Written by David "Zeb" Cook and Tom Moldvay, it is among the most widely circulated[1] of all Dungeons & Dragons adventures due to its inclusion as part of the D&D Expert Set.
[2][3] In the adventure, the player characters arrive on the Isle of Dread seeking a lost treasure, and there encounter new nonhuman races.
[7] The module has been described as an adventure scenario for medium- to high-level player characters, which takes place on an unexplored tropical island which has been divided by a stone wall built in ancient times.
[8] The characters somehow find a fragment from a ship's log, describing a mysterious island on which many treasures can be found, and set out to explore it.
In the course of their explorations, they may find a number of other villages of unfamiliar intelligent creatures, numerous hostile monsters and the treasures they guard, and a band of pirates.
The Isle of Dread was the first published adventure for any version of Dungeons & Dragons to focus on wilderness exploration as a major theme.
This product marks the first appearance of the continent for the Dungeons & Dragons world that includes locations such as Darokin, Karameikos, Ylaruam, and Thyatis.
[1] This version is laid out in the style characteristic of early D&D adventures: it had no Dungeons & Dragons logo, a diagonal strip in the top left corner indicated which edition of the game it was for, and the back cover featured an illustration and a list of other D&D products of the time.
The Isle of Dread was developed by Paul Reiche III, and edited by Jon Pickens with assistance from Harold Johnson, Patrick L. Price, Edward G. Sollers, Steve Sullivan, and David Cook.
[12] The Isle is also a minor encounter area in the later adventure Lathan's Gold,[13] and receives some further mention in several later D&D products such as the Poor Wizard's Almanac series.
The isle has become a mad collection of kopru, other aquatic races, demonic beings, dinosaurs, and savage Olman natives.
The scenario itself, set on an island whose simple human culture bears tinges of Polynesian and Amerind societies, is relatively tame, but provides some tense moments.
[1] James Maliszewski said "There's no rhyme or reason to it, but it's all incredibly evocative and a blast to play, which, in the end, are the only measures by which any adventure module should be judged.
[20] The French RPG magazine La Gazette du Donjon gave this adventure a top rating of 5 out of 5, saying that although there were inconsistencies with the scale of its maps, "It's full of random encounter tables, descriptions of locations, tribes, monsters and NPCs.
"[21] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "Its true power lies in a single page: The map of the Island — its shores charted, its interior blank.