Keep on the Borderlands - your experiences?

[Kid Charlemagne]

Hoo boy. Memories of fun but bad gaming from the early '80's...

I ran group through the Keep, and they mostly took out the Keep. They decided to kidnap the guy in charge. The party included a Ninja, and Archer (both from early Dragon magazines, circa #39-#50) two NPC CN barbarian-ish fighter brothers, and a halfling thief.

The Ninja and Archer tried to kidnap the guy first, and failed, I can't recall how. Then the halfling and the two CN fighters tried to talk their way past the guards. Well, he halfling tried. Poorly. About a minute into his spiel, the two CN NPC's started getting antsy. Another fifteen seconds, and they had decided the halfling couldn't pull it off, and slugged the guards in unison, as the halfling cried out to stop them. Things went downhill from there.

The halfling later sold a magical sword to the king of the elves. A magical cursed sword. Elves shot at the party on sight after that.

 

[zcthu3]

I've run this module so many times it's not funny - especially as it was the same group of players. Each time I gave a slightly different back story and it always took them half the module to click to what the module was!

Lots of fun had by all!

 

[Shadowdancer]

I played the original once, we never finished it. It was a group of people I worked with, and we got together to play after work just a couple of times.

Return to the Keep on the Borderland was the last campaign we played before switching to 3E. In fact, we didn't start playing 3E until it had been out a few months because we were still in the middle of Return.

I remember the hall with all of the skeletons and zombies. We took them on, and survived! It was one long, drawn-out, hellacious combat. I had a character that was buffed up as a sword fighting specialist, with the 2E Options book. Man, he was cutting down zombies left and right. He just left the skeletons to the others and went around the hall slicing and dicing zombies. It was so cheesy, yet so much fun.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

My early gaming groups started with the white box set, so we missed this one completely. I did play a couple sessions of the Silver Anniversary version a few years ago, but the GM got bored so we didn't get far into it. I remember not being terribly impressed, but then again, we only encountered the bulette and some crazy guy nearby (a druid?) before stopping.

 

[Lazybones]

My first D&D experience was in KotB. I have vague recollections of my elf (back when it was a class and race) falling into a kobold pit, and casting sleep spells on goblins. Or at least a sleep spell; none of us understood that you got spells back by rest; we thought you just got one until the time you leveled up. I remember his name was Avenger, and his parents had been wiped out by goblins. I believe I was 13...

 

[dren]

My first four books: PH, MM, DMG and KoTB. We played it at least half a dozen times, and I used it as the main area of my first campaign world. I think it was three years after this, I bought my next module.

 

[Emiricol]

I would like to start a series of threads on the old classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules. I think it would be interesting to see how everyone's experiences compared and differed.

For instance, I'll start this series with an old Basic D&D adventure that many, many old-timers cut their teeth on:

Keep on the Borderlands

Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did)? What were your experiences? Did you complete it?

I'll detail my experiences later in the thread, although I'll throw out this: Did your PCs ever take on the Keep itself? I know two completely seperate groups who did at some point assault the garrison from the inside because of a botched bank robbery and because they got cocky when they reached 3rd level.

Quasqueton

I DMd it and played it. When I DMd it, the bandits stormed the keep after being riled up by the PCs, and one of the PCs didn't make it into the keep before the gate closed. Alas. The bandits razed the keep, and the PCs fled into the dungeon for shelter, after barely surviving the encounter with the puma. Then they TPK'd in the dungeon My very first DM experience was a TPK!

 

[MerricB]

I've DMed it - and recently with 3E. KotB allows you to add a lot to it, so I did so, making the Caves a definite threat to the security of Ulek, a base of forces wishing to invade.

It's a great adventure, and it's worth remembering that you don't have to run it exactly as written. It just begs to be tinkered with.

Cheers!

 

[frog]

Ran it to start our current 3e campaign. The Caves were being run by the evil priest. They were a breeding ground for a northern invasion force into Karameikos...or so everyone thought. From there we linked to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

The Temple was turned into an archeological dig financed by Baron Von Hendricks and run by Bargle. Bargle was looking for the gems that fit in a gold skull artifact that he had found and determined that they were in the Temple. The same cult from the Caves was secretly trying to bring back the Temple and free the ancient evil bound there.

Nulb was changed to Luln and all of the good NPC's spying there were agents of the Duke of Karameikos. Except that in the plundering of the Temple the group discovered that the REAL Duke had been kidnapped and imprisoned in the Temple under an illusion that he was a vampire. The kingdom was being run by an imposter, who was an agent for the Master of the Desert Nomads.

Can you tell that I really like the old modules?

 

[Brother Ezra]

I remember playing this module when I got my basic D&D boxed set for Christmas in 1979. The day after christmas, I had my dad roll up a character, and I took him through the KotB. I got confused pretty quickly, and didn't realize that there were two seperate sections of the module, one for the keep itself, and the other for the caves of chaos. Pretty soon my very indulgent father was at one minute fighting the owlbear (one of the toughest encounters IIRC) and the next minute was walking into one of the guard rooms in the keep. Dad was a trooper, though, and tried to kill everything, good, evil or indifferent.

Keep on the Borderlands also was memorable for the rumors you would get while in the tavern. They became so iconic that in EVERY campaign afterwards, when the characters were interested in looking for rumors, they would simply look at me and say "The dog-men live in the lower caves, right?"