B2: Keep on the Borderlands

[Lanefan]

In all the time I'd been in this game I had never played or run or even closely read B2, so when I started my current campaign I said to myself "dammit, this will be my best chance ever". So I kicked off the campaign with it, and though I completely reworked the town/keep part to suit the setting I left the caves and (most of)* the inhabitants just as they were. I left the built-in wilderness encounters alone as well, which didn't matter as nobody ever went near 'em anyway, and threw in a few others as quasi-wandering monsters.

* - Hobgoblins in my games are much different than stock, being highly intelligent descendants of a civilized technology-based race; the ones in the caves reflected this so as to set the tone for later plans.

The players had a blast. So did the monsters. The characters, however, didn't have much fun at all: this adventure was highlighted by an all-time record 22 party-member deaths - and just as many new recruits! Only one character that started the adventure survived to finish it, but finish it they did.

Lan-"you know it's rough when you need a program each week to know who's in the party"-efan

 

[Edgewood]

I cut my teeth on B2 wayyyy back in the day, and it still is the most versatile module I have ever run. Of course I haven't run it since those time but I did re-read it about a year ago while reading through all of the rules for BECMI. It certainly gets the creative juices flowing.

 

[frankthedm]

Dungeon needs to be physically expanded, mainly because of mini scale creep. In 1E, the assumption was 3 man sized folks could fight side by side in the ubiquitous 10' wide corridor, many minis were quite smaller, figures did not have to be locked to a "grid" unless the DM called for it and there were less hard and fast rules about how much more area bigger critters took up on the battlemat. Nowadays folks see the 10' corridor and think only two medium or one large foe, though back in 1E 3 PCs might have clashed against two trolls in a 10' corridor without issue. When updating old mods, this issue seems to be ignored. 3.0 actually did pretty good on this, since it made Large (Tall) creatures take up only a 5' square, but by this time scale creep had pushed minis up quite a bit in size and it looked artificial because of the scale creep.

Indeed. The caves have good concept, but the map has some issues.

I'd recommend more use of elevation in the caves, with areas stacked on top of one another. Don't be afraid to play up on the chaos aspect with some impossible geography going on.

Adding more areas and making the slopes steeper like the The Caves of Chaos painting by Michael Komarck sounds like a good idea to me.

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/ph2_gallery/97180.jpg

http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/220869-conversion-keep-borderlands.html
http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...6-just-got-b2-keep-borderlands-need-help.html
http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/209948-shared-experience-keep-borderlands.html

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think I would put more distance between the individual caves, remove some of the more incredible encounters (like the cleric lost in the maze ...) and probably put more site-based or random encounters into the wilderness.

From this description it sounds like you have the 2nd edition version: Return to the Keep on the Borderlands.

This was the version I kicked off my 4E campaign with. My group didn't like the strange lost cleric's attitude so they killed her.

 

[amerigoV]

About 5 years ago I pulled it out as a filler night (down a player or two and at a critical point in my main campaign). Everyone rolled up 1e PCs. They went to the caves, took the upper right hand opening and....TPK. Them orcs torn them apart.

Loved it!

 

[Raven Crowking]

I have made good use of Keep on the Borderlands in Holmes Basic, 1e, 2e, and 3e. It was no less fun for folks who started gaming in the WotC era than it was for folks who started pre-1e.

Every module should aspire to create situations which easily generate individual stories.....So that each group who explores the same material comes up with different events. If you want a module worth discussing after the fact, it must have been a different experience for each play group, based upon DM angle and PC choices. IMHO, of course.

KotB is one of the all-time greats, IMHO.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I DM'd Keep on the Borderlands many, many moons ago when I got it with the old Basic D&D set. I have fond memories of the adventure, but don't remember an evil cleric. Of course, it's been 30 or so years now, so my memory is fuzzy. I remember having a ton of fun with it and I still have my original dice from that set, though the d20 is so rounded that it seems to land on "2" an inordinate amount of time.

Looking back, though, I wonder how so many different types of monsters lived together in peace & harmony in a place called The Caves of Chaos. And, why did so many monsters have magic items stashed conveniently away instead of using them? And, of course, I remember one of the rumors being "Bree-yark is the goblin word for 'surrender'"

 

[Filcher]

Yeah, there's a stealth cleric operating out of the Keep. Easy to get lost in the mix, though.

 

[billd91]

I ran B2 a long time ago, but we certainly had fun while playing it. I've also run Return to the Keep on the Borderlands (converted to 3e) much more recently and, I have to say, it's a worthwhile revision of the original. I found it worked very well for my players who had played B2 a long time ago like I did. The revision was just enough like and yet different from the original.

 

[thedungeondelver]

B2 KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS was my D&D rulebook for the first few years...I intuited out the rules that weren't covered and the rest of the rules you need are in the pullout pages in the middle and covered by Gary's advice to the new DM in the beginning.

Although we did roll stats with a d20 and ignored anything 1,2,19 and 20.

Run an online game. I'm sure you could get some player traffic.