Keep on the Borderlands - your experiences?

[Silent Cartographer]

My very first D&D game was running this for my friends. A long, long time ago. The Caves of Chaos was my first homebrew dungeon; I had a hydra in a room with only 5' wide entrances. Heh.

By the way, Keep on the Borderlands is the original point-of-light adventure! When WotC talks about PoL; KotB is what comes to my mind as the very epitome of that idea...

 

[Holy Bovine]

Good thread to bump whoever did it. Keep on the Borderlands deserves all the praise it gets. It's practically a campaign in 32 pages! I've run it 4 or 5 times and had great fun everytime. One of the best was the time I ran it for my then girlfriend and her brother. Using the Rules Cyclopedia D&D version made for some lethal combats and they went through multiple characters each including a veritable horde of NPC mercenaries. The most long lived (he nearly made it to 2nd level!) was the Fighter Borg. He got squished by an Ogre hiding behind a tree.

 

[GreatLemur]

I actually had my first experience with the Keep on the Borderlands last Saturday, when buzz ran his Burning Wheel version of the adventure for Chicago Gameday. We played as leaders of the various Caves of Chaos monster tribes, and we were supposed to try to work together to destroy the Keep. However, we all played up our characters bigtime, and instead of working together, we all plotted elaborate--and not so elaborate--ways to backstab each other. At the end of the adventure, the Keep remained entirely untroubled by us, all because we were too hopelessly untrustworthy a bunch on monsters to actually cooperate.

It was awesome.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

I actually dug my copy out a week or so ago to convert to C&C to run for my son and a few of his friends. I think this was the second or third adventure I ever played for D&D and my group loved it. I don't recall how many times we went through it but I do recall we started calling it "Death on the Borderlands" due to the high mortality rate of the PCs.

 

[rossik]

My very first D&D game was running this for my friends. A long, long time ago. The Caves of Chaos was my first homebrew dungeon; I had a hydra in a room with only 5' wide entrances. Heh.

By the way, Keep on the Borderlands is the original point-of-light adventure! When WotC talks about PoL; KotB is what comes to my mind as the very epitome of that idea...

whats point of light?

 

[Prince of Happiness]

whats point of light?

To illuminate otherwise dark objects.

 

[Boss]

I too started my adventuring career with KotB. I couldn't even begin to count the number of times that we went through that module. And being impressionable 12 year olds, we were uber-munchkins playing it. There was a typo that we exploited every time we played. The Minotaur had three gemstones, each worth 100+GP (can't remember exact amounts). The typo was that there was no space between the amounts, so we took it to mean that the gems were worth 100's of millions of GP. And in those rules (may have been 1ed we were using, can't remember) 1 GP = 1 XP and we were like unto gawds!!!!!!!!

Then several years later (and much less munchkinism) came Return to KotB. One of the guys in my group at the time had a photographic memory and remembered where everything was in the original adventure, including where the secret door leading to the goblin lair was. So off they went following him. Of course, since he didn't have the new module (yet) he didn't realize that a Troll had moved into the cave in question. 1st level adventurers against a Troll means all but one character died, and the one that made it out was carrying a friend in a fireman carry down the rope (and failed his climb check, killing them both in the fall).

Much merriment.

 

[Silent Cartographer]

whats point of light?

A generic setting concept put forth by the designers of 4th edition D&D:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=205768

 

[khyron1144]

I tried to run it once converted up to AD&D 2e rules because that's the system I knew best. It worked okay, but the only one of the encounters from the book that got run was the Mad Hermit one. The players didn't seem to be getting that he was a mad hermit and that he would only lie and try to lead the party astray.


I also learned not to put sheep in a common slot on your random encounter table. I prerolled six random encounters to save time. I got three sheep encounters, two with bandits, one with gnolls.

 

[Celebrim]

Ran it twice. The first time as a kid not long after getting the basic set. I don't have alot of memories of it except that it involved alot of huge fights, and lots of resting between fights. I remember the players holeing up in the secret room between orc caves, and lots of fleeing the dungeon with hordes on thier heels. The goblins especially are designed to dump thier whole tribe down on the PC party immediately - and then call in help! The kobold fight at the pit entrance is pretty enormous as well. I think we started with like 8 characters and lost seven or eight PC's over the course of the module, finishing with like 4 or 5 survivors - who then went on to face X1.

I ran it the second time as a more mature DM using a redone map*. Still had a tendancy to turn into huge slug fests, but since most of the monsters are really weak very quickly they lose the ability to hit anything. Still killed off about half of the initial party but almost all that was before the players got platemail, magic shields, etc. Unarmored classes just don't survive.

I personally think its a pretty poor module, that encourages extremely tedious largely undifferiented mass encounters with limited largely featureles terrain. That each tribe has a different alarm system is about the most creative thing about it. Even ran as well as I could manage with conspiracies, betrayal, mature maps, mini-bosses, etc. - looking back it just doesn't seem like alot of fun. Of course, the funny thing about that perspective is that the players always seem to enjoy the heck out of it. Whether that's due to the fact that its often their first experience with D&D, or whether its because simple hack-n-slash really is the heart of D&D, I don't know. I do know that I don't regret having the module basically memorized, whereas some of my other favorite modules to run (or play) I wish were still fresh and unspoiled so I could play them again.

Of course, as primitive as the module seems to me now, its light years better than any of my first few attempts to make my own adventure. There are things I think you can learn from the module, but I don't think I'd ever run it again.

*Map changes: Break the caves into levels with the goblins and kobolds on the first (lowest level) and so forth. Added new content between 'levels' (a gatehouse with bandit gaurds at the entrance of the ravine, an arena where the tribe resolve thier differences midway back, and a lesser temple complex in the rear where the demihumans are indoctrinated into the cult), and shifted the map so that the Minotaur's maze gaurded the entrance to the greater temple.

 

[BabbageCliologic]

Keep on the Borderlands

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

Been a player and GM in KotB. Recently, I used it as my group's main "base" in a multiverse Savage Worlds! Forgotten Realms game. Also wrote about Alternate B2s in Issue #3 of my 'zine, One Thousand and One Nights and One Night. Check it out!

/BC

 

[Prince of Happiness]

I personally think its a pretty poor module, that encourages extremely tedious largely undifferiented mass encounters with limited largely featureles terrain. That each tribe has a different alarm system is about the most creative thing about it. Even ran as well as I could manage with conspiracies, betrayal, mature maps, mini-bosses, etc. - looking back it just doesn't seem like alot of fun. Of course, the funny thing about that perspective is that the players always seem to enjoy the heck out of it. Whether that's due to the fact that its often their first experience with D&D, or whether its because simple hack-n-slash really is the heart of D&D, I don't know. I do know that I don't regret having the module basically memorized, whereas some of my other favorite modules to run (or play) I wish were still fresh and unspoiled so I could play them again.

I kinda feel the same way. Maybe not a poor module, but certainly doesn't have the "oomph" that Village of Hommlet does to me. I find Bs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 more interesting.

 

[haakon1]

I personally think its a pretty poor module, that encourages extremely tedious largely undifferiented mass encounters with limited largely featureles terrain.
. . .
Of course, the funny thing about that perspective is that the players always seem to enjoy the heck out of it.

Perhaps the complexities you prefer are different from what your players truly like. I think most of the time, players either make up their own complexities behind simple plots, or ignore the intricacies of complex DM backstories (think of the South Park episode where it's revealed that Towelly is actually a robot from space and part of a conspiracy involving the military . . . when all the kids keep saying, "Yeah yeah yeah whatever, how do we get back our GameSphere.")

 

[Dan Bell]

Keep on the Borderlands

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

Played and GMed it, about 5 yrs apart. In both cases the PCs never attacked the keep. For those who like Harn, this adventure as been recreated, here is the free download: http://www.lythia.com/modules.php?o...etails&lid=233&ttitle=Keep_on_the_Borderlands

 

[JohnBiles]

This module is my origin story as a gamer. When I was 12, I got the Basic Set (Moldvay, I think) by selling greeting cards; if you sold enough boxes, you got a prize. I got the basic and later the Expert set that way.

A friend of mine tried to DM but wasn't doing well, so he passed me the job halfway through our first session in Keep on the Borderlands (we were wandering around mindlessly, trying to get to the Caves, having been too young and foolish to FOLLOW THE ROAD. People ambush you on roads, right?)

It was more fun than we'd ever imagined possible, though this was 26 years ago, so I only barely remember it now.

Over the years, I've accumulated four paper copies of the adventure (I'm not sure where any but the original came from!), colored in one of them when I went through an 'artistic' phase, and also gotten Return to Keep on the Borderlands. I've run the whole thing about 8 times, I think, including Return twice.

 

[Serendipity]

Fancy a bit of thread necromancy, neh?

I've played or run this thing so many times it all tends to run together. The last time was as DM sometime in the early 90s, which happens to be the only time anyone went to the Keep or actually finished the adventure. Though I recall trying to find all (what four?) wilderness encounters over and over again and generally getting our asses handed to us by either the lizard men or the old hermit.
There was a point when I took one of my higher level PCs through it in a pique of overconfidence and wound up staring down the Medusa. That taught me......it was some time before anyone mounted an expedition to go find that character.
Good times.

 

[Fifth Element]

I played it back in the day. How does one define "completing" this module? I remember we wiped out the kobolds and goblins, and took out the ogre, and the undead.

 

[Negaman]

My first adventure...back when I was 9 myself...I love it still, even though I've read and heard arguments about how much can be done to improve it...I think my most clear memory of it was that when my friends and I first tried it we had no idea that you were not supposed to read the ENTIRE room entry notes to the party. In hindsight its kind of embarrassing, and as the DM read the room notes we KNEW there was something wrong with telling the party about the traps to come and the tactics of the monsters, but for some reason (maybe because we also KNEW that this was the first time playing and we wanted to minimize surprises?--that seems way too charitable for me and my friends though...) we just kept on doing it. Even though we got through most of the dungeon, I lost about three elves myself. Not my best debut, to be sure...

 

[Negaman]

Incidentally, I just found a copy of the D&D Basic Set at Goodwill for about $3. The contents inside appear to be untouched! It even still has the dice and the crayon! Nowadays I'm playing D&D 3.5 (mostly as a GM for my 10 year old daughter and 13 year old son), and that is what my kids know, so I'm looking for a conversion kit for it to 3.5 (after this many years, SOMEBODY must have done one by now...). That is part of how I found this website in fact.

 

[amerigoV]

Wow - necro'd Twice! That is one undead you cannot keep down.

I actually ran a segment of it (the temple at the end) at a Con recently. I nudged it a bit to be more Temple of Tharizdun because if you compare the two modules, there is just a ton of similar description used.