Keep on the Borderlands

[Blood axe]

The Keep on the Borderlands, the iconic Basic D&D module. Opinions vary on this adventure, but many of us "old timers" started our adventuring careers there.
Whats your experience with this adventure?
Im going to start a project in the Workshop to add some details to this golden oldie. Many of The Keeps inhabitants dont even have names!

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There are some different versions of KOTB. One has three pieces of art by Erol Otus, not in the other book. A Minotaur, a stirge, and some treasures for sale from the Loan Bank.

[Blood axe]

D&D Next is even using the Caves of Chaos to playtest!

[Thoth Amon]

We just finished it. I DMd. It was fun.

[Blood axe]

We just finished it. I DMd. It wa s fun.

Thats cool, give some details. How did you handle the generic setting.( no names, no deity for church,etc) Tell us about your adventures.

[Blood axe]

Dyson Logos gave some of the Caves of Chaos a make over, in his own unique style. Very cool stuff. Ill put a link up later.

[Thoth Amon]

We just finished it. I DMd. It wa s fun.

Thats cool, give some details. How did you handle the generic setting.( no names, no deity for church,etc) Tell us about your adventures.

The setting is loosely based on the Maztica map and deities, basically just that, the rest is standard D&Dism. I had them play their alignment, which ended up causing some issues between the characters of two players (Jon kept playing chaotic clerics and Flo kept playing lawful characters). It was fun, though. The group had nearly a TPK while fighting gnolls due to playing alignment.

Each player started with four characters but could only replace dead ones up to two characters per player. I didn't count but I imagine that 20+ characters died over the course of the adventure. I didn't use wandering monsters in order to keep the game moving. As far as characters, it was 3d6, in order and there were not a whole lot of house rules (mostly involving spell casting). The rules started straight LL, then migrated into LL with AEC, and then finally into a mix of S&W and LL. I eventually just wrote a doc with all of the attribute, class, and spell tables to make it easier. If I could get away with it, I would drop attributes all together.

The characters basically walked through every difficult encounter except the medusa. Minotaur and head bad guy priest were offed in two rounds, or less. If the group ran into kobolds or goblins, though, they usually lost a couple characters. It ended up being a running joke.

The last session had the group finish the caves and return to the keep (called Castellan Keep), accept jobs as caravan guards traveling to the towns of the desert dwarves.

[Blood axe]

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[Blood axe]

Dyson Logos awesome make-over map!

[url][/url][/url]

[Blood axe]

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[Dyson Logos]

While I was once a fan of the Keep and the Caves, I find that the caves themselves are not conducive to fun low-level play for most players. The rest of the adventure is AWESOME, but the caves just don't do it for me anymore. SOME of the caves I love, but there's just too much cave, not enough chaos.