Keep On The Borderline

[Aldarc]

Keep on the Borderlands is that song that keeps getting covered, remixed, and sampled by artist after artist, decade after decade. You look at the original and you may not think much of it - its not as hip as contemporaneous standards - but it nevertheless endures as a font of nostalgia, inspiration, and innovation. It probably even exemplifies the 4e design concept of the "point of light" campaign, where a small speck of law, order, and civilization was opposed by a chaotic, untamed wilderness.

 

[Lanefan]

ToH isn't bad IMHO but yeah it's not for everyone. It's not really meant for a long term campaign IMHO.

Sure it's meant for long-term campaigns. It's how you end them.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd been playing/DMing for well over 25 years before any exposure to KotB other than reading through it - never played it, never ran it.

So in 2008 for my then-new campaign I said "Dammit - I'm starting them out with KotB come what may! I'll finally get to run this thing!". I gave the Keep a name, plonked it in the foothills of a mountain range in my setting, gave the monsters a vague reason for being where they were, plugged in a few wilderness encounters, and dropped the puck.

And as fate would have it my players - mostly unintentionally - played into this perfectly. The way they formed the party was to have a Bard (and a Cavalier who was there too) roll up-country bragging about how they were going to get into Great Adventures In the Mountains, and how anyone with courage and daring should join them - and one by one they recruited a party from the villages they passed through. Then they get to Holtus (the name I'd given the Keep) and ask what Grand Adventuring needed doing, and are told (in broad terms) of the Caves, though the people of Holtus were as yet unaware just how populated things had become out there.

The rest was history. Or hysteria. Actually, both. Many a fine fresh-faced adventurer met his or her end in those woods...

 

[Lanefan]

As for the other modules mentioned:

I've never touched Castle Amber as written, other than to read it. I played through a modified version of it in a 3e game; and when I DMed it I had to rewrite it from scratch (other than the maps) as I had some players who otherwise knew it too well. But I really like it as a module.

Not a fan of Tomb of Horrors, though I can say I've been in a group that beat it using only the stock characters given in the module. I'll probably only ever use it as a source of nasty traps for other places, sort of like a pre-Grimtooth Grimtooth booklet.

And my only other serious exposure to the B-series has been B-10 Night's Dark Terror - I've DMed it twice over the years. The first time went horribly, the second time not so bad but still less than it probably could have been; and I think both times my primary mistake was to not use its setting as the starting point of a campaign so I could interweave all its various elements into the game right from day 1.

 

[Azzy]

Keep on the Borderlands is that song that keeps getting covered, remixed, and sampled by artist after artist, decade after decade. You look at the original and you may not think much of it - its not as hip as contemporaneous standards - but it nevertheless endures as a font of nostalgia, inspiration, and innovation. It probably even exemplifies the 4e design concept of the "point of light" campaign, where a small speck of law, order, and civilization was opposed by a chaotic, untamed wilderness.

Great, you just implied that KotB is the equivalent of the song Hallelujah... The original is understated, but it has been covered brilliantly (but usually poorly) by many artist—many putting their own spin on it (but most just coloring by numbers and giving it no depth). And it's been so done to death (typically poorly) that you twitch whenever you hear someone new cover it.

 

[Aldarc]

Great, you just implied that KotB is the equivalent of the song Hallelujah... The original is understated, but it has been covered brilliantly (but usually poorly) by many artist—many putting their own spin on it (but most just coloring by numbers and giving it no depth). And it's been so done to death (typically poorly) that you twitch whenever you hear someone new cover it.

I'm a fan of the original Leonard Cohen version and the John Cale cover, whose arrangement has probably been the greatest influence on subsequent covers.

 

[Goonalan]

I'm DMing the reincarnated Goodman Games B1/B2 Keep on the Borderlands, and writing up the action here-

D&D 5e Into The (Keep on the) Borderlands (B1&2) #032 Monster Mash.

Being a mixture of B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 The Keep on the Borderlands (& the Caves of Chaos). So, my main story hour here is the Dark Squad. I'm also reading my way through the Forgotten Realms novels and posting my reviews (of a sort) here. Therefore the last thing I want/need to...

www.enworld.org

Five sessions in and five dead PCs, another captured by the goblins, and one survivor- he ran away, it's the second time he's done it.

Still, the kobolds have been accounted for...

We're playing the module for kicks, and because it can be a lot of fun. Same as it was back in the day when I first DMed it back when it first came out at the start of 1980. B2 is one of my most used modules, in that any time I've needed a Keep, here it is, or a PC has insisted on tracking the Kobold/Orc/Gnoll etc. back to their lair... here it is.

Thank you B2.

Toodles.

goonalan

 

[Jmarso]

1. I can't honestly disagree with almost any criticism that has been leveled against this module over the years.

2. The 2E "Return to the Keep on the Borderlands" does a passable job of fixing many of the problems with the original. So much so that I liked to use it 'as the original' and further modify it from there. I tried using Mendel the Slaver as a link to the Slave Lords "A" series, although admittedly I have yet to see this one through to full fruition.

3. I must admit that my nostalgia for this module is almost unlimited, and warts and all it will ALWAYS hold a special place in my heart. It was one of the modules I cut my gaming teeth on 4/5 of a lifetime ago, and I do occasionally 'run home to mama' with this one.

 

[billd91]

2. The 2E "Return to the Keep on the Borderlands" does a passable job of fixing many of the problems with the original. So much so that I liked to use it 'as the original' and further modify it from there. I tried using Mendel the Slaver as a link to the Slave Lords "A" series, although admittedly I have yet to see this one through to full fruition.

Return to the Keep on the Borderlands is an excellent iteration of the KotB. And I have used Mendel the slaver as a link to the Slave Lords. He worked really well as a tie-in. I based Kendall Keep on the edge of the Lortmil Mountains and then used a couple of one-shot adventures (thanks to Dungeon Magazine) to link through Verbobonc and then Safeton out on the Wild Coast and Scourge of the Slavelords.

 

[lingual]

When I've run it, it becomes a simple process of putting a pair of fighters with plate and shield (or chain and shield if you go after the kobolds first) into a 10' wide corridor (or better yet a doorway), such that no more than a couple of kobolds can face the party at a time, and then regardless of how many attacks they are facing, the kobold need nearly a 20 to hit the party, while the party can rather easily hit the kobolds in return and generally lethally if they do. Also, remember, we generally started with a large party of 8-12 characters (2 per player), plus henchmen, dogs, and men-at-arms hirelings. So, yeah, you can win those fights with even low level characters, but they are a nightmare of tedium to go through because its just dice grindy at that point.

And it doesn't really let up. Pretty much every fight in the whole module is like that. There is a fight with 20 skeletons and 20 zombies as pretty much the climax of the adventure in the Temple.

This is pretty typical of Gygax, in that Gygax is expecting 12 players who are all former wargamers at his table, and thinking of D&D in part as a tactical wargame generation device. You see the same thing in the G series and the same thing in the WG4 and the same thing with the bandits in the moat house in T1, with a mass combat being a big part of the game, and the players expected to adopt hit and run commando tactics, make generous use of flaming oil, and to wear down the foes by fleeing and returning multiple times if needed.

And for me, the real problem here is even if you are claiming maps and stat blocks and encounters are the really valuable part of a module, and the really hard part of a module, the problem is that none of this stuff is really even that good, either by the standards of the day or Gygax's own best work. I enjoyed it as a kid, but only in the same way that I can remember playing the card game 'war' as a kid. Monotony meant different things to me then.

And back to the incoherence part of it, in the worst of Gygax designs what you see is that the stronghold of the monsters is more or less entirely working against them. Those 10' wide corridors and guard rooms that the monsters defend are their own death trap. If they just sallied forth from their lair and surrounded the party on open ground, they'd probably win. In the same way, if the frost giants in the glacier rift, just sallied forth from their glacier rift, they'd easily overwhelm the PC party. But Gygax is designing the terrain so that if the PC's fight it in the intended manner with the monsters being stupid, then with "clever play" like making use of chokepoints and doorways, then the valiant party will get through it.

So true about the death traps! I'm running Against the Giants now. One giant barely fits in a typical hallway. They just "300" themselves to death.