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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 4529739" data-attributes="member: 16574">Welcome to the club <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It's a little mini-sandbox setting with a home base with some helpful and harmful NPCs, a small wilderness with a handful of encounters, and a "monster hotel" with about a dozen small lairs mostly of various types of humanoids. There's not plot unless you insert one. None of the NPCs at the Keep have names unless you name them. If you run it "straight" without adding or customizing anything (the way most of us who got the Basic Set for our 9th birthday did) it'll be boring and suck, but because it's so open-ended, if you get creative and treat it as a toolbox you can have all kinds of fun with it. Not much. You can pretty much expect that until they hit 3rd level you're probably looking at something like 33-50% casualty rate per session -- some players will lose a character every session, some might lose 2 or 3 in a single session (but because characters are so easy to create -- picking equipment takes longer than all the other steps combined) this isn't so much a problem.  Tips for survival: 1) hire red-shirts (NPC men-at-arms) to bulk up the party's numbers (but treat them well and pay them generously, otherwise they'll run away and leave you in the lurch when combat starts); 2) run away; 3) "cheat" (not literally, as in lying about die-rolls, but as in employing "unfair" tactics -- pretending to run away to lure monsters into ambushes, use lots of flaming oil (which does more damage than any weapon or spell available to 1st level characters), bribing one set of monsters to help you fight another set, etc. -- straight-up combat is a losing proposition, so you have to learn to think outside the box); 4) if you're going to lose, and can't run away, surrender -- sure the monsters might just laugh and kill you anyway (or take you back to their lair and torture you) -- especially if you've been killing all the monsters that have surrendered to you -- but you were going to die anyway if you kept fighting so you haven't really lost anything, and they might be willing to ransom you (there are specific rules for this in Keep on the Borderlands), or you might be able to escape, or if you're chaotic you might make friends with the monsters and fight on their side when the next set of PCs shows up. The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination. The Creature Catalogue has a bunch of new monsters that aren't in the RC. There are several more classic modules: B4 (The Lost City), B5 (Horror on the Hill), B10 (Night's Dark Terror), X1 (Isle of Dread), X2 (Castle Amber), and X4 (Master of the Desert Nomads) & X5 (Temple of Death) (a 2-part series) are all classics. X1 is sandboxy in the same manner as B2 (a huge tropical island full of natives, all kinds of monsters, and lost treasures); the others are more traditionally plot-based. The Gazetteer series gets a lot of love for adding a ton of detail to the world and a lot of extra rules (new classes and such) but I thought they were overkill and sort of wrecked the freewheeling casual spirit of this version of the game (they blurred the line too much between this version and AD&D).I'm sure other people can and will give you plenty, but IMO this version works just fine right out of the box (as long as you've got a lot of imagination and are willing to make a lot of rulings up on the spot when somebody tries something crazy).</blockquote>

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