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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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I am very fond of The Keep on the Borderlands. My original experiences with the Keep section as a novice DM weren't the best, but then, I was very young. The Caves of Chaos, on the other hand, were great fun for the players as they stomped their way through them!
What is this elderly adventure? It was first published in late 1979, the same year that the AD&D game system was completed with the release of the Dungeon Master's Guide. However, KotB wasn't written for AD&D - instead, it was an adventure module for use with the Basic D&D system as edited by Eric J. Holmes... which was a distilled version of the original D&D system.
When Tom Moldvay significantly revised Basic D&D in 1981, The Keep on the Borderlands was revised with it. (Notably, the monster statistics lost their Dex scores, as initiative was no longer in Dex order as in Holmes' version of Basic). The module did not change in character that much, though: it essentially remained the same.
The module describes the location of the Keep itself - an outpost against the monsters and foes that lie outside the unnamed kingdom from which your character hail - and a nearby dungeon setting, the Caves of Chaos. A small tract of wilderness separates the two, within which Gygax placed a few encounters to entertain those who get lost searching for the Caves.
The Keep itself is quite unusual: none of the NPCs are named, and most are given the barest of motivations. The most developed is the evil priest staying in the tavern and his acolytes; the descriptions are there mainly to spur the DM's imagination and make use of them for his own ends. This works very well for the experienced DM I am now, but it worked less well when I was a young teenager.
You could be forgiven for ignoring the wilderness section - certainly, I have whenever I've run it. The structure of the Basic D&D rules at the time and of the wilderness description doesn't make it easy for a group to find the Caves without other clues... but the Caves are the entertaining part of the adventure, not wandering blindly around the wilderness. Although the encounters can be evocative, they don't add enough to the adventure in my estimation.
Where the adventure really shines is in the dungeon setting - the Caves of Chaos. The Caves don't really make any kind of ecological sense, as there are far too many feuding humanoid tribes in close proximity, but they are great fun to play through. Each tribe feels distinct, and there are enough tricks and room descriptions to keep the whole entertaining. A few really nasty monsters (the minotaur and ogre in particular) can take the party out of their comfort zone and allow either heroism or discretion to prevail - with a pinch of luck!
Apart from the adventure proper, Gygax also gives a number of very helpful tips as to the running of the adventure and D&D in general.
My experiences with the Keep - which I've now run on a number of occasions - indicate that in the hands of a novice DM, it provides good dungeon fodder for hack'n'slash and other basic adventuring activities. However, in the hands of an experienced DM, it allows for superior play with roleplaying, mysteries and intrigue in addition to the regular adventures - but this requires the DM to go beyond the material as presented. Its greatest failing is not in giving greater adventure seeds in the Keep for such activities.
However, even given those caveats, it remains one of my favourite D&D adventures: an entertaining dungeon, a home base with potential, and the whole allowing development into so much more.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
