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.