D&D General Actual Play: Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set

[David Howery]

Yes, although presented very differently, with lots of player handouts, cards for abilities, spells, equipment, etc.

wow, that is rather neat looking. It's kinda amusing that B2, in spite of all the criticism about the problem of 'so many critters in such a small space', has been revamped quite a few times. Did it get updated for 3E and/or 4E?

 

[pukunui]

OK, so the adventure includes not one but two abandoned wagon encounters. There's the one that Pral and his gang looted on the wilderness trail, and there's the one that Oleira is expecting that's running late because its driver got eaten by a stowaway ooze. The latter has some quirks.

I found a third one! The Random Tamarack Stand Encounters table includes an abandoned wagon with a mimic pretending to be a crate.

Anyway, I am just about as ready as I can be. I've got my opening encounter prepped, and I've read through both the Wilderness and Keep booklets.

I've also prepared an index card for each player so they can write down their PC's name, age, height, weight and any other characteristics.

I am looking forward to getting the show on the road this afternoon! I hope the girls will enjoy themselves enough to want to make it a regular thing.

 

[David Howery]

just for the heck of it, ordered this and got it yesterday. The maps are neat, the Keep is much better detailed, and the wilderness encounters about the same. But my first thought on reading through the Caves was.... 'Man, they really nerfed these down." I mean, the bugbears and gnolls went from a dozen or so each to... 3 or 4? The two orc clans are gone, replaced with some completely different things. I did like the explanation behind 'why are all these assorted critters living all in a rather tiny area?"....

 

[Zardnaar]

just for the heck of it, ordered this and got it yesterday. The maps are neat, the Keep is much better detailed, and the wilderness encounters about the same. But my first thought on reading through the Caves was.... 'Man, they really nerfed these down." I mean, the bugbears and gnolls went from a dozen or so each to... 3 or 4? The two orc clans are gone, replaced with some completely different things. I did like the explanation behind 'why are all these assorted critters living all in a rather tiny area?"....

Modern D&D doesnt do mobs well.

Goblins may be OP.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

just for the heck of it, ordered this and got it yesterday. The maps are neat, the Keep is much better detailed, and the wilderness encounters about the same. But my first thought on reading through the Caves was.... 'Man, they really nerfed these down." I mean, the bugbears and gnolls went from a dozen or so each to... 3 or 4? The two orc clans are gone, replaced with some completely different things. I did like the explanation behind 'why are all these assorted critters living all in a rather tiny area?"....

5E monsters are way beefier than BD&D ones, so the threat is still legit for people who go in guns blazing. (I almost TPKed my first party that I ran through it, after all.)

 

[David Howery]

5E monsters are way beefier than BD&D ones, so the threat is still legit for people who go in guns blazing. (I almost TPKed my first party that I ran through it, after all.)

okay, I'll take your word for it, as I have nil experience with 5e. It is a neat set, though, the maps are great.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

okay, I'll take your word for it, as I have nil experience with 5e. It is a neat set, though, the maps are great.

Yeah, the physical elements are top notch.

 

[Clint_L]

So, having run it with some modifications (I posted my PDF somewhere on this site), here's my take:

It's a pretty good sandbox. I really enjoyed the little tasks around the keep as a way for newbies to learn to RP and get the hang of basic abilities at Level 1. It kind of feels like a starter zone in World of Warcraft; you can almost see the little exclamation marks above the NPCs. I think the wilderness areas are done well, also, with a cool variety of encounters and a fair amount of stuff to find.

There's very little plot to the whole thing, and I found the Caves of Chaos are to be kind of goofy; ultimately they became tedious. The densely populated caves all being within a few dozen metres of each other made no sense to me, so I added a more cohesive story and spread the caves WAY out; in my revamped version they are part of an old complex spread out over several kilometres. I cut out a lot of encounters and made many of the caves even easier to find RP solutions, because there was a bit of a repetitive vibe otherwise: go in, do 3-4 simple fights, roll on magic item table. ***

My biggest change was really beefing up the plot around the "Cult of Chaos" so that they became a Cult of the Chained Oblivion and tighening up their plot to attack the Keep by recruiting some of the denizens of the caves; I also made several of the Keep NPCs secret cultists to facilitate this plot. And when the party finally moved on the cultists but decided to take a long rest after an early encounter, I decided that the Cultists would speed up their plan, so the party found their HQ empty and had to rush back to the Keep to foil the cultists with a pitched battle in the Keep itself. This made for a more pleasing capstone to the mini-campaign, IMO, and easily segued into the next set of adventures that I designed.

So overall I liked it. The resources on DDB are very good, and the framework was enough for me to easily expand into something meatier, which is my personal preference. But you could also run it as a very direct, old school-type campaign as written. It's not Lost Mine of Phandelver or Frozen Sick tier, but I would put it in my second tier of starter adventures.

***Note: I was using it in a campaign with a lot of beginners, 14-17 years old, and our sessions are typically 1.5-2 hours after school, once per week. Combat is slower in D&D2024, especially with newbies, because they have more options to wrap their heads around, so I prefer one meaningful battle per session, on average, rather than a bunch of little fights. I never have more than two battles in an after school session, and sometimes there are none. So 3-4 fights just to clear out one of the tiny Caves of Chaos subcomplexes was not working for me.

 

[David Howery]

. The densely populated caves all being within a few dozen metres of each other made no sense to me,

that's been a complaint about the module since the Basic version came out back in 1980 or so. It's a slugfest and runs along the lines of 'fight/retreat to the Keep to heal up/fight some more." And yet, there's been versions of this in about every edition from Basic to 5E. Something about the whole 'fort on the edge of the wilderness' theme seems to be an appealing one....