Building the Keep on the Borderlands

 Strange as it may seem for the grognards among us, Keep on the Borderlands can be somewhat overwhelming for the first-time DM. The module packs an awful lot into a small number of pages, and just running it alone still means dozens of NPCs to detail, not to mention the intrigues taking place in the Caves of Chaos. Of course, most of that is entirely unnecessary, and the players will never experience a fraction of the material you have prepared for them.

So don’t prepare it.

Don’t think of the module as a burden, something that you have to hack to pieces before play, something you have to add infinite detail to. Instead, treat it just as you would if you were creating your own setting, and work out only what you need to work out. After all, the PCs will not be going everywhere at once; what you need to focus on are those NPCs and locations that they are highly likely to visit, and the DM has at least an element of control in narrowing this down.

You need to know who rules the Keep, but at this point, just a name and a vague description will do. Unless you as a DM mandate it, a fresh group of wandering rogues are not going to get an audience with the ruler, not until they have proven themselves. (I usually use Morgan Ironwolf, as a tie-in to the Basic Set; the backstory being that she has retired from her adventuring days to take up her role as Baroness of the Borderlands. I often drop some of the other characters from the Sample of Play into the Keep as well, in various roles.)

Aside from that, you need to work out where the PCs will go, right at the start. There’s a Tavern and an Inn, and you can bet they’ll go to both. Names for the owners of those places, and a couple of others to serve as staff. The Gate Guard, they’ll see him first. You only need the one. The Bailiff, who rules the Outer Keep, is the ‘establishment’ figure that they PCs are likely to run into. The Priest, for obvious reasons, and I usually make use of the Jewel Merchant as well. Then names for the owners of the Smithy, the Provisioner, the Trader, and the Loan Bank – but they can also double as tavern patrons. (Here’s a tip – have the PCs reach the Keep as it is getting dark.)

None of these need to be fleshed out in anything like exhaustive detail at this stage. Names, a few one-word descriptive ‘tags’, and you’re done. Don’t put more effort in to characters you don’t know that you are going to use. Most of those are likely, but not certain, not by any means. You may have a few other ideas as well, NPCs that you hope to use in future adventures, perhaps tie-ins from other modules, feel free to list those as well. Again, tavern patrons. At this stage, all you have is a single sheet of paper, and that’ll be enough.

The trick being that you are going to flesh these out during play. For the first session, this is all you should need. (Actually, I usually spend the first session getting to the Keep, letting the PCs get to know each other before throwing them into the larger world. Perhaps one NPC from the Keep to serve as an early patron.) You’ll quickly work out what you need, and which NPCs can remain just a name on a piece of paper and which you will be fleshing out. Remember that you do not want to drown your PCs in detail. Throw twenty NPCs at them and I guarantee that they will not remember any of them. Keep it simple at this stage. (That, or put together a directory for them to follow. A list of names and shops at least. Though if you limit the introductions at the start, that ought to help.)

Don’t be afraid to change the Keep as well. Perhaps the Trader went out of business and there is now an empty storefront, which can be taken over by another NPC if you realize the PCs are going to make frequent use of a service. I’ve done this on a few occasions. And when it comes to the Guild House, again, that can be left empty. Perhaps the Guild has failed. Or the PCs are the Guild; I’ve done that a few times. Again, it’s a good idea to see what the PCs are likely to require. A party with multiple Magic-Users will justify some sort of Mages’ Guild.

Now we get to the Caves of Chaos, presumably early on. Don’t even think about covering all of them on the first crawl. This has to be focused or frankly you are going to kill your PCs. Pick one of the easier dungeons and give the PCs an objective – rescue a prisoner, retrieve an item. Make sure they have a goal, and give them a guide. Perhaps an NPC who will get them to the cave, even accompany them if needed, or alternatively a map. You could even use a prisoner, a captured goblin. Introduce them to the caverns as you’ve introduced them to the Keep – slowly.

The rest will come. Twelve sessions into the campaign, you’ll have a folder full of notes that you have prepared organically, and your players won’t need a study guide to find their way through the Caves of Chaos.

The Missing Class

I’m sure that over the years, most B/X DMs have been unable to resist the temptation to add additional character classes to the game, whether custom-made or adopted from 1^st Edition AD&D. I have myself, more than once, though I started to notice that oddly enough, my players rarely took me up on it, defaulting instead to the classic seven classes. With that in mind, and a new campaign to start shortly, I started to think about what I might add, going back through my notes, my archive of old magazines, trying to see what might fit.

And I struggled. Genuinely, I struggled. I’ve always thought that most of the variant AD&D classes suffered for having high Ability Score requirements, few ever qualifying for them, to the point that in my last two campaigns I dropped those requirements completely, though even with that adjustment, everyone went for the Original Seven instead. The more I stopped to think about it, the more I understood it. Those seven classes cover an awful lot of ground between them, and over the long years they’ve become truly iconic.

For that matter, the only variant class I personally would be tempted by would be the Illusionist, and in all honesty, that’s just a Magic-User with a variant spell list. (Though my version changes the Prime Requisite to Charisma for obvious reasons. Not least to give that player who rolls a high Charisma score something to celebrate.) One way or another, I’ll continue to use the Illusionist, I suspect. If for no other reason than that I have a fondness for that class, and that it tends to create some truly fun NPCs for me to run. (I suppose I could simply add the additional spells of the class to the vanilla Magic-User, but where’s the fun in that.)

Aside from that, though, there is only one character class that I think actually fills a gap in the game. Let’s quickly evaluate the Original Seven. Four human classes, Fighter, Thief, Cleric and Magic-User, and three race-based classes, in the form of Elf, Dwarf and Halfling. (Hobbit if the Tolkien Estate isn’t sitting at your table.) There’s a class missing from that list. There’s no race-based class for humans. Now I know what you are all thinking, that humans already have four classes of their own, but none of them are truly a quintessential human.

Which brings me to the Barbarian, though not the class from Unearthed Arcana, instead the class from White Dwarf #5, which frankly I have always preferred. This one is Robert E. Howard’s Barbarian, instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Barbarian, a wiry, wily fighter with a selection of relevant special skills that make him appear as though he has stepped out of the Stone Age, instead of being a simple Fighter-variant. Skills in Tracking and Sign Language, a limited weapon and armour selection, reduced hit points from the Fighter (d6 instead of d8), but levelling at the same rate as the Cleric in compensation, and an ability to climb that is similar to that of the Thief, though the Thief’s skill is superior. (I want to see a group that is composed entirely of Barbarians and Thieves…) I’ve made a few modifications to the basic idea, but basically, it’s the same class as described in that very early issue of White Dwarf.

Any number of early modules talk about Barbarians, and while I’ve only used this one in a handful of campaigns thus far, and again, nobody has actually played one, I’m definitely throwing it into my next one, with the core idea that it represents a human racial class. Those four original human classes represent civilized characters, while this one represents humanity in its basic, elemental form. Not to mention that it fills one other critical niche.

Now you can roll a random character class on a d8. 

Planning my next Campaign...

One way or another, it always comes back to the Keep on the Borderlands. It wasn’t the first adventure I ever ran, as I recall, that was Escape from Zanzer’s Dungeon, but it certainly was the heart of my first campaign, and I’ve run it at least twenty times during my years as a Dungeon Master. It has everything you need to put together a good Basic-level campaign, but more importantly, it is a fantastic blank canvas upon which a host of material can be added.

Technically, my first taste of Dungeons and Dragons came in the big Classic boxed set in ’91, with the cardboard miniature stand-ups, but as I recall, that was an unwanted Christmas present received by one of my friends that I ended up with for a while (until his parents asked where it was, if I’m remembering it correctly; though I ended up buying it off him a few months later.) In response to this, my parents bought me the three Second Edition books for my birthday that year, along with a couple of issues of Dungeon magazine…

And that’s where this campaign began, thirty years ago. And it wasn’t one of the adventures, either; it was one of the ‘Letters to the Editor’, where a writer described how he had pieced together his campaign from past issues of the magazine, tying them together with shared NPCs and rumour tables. I’ve been doing this ever since, and my new ‘Borderland’ campaign setting is designed to let me incorporate a series of classic modules, with Keep on the Borderlands as the base, the remainder altered and adjusted to fit.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t add In Search of the Unknown to that canvas; I didn’t get that module until I was in college, so I must have done it at some point, but ever since I picked it up, it’s been one of my favourites, and is always a part of any campaign I run, though to be fair, the players don’t always choose to venture into its darkened halls. I’ve adapted it many times over the years, using new maps, new monsters, but it always comes through.

 he third part of the key trinity is, of course, Village of Hommlet, which I will admit is the one of the three I have run the least. This one, of course, was made for AD&D 1^st Edition rather than Basic/Expert, but the adventure requires little alteration to make it fit; the NPCs need considerable alterations, but I already do that anyway with that particular module, I always have. (And it goes surprisingly well with the Jean Wells version of Palace of the Silver Princess, incidentally...)

All three of these modules fit well together as it is, but all three of them form a different entry point into the setting, each sufficient, with greater or lesser degrees of work, for a full campaign in its own right. That was the origin point of the ‘three groups in the campaign’ concept, to have three individual groups of PCs, each focused on one of the three modules but sharing the world with the others, the actions of each group having at least some sort of effect on the other groups. If one group drives off a tribe of Goblins, say, then the survivors might end up running into another.

 To give a different feel to the campaign, I’m making use of some old White Dwarf magazines, dating right back to the beginning, and pulling out the spells, creatures, magical items and adventures that were published in those pages back when it was a role-playing magazine, long before Games Workshop was ever involved in miniature gaming, long before Warhammer was anything more than an entry in a table of equipment. Perhaps the best two modules were penned by the late Albie Fiore, who only worked for Games Workshop in the early years before leaving the hobby, ending up as a designer of cryptic crosswords for the Guardian.

Gaming’s loss. Those two adventures, the Lichway and Halls of Tizun Thane are deservedly legendary, and both of them have a place in this campaign; I’m not sure which groups will encounter them, but they’ll add additional flavour to the setting I have created. Those aren’t the only modules I’ll be using, either; there are several others from those days I intend to make good use of. Again, it's a question of adding a unique flavour to the campaign. Not that I won’t be making use of old issues of Dragon magazine, but I wanted something more.

 Another major influence is the other old-school RPG I enjoy, Tunnels & Trolls. Oddly enough, I’ve never actually run a campaign in that system, only a few one-shots, but where that game shines is in its extensive collection of single-player modules, great to pull out and play for an hour here or there. I’ve drawn considerable influence from those modules, and quite a few adventure sites and NPCs have managed to find their way into this campaign, though obviously with extensive conversion involved. (One of these days I’ll try to run an actual campaign with that system…one of these days…)

I’ll confess that a part of this was an amazing stroke of luck I had during the final stages of preparation for the campaign, when I stumbled across a near-complete set of Sorcerer’s Apprentice magazine, Flying Buffalo’s old house magazine and one of the best that ever supported the hobby, albeit with a far too short run. Flicking through those articles gave me a lot of inspiration, not to mention more opportunities to add various bits and pieces to the campaign. One key with those three modules, a feature that is all-too-often missing in more modern adventures, is that they represent a framework to be filled in, with almost infinite scope for customization. A tool I mean to make much use of in the adventures to come.