The Keep on the Borderlands, 1 Zillion Years Later...

[theodudek]

Hey everybody,

I wrote a review of the most well-known (?) D&D1e module, "The Keep on the Borderland," and I wanted to post it here if it's not off-topic. I've tried running it in both 3e and 4e conversions, and it actually works pretty well, in a "simplest module on earth" kind of way. -_-


First thoughts: I like the Erol Otus back cover painting with the adventurers approaching the keep in the sunset. But the module is pretty… well, “basic.” One player told me an unverified rumor that a proofreader at Wizards back in the day was reading “The Keep on the Borderland” and marked it all up with red ink, saying “This is the stupidest adventure ever! It’s just a list of all the low-level monstrous humanoids in the game, living in caves right next to one another, waiting for the PCs to come in and kill them!” Apparently he didn’t notice that the author byline read “Gary Gygax” and he didn’t last much longer at the company… -_-;;


My own feelings about “The Keep on the Borderland” are more forgiving. It is basically the SIMPLEST IMAGINABLE 8-bit site-based oldschool adventure where the players have a “home base” (the keep) and can come and go from some dungeon (the Caves of Chaos) and keep killing monsters as they go. The assumption that the player characters are justified in raiding the caves, performing “home invasions” and slaughtering hordes of orcs, kobolds and hobgoblins AND THEIR DEFENSELESS INFANTS is very morally questionable. (The old “do we murder the innocent kobold babies, or do we take them back to Elftown, give them elf names, teach them to worship Corellon Larethian and raise them as domestic servants” test is a standard test of player & character alignment.) Maybe it would seem better if there was some backstory about the Caves’ residents pillaging the neighboring countryside or something…


Anyway, the module offers almost nothing in terms of description, backstory, names or even interesting room contents a la all the weird wizard stuff in module B1: “In Search of the Unknown” (but at least “The Keep on the Borderland” is a complete module and not a RIP-OFF created by someone who didn’t have time to finish a module and tried to pass it off as a ‘make your own module’ thing -^- ). Basically, the DM has to fill in a lot to make this module make any kind of sense. What is the history of the keep? How can all the monsters live so close together? What about the temple of evil, what is the racial makeup of its parishioners?


There is one very good thing about “The Keep on the Borderlands”, though, and that is: it offers the players lots of choices (even if they’re just small choices) right off the bat. Should they go directly to the cave, or mess around in the wilderness? And what cave should they go in? This isn’t China Mieville or Robin Laws or Jonathan Tweet material, but evena simple choice is much more interesting than railroading them into a set string of encounters. The first time when I tried to run this module (updated to 3e) the 1st-level party randomly chose the cave which happened to be inhabited by bugbears. They ended up being chased into a dead end and two of them were killed by the bugbears while the other two fled into the bugbear chieftain’s room and bolted the door. While the bugbears laughed and pounded on the other side of the door, the two survivors searched the room, desperately hoping to find some other way out. By a stroke of luck, the room contained a narrow crawlway which led into a dark, damp maze of limestone caverns. Caverns which, unluckily, were INHABITED BY DEADLY STIRGES! \(^o^)/ Another party member was slain by the stirges leaving the sole survivor to push out from under the root cover and rotten leaves and escape into the woods with 2 hit points. I considered having him attacked by the Mad Hermit of the Woods but in the end he made it back to the keep safely.


So even a simple module like this has its advantages. I am actually running it in 4e now for my friend Jason and his girlfriend, and it works well… I have turned most of the minor demihumans into minions and only a few of them, the chiefs and guards and chieftainesses, etc., are full monsters. That way, a party of 4 1st-level characters can fight an entire tribe of orcs or goblins and it’s semi-balanced. (The only thing I really have to work on is adding more interesting terrain to the encounter areas.) BTW, the sequel to “Keep,” “Return to the Keep on the Borderlands,” is pretty awful because it just has SO MUCH TEXT and SO MUCH BACKSTORY it becomes almost unreadable… the opposite of the original.

 

[Olli]

Well, hm, well,

first off, when KotB was first released there was no WotC, it was released by TSR. And to explain that it is very "basic", um, come on, it´s one of the first modules published, and set the standard for the basic dungeoncrawl. It was even included in the D&D boxed set. So, holding it to todays standards seems a little shortsighted.

Olli

 

[haakon1]

The assumption that the player characters are justified in raiding the caves, performing “home invasions” and slaughtering hordes of orcs, kobolds and hobgoblins AND THEIR DEFENSELESS INFANTS is very morally questionable. (The old “do we murder the innocent kobold babies, or do we take them back to Elftown, give them elf names, teach them to worship Corellon Larethian and raise them as domestic servants” test is a standard test of player & character alignment.)

There's no requirement for your PC to kill kobold babies. The Keep is essentially a sandbox adventure, where the PC's set the agenda, and the DM has the world react to it. It's can be a great adventure, if you let it be, but it's more do-it-yourself than later adventures.

There is one very good thing about “The Keep on the Borderlands”, though, and that is: it offers the players lots of choices (even if they’re just small choices) right off the bat. Should they go directly to the cave, or mess around in the wilderness? And what cave should they go in? This isn’t China Mieville or Robin Laws or Jonathan Tweet material, but evena simple choice is much more interesting than railroading them into a set string of encounters. The first time when I tried to run this module (updated to 3e) the 1st-level party randomly chose the cave which happened to be inhabited by bugbears. They ended up being chased into a dead end and two of them were killed by the bugbears while the other two fled into the bugbear chieftain’s room and bolted the door. While the bugbears laughed and pounded on the other side of the door, the two survivors searched the room, desperately hoping to find some other way out. By a stroke of luck, the room contained a narrow crawlway which led into a dark, damp maze of limestone caverns. Caverns which, unluckily, were INHABITED BY DEADLY STIRGES! (^o^)/ Another party member was slain by the stirges leaving the sole survivor to push out from under the root cover and rotten leaves and escape into the woods with 2 hit points. I considered having him attacked by the Mad Hermit of the Woods but in the end he made it back to the keep safely.

And you think this is NOT a good adventure? That sounds like more excitement and adventure than most CAMPAIGNS have these days. Gygax D&D is D&D with no safety helmets -- which makes it that much more exhilerating if you can survive it.

Anyway, the module offers almost nothing in terms of description, backstory, names or even interesting room contents
. . .
BTW, the sequel to “Keep,” “Return to the Keep on the Borderlands,” is pretty awful because it just has SO MUCH TEXT and SO MUCH BACKSTORY it becomes almost unreadable… the opposite of the original.

Hmmm, one version has too much, the other not enough? To me, both versions were good, but I freely modified/created stuff like crazy to make it my own.

My favorite bit in running "Return" was having the Temple and their followers counterattack and trying to storm the Keep -- that lead to the longest D&D combat I've ever seen or run, something like 300 rounds, with dozens of NPC combatants . . . I was using AD&D rules (whereas "Return" was 2e) and the counterattack was definitely not written into the module . . . but the monsters and NPC's were, and it's what made sense for them to do at the time.

 

[theodudek]

I didn't describe running the Keep to indicate that it was not a 'good' adventure. i meant that it was really fun, of course. -_- But it's just a question of what you bring to it, not so much the contents of the module itself. Like you said, it's a sandbox.

And yes, I meant TSR, not Wizards... -_-;; Aggggh!

 

[kaomera]

It sounds like the PCs where able to get straight from the Keep to the dungeons without any real fuss. I no longer have a copy of the module to check, and it's been about 25 years since I actually tried running it, and I probably did a lot of filling in the blanks... But my own recollection of the module involves quite a bit of roleplay in and around the Keep before the players even started out for the dungeons, which usually took at least a full session to find, given that the location from which the humanoids had been raiding (well, more of a nuisance than an all-out raid) was not known, random encounters, etc. In fact I remember a reference to cultists (of the Evil Temple) lurking within the Keep itself? I don't know maybe that's something we added, but I thought it was in part of the Keep writeup...

Anyway: given that I find most modern modules to be very sparse on details, and often rewrite whole sections if I even use them, I'm sure I'd find the Keep to be little more than a skeleton. We had lots of fun poking about, getting lost, and getting beaten up by the various monstrous nasties (well, I DM'ed, mostly, so I guess I had fun beating the PCs up!), but there was a lot of stuff that we made up as we went along back in those days...

 

[LostSoul]

The Keep on the Borderlands may only be lacking in, well, DM advice on how to run it most effectively.

I seem to be on that kick lately...

 

[Crothian]

The boards have their own review section that this would fit in nicely.

Reviews - EN World D&D / RPG News

 

[Wik]

One player told me an unverified rumor that a proofreader at Wizards back in the day was reading “The Keep on the Borderland” and marked it all up with red ink, saying “This is the stupidest adventure ever! It’s just a list of all the low-level monstrous humanoids in the game, living in caves right next to one another, waiting for the PCs to come in and kill them!” Apparently he didn’t notice that the author byline read “Gary Gygax” and he didn’t last much longer at the company… -_-;;

Yeah. That didn't happen. I'd bet any one of my favourite body parts that didn't happen.



What makes the Keep a fun dungeon is the emphasis on character choice. And that it's a simple dungeon crawl, where the PCs choose their reactions to what's put before them. I always prefer simple adventures, where solutions can be arrived at through multiple paths, than through the railroads that are much more common these days.

Without going too much into it, though, I'll just post a link that can explain everything much better than my coconut brain ever will:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...n-layout-map-flow-old-school-game-design.html

Read it. Absorb it. Learn from it.

 

[LostSoul]

Yeah. That didn't happen. I'd bet any one of my favourite body parts that didn't happen.

I think he's talking about Mike Mearls' review of the module.

 

[theodudek]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...n-layout-map-flow-old-school-game-design.html

Wow, thank you, that was really interesting! ^o^

Yes, I prefer more nonlinear adventure design.... although on the other hand players need to be led by the hand sometimes, I have run campaigns where they have been overwhelmed by the number of subplots and options.