One of the unique features of the "Isles of Dread" campaign is that I wrote the whole thing out long-hand as a fully fledged D&D adventure - that is, I followed the same format and style guides (mostly) as in published adventures like "Lost Mine of Phandelver". In all, the adventure came to something like 45,000 words, almost exactly the same as "Lost Mine", with a further appendix of monsters and other adversaries and some new magical items.
Some thoughts:
- Firstly, and most obviously, writing all this up is hard! Perhaps more to the point, getting started is fairly easy, and making progress to a point was also quite good fun. But eventually, as happens almost every time I set out to do this, I got bogged down somewhere in the writing, and the thought of slogging through another 10,000 words and writing up a satisfying conclusion became really daunting.
- Finally getting to that end was not the achievement I thought it was going to be. Despite bringing the thing to an end, and indeed despite being happy with how it all ended, I nonetheless didn't feel that it was really worth the effort I put in. I certainly won't be doing this again, at least in this form.
- Related to the above, it's very obvious to me that writing something like this is very different when producing something for personal use versus for consumption by others - "Isles of Dread" was very much writen as though others would use it... but nobody ever will. Consequently, it represents a load of work that really didn't need to be done.
- That said, there is a lot to be said for advance preparation - the campaign had a number of things that were set up early and then paid off later. That wouldn't have been possible without putting in that work for the advance preparation. As indeed I found with "The Mists of Lamordia".
Ultimately... I'm happy I did it, but I wouldn't do it again. And, likewise, I think I might recommend people try it... exactly once, if only so they have a better appreciation of just how much effort really goes into writing an adventure.
Oh, yes, one last thing: I still really like the way "Lost Mine of Phandelver", and indeed a lot of the published adventures, are structured - a fairly constrained first section, then wider the choices out to a sandbox area, then widen it again to another, bigger sandbox, and then bring it back to a somewhat constrained climax. I definitely think that's something worth emulating.
