Little Keep on the Borderlands - is it really a low-level adventure?

[Rune]

The PCs don't have to fight monsters just because they're there. Similarly, monsters don't have to fight PCs just because they are there. The presence of something like a beholder in a low-level adventure represents lethality without enforcing it. Instead, it strongly encourages different approaches. This is a good thing.

What I would do is consider before the game what the beholder might want from the PCs and what means it is willing to go to in order to bargain for or extort it from them. Then I would only go to combat if the PCs press the issue.

For example, in a recent (5e D&D) game, four level three PCs were confronted by an ancient green dragon. Sometime earlier, the party had stumbled upon the ruins of a mad elven arcanist who had apparently been experimenting on different chromatic dragons' eggs in an attempt to breed a super-dragon, with the strengths of all colors.

Now the white egg, due to the relative warmth of the climate, had finally hatched before the PCs had arrived at the ruins (actually, he led them there). Informed by the long-dead arcanist's animated skeletal caretaker/dictation playback device and deluded by his own innate illusionist abilities, the wyrmling believed he was the first such super-dragon. Wishing to get his siblings (as he regarded them) back to their clutches so they could be hatched, the white dragon hoped first to lure some adventurers into taking some dragon eggs for fun and profit. Which, of course, they did. Only, they couldn't carry them all, so they hid a few.

Step two was to go tell a bunch of ancient dragons that their brood was being auctioned off by some adventurers.

The green dragon found them first. It wanted two things. Both of the green eggs and the destruction of the other eggs. The PCs' only leverage was the fact that they had hidden some eggs. But it was enough to keep them alive, for now.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Little Keep on the Borderlands is amazing in a billion different ways. It's one of my all-time favorite modules. It's got some "campy" stuff, obviously (WotC wouldn't let them publish the first few drafts as they weren't "silly" enough), but that stuff is easy to strip out or only use if everyone at the table is in need of some comic relief for all the death and dismemberment going on around them.

The Beholder is a TPK waiting to happen...to players that act before thinking or to players that make the "3e assumption" that everything in a module is meant to be killed, and that the PCs are capabale of killing them. Hackmaster4e isn't that kind of game. It requires players to place themselves in the shoes of their PC's and make intelligent choices. Yes, some meta-gaming is assumed to be used by the players (e.g., their 1st level PC's may have never heard of a beholder, but the players have; players that have their PC's run like stink away from the beholder are not 'penalized' for it).

So, as long as you look at LKotB from the blood-stained goggles of HM4e, you'll have no trouble.

By the way, there is so-o-o much going on in the Keep and surrounding area that a DM could just use it as the base for a multi-year campaign, with the PC's never leaving the 'overland map' area in the back cover. If that isn't supreme bang-for-your-buck, I don't know what is!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Kevin Schlupp]

Do it!

(Warning, some spoilers) As a DM who is running this campaign currently, do it! I just looked up the monsters as we went and improved it as my 5e conversion, but it's really sweet at the beginning with some chalenging role playing for the DM. Not to mention the players can easily get stuck where to go and I was short on time, so I was able to easily railroad them to the caves avoiding some conflicts, trouncing some, half of the party down in one, and a half orc wining a bare knuckle brawl with a gorilla and in an Un related situation skining a gorill to make gorilla suits lol.

As far as the beholder goes, he's meant to be taken down by weaklings. He's old and frail compared to a normal beholder, with probably 20% the true strength and missing an eye. It's actually a requirement in this game to either kill or rob the beholder, because of the jem he holds, but it's still worth the playthrough.

 

[ccs]

I was scanning it to consider converting it to 5e (I want a low-level sandbox using the Keep on the Borderlands setup) when I saw there's a beholder in there. I don't want to bother reading it through, much less converting it, if it's just going to be some wonky kill-my-PCs thing.

So then what's your point in posting?

 

[Eltab]

I've never seen the HackMaster conversion, but the original KotB IS a good module for beginners.
Any encounter you don't want to deal with (yet), feed the PCs only vague rumors. Later on when you are ready, introduce an NPC who knows real information, or has a motive to find out stuff.

The biggest change I made was to spread the Caves of Chaos out over a range of hills, not all clumped together in a ravine.
I put a ruined village along the river, to represent the rising danger and what will happen if nobody does anything about it.

 

[ccs]

I see the question of whether something has high level monsters in it as irrelevant to the question of whether it's a "true" sandbox. I'm detecting a doctrinaire issue here; I agree that balancing all encounters is contrary to the definition of a sandbox, but on the other hand, that doesn't mean I have to put huge ancient red dragons into it.

You sound like my friend Tom. That's not a good thing btw.

I once opened a 3x campaign with a huge green dragon attacking (and sinking) the river barge the 1st lv party was traveling on.
They saw it coming & had a round to react. 2 were already below deck, 3 weren't. One guy ran & hid in the wheel house, one jumped over board, one passed his fear save & reached for a crossbow. Crew ran to & fro screaming/trying to hide/abandoning ship.....
It swooped in ignoring the crossbow fire, swept it's tail through the wheel house (knocking debris & the 2 characters on deck into the water), landed on deck (sinking the whole boat), seized a horse and flew off.
Then out of spite it circled back & belched chlorine gas on the survivors bobbing in the water. Once again, the PCs saw the approach & had a round to swim/dive out of the AoE. All did. And then the dragon flew off up-steam with its' tasty horse snack.

Total length of encounter? 6 rounds. Total damage done to the party? About 12 pts divided between the two PCs who got caught in the destruction of the wheel house.
Total interaction between PCs & dragon? 1 ineffectual crossbow shot & having some minor collateral damage inflicted upon them.
And now the adventure truly begins as the PCs have to help the surviving NPC crew foot slog through miles of hostile terrain.
The players all agreed that that was a pretty cool opening sequence & had a great time with the rest of the session as well.

My friend Tom, who wasn't playing, just hanging out there at the shop that evening, proceeded to rant at me afterwards about how dragons really act. It'd do xyz, blah blah blah, that's a CR whatever challenge & completely inappropriate for lv1s, how it could kill 1/2 the party in one round without its' breath weapon, etc.

Eventually he quit. And was bluntly reminded that I'm the DM. ThatI have complete 100% control over what the dragon will do. This isn't a video game script. The dragon doesn't do anything on its' own....