Keep On The Borderline

[ParanoydStyle]

My mistake. : )

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Full Disclosure: Keep on the Borderlands is probably my all-time favourite module and I think it is near perfect.

Most of my complaints are the same as ones I've read online recently although I probably have a new one or two to add. For starters, the fact that neither the keep nor any of the many NPCs that live there have names is pretty off-putting.

Not a bug, a feature. I LOVE that they don't have names. It lets the DM add names that fit into his/her world. The names of NPC's in Farune are different from those in Iron Kingdoms, which are different from those in Kalamar. He/She can also put in specific 'family' names and build a truly believable bunch of people that the Players will remember because the DM will remember. It teaches a begining DM to either get good at coming up with names on the fly (my forte...), or develop his/her own list to choose from.

A complaint I haven't heard from others that I'll throw in is that the "Keep On The Borderlands" is actually a medium sized town. See, on my initial skim of the module years ago, I kind of got the impression from the text about the PCs using the Keep as a base of operations that it would be mostly deserted except for the PCs and the PCs could customize the keep as they saw fit but of course once I got into translating it was clear that that was REALLY REALLY not the case. With a bank and a guild hall and an inn and a tavern and multiple shops along with a seriously sizable army of defenders, the "Keep On The Borderlands" is actually a medium-sized or large town by D&D standards. Which actually makes it even weirder that it doesn't have a name.

It has a 'name', which is referred to as Castellan Keep. But mostly it's just referred to as "The Keep" by people living there, or the full name of "The Keep on the Borderlands" by those living outside. Again, this is a GOOD thing! It lets the DM, once again, come up with his own name if he/she wants too.

And finally, and this is a complaint I've seen before, it feels like a nonsensical quagmire of anti-logic how literally 8-10 tribes of demi-humans/monstrous humanoids have chosen to live right on top of each other tenement slum style in the Caves of Chaos when they have the entire surrounding wilderness to find lairs in where they're not tripping over each other. Then there's the fact that they are all completely passive: largely, each tribe of humanoids is just there in their caves waiting for the PCs to come in and try to kill them.

Again, this is a GOOD thing! It's not trying to "tell the DM what's going on"...it's showing the DM "hey, there are all these different monsters living here; do something with it, for example, the orcs are squabbling with eachother, the goblins have an 'understanding' with the ogre, and everyone just stays the heck away from the minotaur". This little bit of "friction" between a handful of tribes/creatures SHOULD get the creative juices of the DM flowing! The DM can then decide what and how the Caves are running. This is very much in the style of teaching a new DM what being a DM is about; creating stuff yourself for you and your group.

The two semi-warring orc tribes are a baby step in the right direction but the fact that neither the tribes or their leaders have names is sort of a roadblock to the roleplaying possibilities. There's a real lack of enemy variety as while there are at least five or six varieties of monstrous humanoids to fight, there really isn't much difference between fighting orcs and hobgoblins, between hobgoblins and gnolls, between gnolls and orcs, between kobolds and goblins, etcetera.

All this is a veritable smorgasbord for the new DM's hungry brain. Does the DM like funny/comedic stuff? Ok, here's "Bob the Orc...he's the tribes builder" (insert parody of children's Bob the Builder cartoon). Does the DM like 'WoW' orcs? Ok, we have "Chief Tharg Bloodbane". Or maybe the DM has an idea for orcs more like Star Trek Klingons, so we get "Mor'tah of House Ghal". The DM is the one deciding the bit's and bobs that will make this adventure his/hers.

And finally, yes, it really does seem to amplify some of the gross and racist underpinnings of early D&D, explicitly stocking these caves with non-combatant females and children, and then encouraging you to go in and make widows and orphans of them which is perfectly okay because they look different than you do.

Whoa...that totally came out of left field. Don't even know how to comment about that, so I won't.

Bottom line is that KotB was designed to encourage the DM to be a DM. To develop his/her own way of doing things. To flex their new creative world-building wings. IMNSHO this module does this in spades! I have run multiple campaigns with this module...frequently with the same group. Each time it lasted between a year and two years of play time. And you know what? Each was a totally different experience, because we, as a group, made the story in stead of simply being fed boxed text with pre-determined 'everything' that the Players basically were expected to follow.

Keep on the Borderlands = Amazing adventure module!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[DND_Reborn]

We ran it for a few of the new players who've never played ANY D&D before and it got us to level 5 before we started to branch off of it. Worked great, but a lot of dungeon crawling obviously. By the time we were done, we were glad for a nice overland adventure. I think if run properly, it is one of the best and certainly iconic D&D story lines out there.

 

[8888bong]

It's D&D. It doesn't have to make sense. Also, 90% of everything is crap.

 

[S'mon]

Another one that I've used more than a few times in that way is actually B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess. Most recently for 4th edition - I took the basic idea but turned it into a battle between two of the Archfey - with the assault and occupation of the palace and the kidnapping of the Princess and her consort as "political" maneuvers between them. It worked out really well, even if I did basically have to scrap the lower level nonsense map and replace it with something more sane, the basic framework was solid enough to use it as a basis for the adventure.

I never liked KotB much - the Keep is good except for lack of names, but with a couple hundred soldiers it doesn't make sense as a low level base; it should have cleared out the Caves of Chaos long ago. set it up as on the Borderland of a mid-high level zone, with eg G1 Against the Giants as the threat (at least 2 days' travel away), and it makes a lot more sense. I always found the Caves a bit lame anyway; the endless hordes of humanoids are a bit boring - the 'specials' like the owlbear minotaur & evil priests are ok.

By contrast I like orange cover B3 Palace of the Silver Princess a lot, in fact this is making me think about adapting it to Primeval Thule...!

 

[trancejeremy]

I think people are kinda overlooking that it was a module written for beginners (and children) when the hobby was new and even fantasy was fairly new as a popular genre.

Look at the cover of the new Pathfinder, a new & exciting (apparently for some) take on kobolds by making them like bipedal velociraptors in different colors. Well, back when B2 came out, no one knew what a kobold was, period. People might have known what an orc was, but that was a novelty, since they were only found in Tolkien up to that point.

The lack of names and such was because at the time there were really no published campaign worlds, people were expected to make their own, so as generic

And why do they all live in the caves? Well, one of the things was that most humanoids did not like sunlight. So they needed to live in caves.

It's like complaining that Grimm's Fairy Tales aren't A Game of Thrones.

 

[jasper]

ok, OK. I confess. I wrote Keep under a pen name by that asbeeep beep gynax change things, and took things out.
Really the caves were PMS 131 that is Public Monster School 131. The school was base on Little House of the Redacted. They were too poor for desks. The lunches were to be catered in so no need for kitchen or food storage. They were going to be taught either by the minister Elly. This was change to Eli The minster then dropped all together. Or taught by ethernet tricorders (yes had some scific stuff in the module) but Gary change the spelling to etheral and wanted the textbooks be dropped by a Spruce Goose. That was toss aside. (really he spilled Irish coffee on some pages and the only thing that was readable was ETHERAL PLANE).
They are other points I could make but I think I made enough.

 

[Jer]

That's the sort of thing that (as per my post upthread) I've not worked out how to do!

Another possible difference, but may be not - with B2 I've always been able to (re)work it during the actual course of play. Did your treatment of X2 require preparation? It sounds like it did, but maybe not.

It depends on what you mean by "preparation". I tend to overprepare for any game that I run - though that has changed as I've gotten older and have less time For the last time I ran X2 I basically scanned through the adventure to pull out the NPCs and noted their personalities and figured out stats that I could reskin as them rather than build full monsters. I also went through and noted which encounters I thought were hitting the right tone and which ones were just dungeon-crawly nonsense that wouldn't work with what I was going for and made a few notes to skip over those things (there were fewer of those than you'd think - even the garden, which I thought I'd have to just throw out and have to replace entirely - was able to be sufficiently creeped up with a few changes). Beyond that I mostly improvised.

B3, OTOH, took significant amounts of preparation to get hammered into a form that I liked. But now I'm actually itching to run it again I may have to convert what I have over to 5e to run it for a group that hasn't actually been through it...

 

[Aldarc]

I never liked KotB much - the Keep is good except for lack of names, but with a couple hundred soldiers it doesn't make sense as a low level base; it should have cleared out the Caves of Chaos long ago. set it up as on the Borderland of a mid-high level zone, with eg G1 Against the Giants as the threat (at least 2 days' travel away), and it makes a lot more sense. I always found the Caves a bit lame anyway; the endless hordes of humanoids are a bit boring - the 'specials' like the owlbear minotaur & evil priests are ok.

By contrast I like orange cover B3 Palace of the Silver Princess a lot, in fact this is making me think about adapting it to Primeval Thule...!

Thinning out the number of occupants or combatants in the Keep, which honestly a medieval keep should not have too many retainers anyway, seems like an easy fix though.

 

[pemerton]

All this talk of the Keep's population is making me think I need to go back and look at it again. I don't think it's something I've ever paid much attention to in the past.