Little Keep on the Borderlands is the second adventure release for HackMaster and like the first; it parodies a basic D&D adventure. This time the target is Keep on the Borderlands, a module that many old-timers will remember from its inclusion in an edition of the Basic D&D boxed set. Little Keep is not simply a parody of the original adventure, however. It greatly expands on it and in fact has enough material to keep your players busy for weeks and maybe even months.
Little Keep is 144-page softbound book with color cover and black-and-white interior. The interior line art is well-executed. The many dungeon maps are simply drawn and easy to reference. The cover painting of an owlbear slaughtering an adventuring party is a nice spoof of the illustration on the first page of the original module.
Like the original module, Little Keep describes an isolated keep, which serves as the adventure base, and a nearby dungeon complex. Unlike the original module, Little Keep actually has a back story and information about the area of Garweeze Wurld in which it is located (NPCs even have actual names!). An appendix provides statistics and background information for the more than fifty NPCs that call the keep home. The amount of background information on the NPCs and potential adventure hooks is impressive. The keep prefect even has ties to the first HackMaster adventure, Quest for the Unknown.
The book contains a few wilderness encounters (including an encounter with the infamous hermit), but the thrust of the adventure will probably involve multiple forays to clean out the sprawling mines of chaos. The mines are essentially a big dungeon that is divided into two main levels with each level divided into five sublevels. Each sublevel is dominated by one humanoid race and the book addresses the sometimes uneasy relationships between the neighbors. It also gives the GM some advice on how to handle the PCs’ probable impact on the dungeon’s balance of power.
In a first for a HackMaster adventure (and in fact for any adventure module that I have ever seen), each encounter lists its ‘potential yield’ in experience and treasure right up front with handy checkboxes for the GM. Another feature is the perforated ‘battle sheets’ in the back of the book. Battle sheets are reference sheets that include stats for each encounter area’s monsters. The sheets also have handy checkboxes for tracking things like monster hit points and armor damage. Battle sheets are a neat idea, but I really don’t want to butcher my module by ripping out so many pages. I hope that Kenzer will see fit to make them available as a PDF download on their website at some point in the future.
If you want a mini-campaign setting that includes plenty of dungeon crawling, as well as opportunities for your players to interact with numerous interesting NPCs, you won’t go wrong with Little Keep on the Borderlands.
