anyways, as usual, I'm just riffing on ideas here.