B2: The Keep on the Borderlands

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

shit was so cash

Shit, this is back when old-school adventures were old-school.

Created back in the glory days of Dungeons and Dragons, when traps were dangerous, poison was save-or-die, and everything was Awesome. It was one of the first adventures released for the "Basic" version of the system (released alongside the "Advanced" version), by Gary Gygax himself back in 1978. The general gist was that an unknown evil had taken up occupation in a series of caverns (the so-called Caves of Chaos) not too far from a strategically-important castle town (the aforementioned keep) in the borderlands.

Classic dungeon crawling and high adventure ensue. It was made for low-level groups, so it's soft-around-the-edges unlike a certain other module that has been known to drive men to madness. In spite of this it had some serious challenges in it, including some nasty cursed items, a bunch of warring monstrous humanoid clans getting ready to attack the keep, and a temple of an evil god set up to profit from it all. All in all, it was a forgiving module, well-suited to a wide array of different party styles and tactics, whether a group was full of warrior-diplomats or sneaky gits, magic-users, and fighty-types - yet it was also hard-core enough to make parties feel tension and unease. There was treasure to be had, and so many memories for the players who hopped into this game, that it remains a fond segment for all.

The Keep on the Borderlands went out of print in the early 1980s, but has been reprinted two times; a sequel was also made.

Adventure Awaits!

General Outline

The module is set in the titular "Borderlands," a region far from more civilized lands and on constant verge of all out monster attack. The players arrive at the keep and get to interact with a LOT of NPCs as well as learning bits of news and lore of the area as well as possibly getting their first quests. The map of the region shows some thick woods, some hills, and some swampy areas, all of them teeming with possible quest hooks and/or allies.

Eventually the players make their way to the Caves of Chaos (another cave on the map, the Cave of the Unknown, was placed merely to give DMs a place to make their own dungeon as well). The Caves of Chaos are cut into the sides of a somewhat steep but small valley and are laid out in a way that is basically the reverse of Gygax's typical dungeon idea, namely that the enemies get harder the further up the walls of the valley you go though a few enemy caves are clearly much more powerful than their location would indicate so players need to be extra careful the entire time.

Players can fight or communicate with the various factions that fill the caves, almost all of them having beef with another faction nearby. Why they are all living this close while hating each other is left up to the DM to explain but probably centers on the final section of the dungeon which is basically a temple to chaos (or some other dark entity of the DM's choosing).

With enough content to run adventures for literally weeks or months for players, and it's easy level of entry for DMs and players alike, B2 is rather phenomenal for giving so much in such a slim package.

Remakes

The module was well-received by almost everyone who played it, and was ranked the 7th greatest Dungeons and Dragons adventure of all-time by Dungeon Magazine in 2004. Like a lot of old-school adventures that Wizards of the Coast fucking dragged their heels on, they didn't release an updated version of Keep on the Borderlands until 4th edition, where it's once again a generally low-level module and is infinitely less dangerous, leading most of /tg/ to proudly declare that it sucks, having lost a lot of the suspense and sense of danger the original tended to drive home due to 4th's less-lethal combat and traps regimen.

In 1999, Ru "Against The Giants" Emerson did the novel. As Greyhawk Classics - despite that its module had got included with the Tom Moldvay Basic set, whose Expert set introduced the Known World. It was neither properly Greyhawk nor (G-d save us) a "classic". Emerson owes Keith Strohm a beer for that one's next book Tomb of Horrors, which will be even worse.

The Keep on the Borderlands was never remade for 3rd or 3.5, despite there being overpowering demand for it. Veteran elegan/tg/entlemen are quick to point out that this squarely falls into the same category as some of WotC's other bone-headed moves, like suing to stop other companies from working on books for Ravenloft in 3rd Edition, claiming they were going to release their own version of the setting (only doing so with the Expedition to Castle Ravenloft book for 3.5, a level 6-10 module), Failing to sell Planescape, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun (settings highly sought-after and that frankly would have sold themselves), and so on. The caves portion of the module, however, was updated in 2012 for the early early playtesting of D&D Next.

To many fans joy, in 2017 it was announced that Keep on the Borderlands (along with it's sister module B1 In Search of the Unknown) would be released 2018 as Into the Borderlands as part of the partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Goodman Games. This release contained two scans of the original B1 and B2 adventures (to highlight the differences from their original and later 80s releases) as well as updating the modules and connecting them to form one overarching adventure suitable for D&D 5e characters of 1st to 5th level. Hilariously they kept almost all of the original treasure and added a few additional adventure locales themselves which only added more treasure. What this means is that by the time the players are done playing through it they'll be on par in terms of wealth as characters several levels higher in most other 5e adventures and decked out in a fair number of magical weapons, armors and other wondrous items they should actually be able to take on even harder threats going forward. And what harder a threat to take on than a whole island of dinosaurs, pirates, cannibalistic spider-people and ancient secrets?

Gallery

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  the Caves of Chaos (spoilers! duh.)