Revisiting The Keep on the Borderlands

[Nupo]

I took that dungeon and split it up into nine different mini dungeons. Also updated it to 3.5 edition at the same time. These mini dungeons can be dropped in almost anywhere, in almost any terrain, or climate. For example, you can have the party come across a merchant wagon that was just attacked by orcs. They track the orcs to one of the mini dungeons to rescue the merchants, and wallah you have a quick little adventure. I use them all the time, you can make a few small changes (like changing the orcs to duergar) and it is a whole new adventure with very little prep time.

 

[Schmoe]

Change #6 – New Developments

Change: I have started introducing new events that occur when the party returns to town, or adjustments in the enemies at the Caves of Chaos when the party returns to the caves. One of the recent events that occurred when the party returned to the Keep is that they found a heightened guard presence at the gates and throughout the keep. In addition, the Castellan implemented the new policy that all visitors to the Keep must pay a 5 sp tax to keep their weapons at hand, and those weapons must be bound even if the tax is paid. As the players asked around, they found that this is because the daughter of the provisioner vanished in the night, and for his own reasons the Castellan suspects foul play.

Reason: This keeps things changing and prevents the locations from becoming stagnant. The development with the missing daughter can eventually tie in to the corrupt priest at the Keep, and it also helps tie activities at the Keep to the enemies in the Caves. Bear in mind that I have a group of very new players. I want to make sure that the players can see that things happen even without their involvement and are encouraged to think of the place as an organic location.

 

[Schmoe]

My players loved playing through Keep on the Borderlands. They had never played D&D Basic before, only 5e, and so I was motivated to show them what the game was like in its earlier form. They loved the freedom they had to choose their own path and it was a lot of fun for me to add the details to the non-descript NPCs and the characters in the keep. It spawned one of my players' favorite villains, "Broken" Maffew Bartlebee, who was discovered to be the antagonist behind all of the activity in the Caves.

Nice . Every player is different, though. One of my players has played before, but I get the feeling that his experience was in a heavily story-driven game where he was expected to follow a particular story. He has asked several times "what is our goal here?" When I recap the situation and what he knows, he always picks it back up, but I'm going to have one of the town NPCs engage him and specifically ask him to do something, either to rescue a prisoner, or cleanse the Caves, or something similar. Some people do best with a little bit of direction, too.

To your point about creating the feel of activity and change within the keep, one of the things that made it really work was having little mini events every time the players went back to the Keep. One of their first return visits they found the bailiff who originally hired them to investigate the caves murdered which spawned a detective like mini-session where they questioned individuals and tried to discover who the perpetrator was. On another they learned that an estate auction was being held after the alleged death of a wealthy merchant (who they later found captured in the caves).

Hey, great minds think alike! Notice my latest update...

 

[Schmoe]

I took that dungeon and split it up into nine different mini dungeons. Also updated it to 3.5 edition at the same time. These mini dungeons can be dropped in almost anywhere, in almost any terrain, or climate. For example, you can have the party come across a merchant wagon that was just attacked by orcs. They track the orcs to one of the mini dungeons to rescue the merchants, and wallah you have a quick little adventure. I use them all the time, you can make a few small changes (like changing the orcs to duergar) and it is a whole new adventure with very little prep time.

That's actually an awesome idea. I'll have to remember that one.

 

[Schmoe]

I am definitely going to follow this thread. Keep is the only module that I ever ran, although I bought plenty and read them for pleasure and for ideas. It fit into an area of my gameworld and it was lots of fun.

Thanks for reading. I run a mix of modules and my own homebrew. As I've grown older, I find that I never run a module "as-is" anymore, I always end up making tweaks here and there. I wonder if this is more related to the type of module I run, though. For one such as Keep on the Borderlands, it's a pretty open playground that really begs to be customized. I don't generally run modules with tight story-lines, although there are a few that have caught my eye over the years (Red Hand of Doom, Zeitgeist, to name a few).

 

[Nupo]

I actually prefer these kinds of bare bones modules. They're what I'm used to. I started with 1st edition back in '79. I prefer modules that are pieces of the bigger campaign, not the whole thing. I prefer for the big picture to happen organically. I have some other old 1st edition modules that I sometimes convert and use, but mostly just create things myself. Never been a fan of the highly directed "Adventure Paths." About the only thing I have purchased from gaming stores in years is dice. I always give a new set to someone when I introduce them to the game.

 

[Henry]

Fair enough I wish I had gotten into the JG stuff more when I was young. I think I can still pedantically claim correctness if you qualify it as the original sandbox for the majority of players at the time.

All deference to [MENTION=518]JeffB[/MENTION] but I'll second the "original sandbox for majority of players" line. Due to its widely printed status, B2 was my first sandboxy module (my first module, actually!), and first for all the players I knew back then. I had never even heard of Judges Guild until sometime in the late 80s. I think I've probably used B2 to start new groups off at least four times!

 

[JeffB]

Well sure, Keep was printed in orders of magnitude more than the Wilderlands. And Keep was far more high profile. But it's definitely not the original sandbox, and Jacquays was doing it in Dungeoneer too in 1976/1977.

Don't get me wrong, you will find no bigger fanboy of Gary, than I! it's simply a nitpick and just giving credit where credit is due for bringing the concept to print (and JG was official D&D material long before Keep was printed)

 

[Schmoe]

Change #7 – Integrating the Hermit

Change: I added a conversation overheard at the bar between three guards where one mentions that the hermit living north of the keep is a “monster who eats children.” I also have one of the slaves in area #40 who has been driven mad and will rave to the party that the cult is going to doom them all, and only the hermit knows their secret. Finally, I’ve decided that the curate in the Keep knows how to approach the hermit without the hermit attacking on sight. Essentially, the party must wear crowns of leaves and always, always speak in the third person.

Reason: It always bugged me that every encounter in the wilderness was just a straight up combat encounter as written. I also always thought that there was a lot of role-playing potential with the hermit. This set of linked clues allows me to give the party a chance to get some vital information from the hermit and tie him into the adventure in a more meaningful way. It should also be fun seeing the players try to have a conversation strictly in the third person.

I spent probably half an hour to an hour writing up the conversation, thinking about how to tie things together, and coming up with a key for the party to be able to interact with the hermit safely. I'm really hoping to use this one.

 

[Schmoe]

Change #8 – Prisoner notes

Change: I gave names to most of the prisoners in the Caves and jotted down notes about any ties they have back to the Keep.

Reason: I’m terrible with random names at the spur-of-the-moment. When left to my own devices, all of my NPC’s become either Hank or Sue, and there can only be so many Sue’s in the world. I’ve tried having lists of names handy to choose from, but that just becomes another piece of paper I have to shuffle through my stack to find, and I end up shuffling through papers for two minutes then calling the NPC Sue because I can’t find the list.

In addition, having put some forethought into the background of the slaves will help me make them seem like more fully developed NPCs. The module already provides some background (but no names) for the prisoners in area 24, but there’s no such information for those in area 40. I spent less than an hour on this.