I have run it a couple of dozen times since then, and have been giving it a lot of action lately. I bought my first D&D boxed set on my 13th birthday way back in 1983, and Keep on the Borderlands was included. Megan is starting work on a hex crawl style game, and I want to give her plenty of ideas to borrow steal. What have other people done with this old warhorse? (I honestly don't think I have ever run it as part of its native Greyhawk setting.)įor my own most recent BtB campaign I added a battle of manipulation between infernal courts.įor Sam's BtB I had a campaign into the environs and ruins of a duergar/fire giant empire - that the Forces of Chaos overthrew about five hundred years before the campaign begins. Then expanding to the North - for some reason I always assumed that the Keep is on a northern border, running East-West. (The first of my own plots - Raids from the orcs in the Caves of Chaos being coordinated with bad guys in the Keep itself - with the goal of eventually subverting the security of the Keep itself, leading to its fall if the PCs do not save the day.) Somebody is doing something that the PCs will need to get involved with.
When running and expanding (five completely different Beyond the Borderlands campaigns, at most recent count) my start is adding something going on in the Keep itself (I cannot claim credit - the first time I dealt with the Keep on the Borderlands I was a player - and it turned out that the Banker was up to no good). While it has no hexes, it is pretty much the start for most people that get into hex crawling campaigns. I was already a GM before it appeared - but it has always seemed that it established the basic format for sandbox style campaigns.Ī starting location to act as the PCs base of operations, encounter areas in the wilderness itself, and, of course, the Caves of Chaos as the quintessential dungeon crawl. I was just wondering, how many people started their GMing with the classic Keep on the Borderands, and how many expanded upon it?