JasonKoivu

Awesome and terrible! The Keep on the Borderlands was often the starting point of adventure into the world of Dungeons & Dragons for most. As basic as the D & D Basic Set it came with, The Keep... was never intended to be great literature, even so it wasn't even a particularly good game. It was, however, a useful tool for the beginner. And boy, was I a beginner...

Confusing to a young, undeveloped mind, who didn't understand that this was meant to be a framework for adventure and not a fully realized story with a navigable plot, The Keep... was meant for gamers to use their imaginations to make up the story out of the elements Gygax provided: the officials at the borderland outpost, the bandits of the surrounding lands, the tribal monsters, the evil cult in the nearby cave complex.

Even so, I felt taking up one third of the module (the name D&D gave to these slim booklets) was too much time spent on detailing the outpost. Sure, the players would have interactions with the tavern-keepers, traders and moneylenders, but aside from an evil priest who might join the group and trouble them out in the wilds, there was no adventure to be had here. This was meant to be a base for operations elsewhere. But dang, the place was a veritable king's castle with its own army!



The Caves of Chaos (gotta love that name) was the place where all the action was at! Boy howdy there was a lot going on in those caves! Minotaurs, medusas, ogres, orcs, goblins and more all crowded into a dozen or so caves clustered together in a relatively small ravine just waiting to slay or be slain. That was the unrealistic part. Sure, it's fantasy and so reality shouldn't matter, but it does. Ask any fan of fantasy lit. There have to be certain rules and boundaries. If anything at all can happen, what's the point? So, when Gygax took his monstrous humanoid tribes, who were warring against one another, and stacked them close-packed in a cave complex that resembled a high-rise apartment complex, it was hard to stomach. When brutal violence is the order of the day on both sides and you live one hundred feet away from your enemy, one or other side is going to be wiped out pretty quick.

If you cared to, this game could be modified to be more realistic or to fit your specific campaign. However, at the early age I started playing D&D, connecting cult to outpost, rearranging the map or organizing the tribes of monsters into a community that would naturally defend itself against sword swinging jerks hacking through their front doors was more imagination than my ignorant 9 year old mind could muster. The most roleplaying I remember being capable of pulling off at the time was with the isolated mad hermit hiding in the woods with his pet mountain lion.



But here too I was flummoxed. I didn't understand how the multiple maps that came with this module related to one another. I mixed up the entries and accidentally stuck the hermit in the kobolds' cavern. I also didn't know what a contour line was (ahem, there's a glossary of terms in the back of the booklet...why didn't I look it up?) and thought the blue lines were meant to be streams.



Yup, four lovely little streams flowing unimpeded in unison through solid rock between caverns, doing a nice loop about the ravine before heading on out. I was DMing this once for a friend and he was confused to say the least, but we both enjoyed playing so much that we just let the nonsensical details slide. Hey, it was Dungeons & Dragons, with all its books and books of rules, you still did what the hell you wanted to do. That was the point.

For all its faults, The Keep... was a great resource for those just starting out. It was more than a module, it helped guide the players through their first gaming experience giving them pointers, not only on how to interact with this new world, but also how to get along with your fellow players. Subsequent rules books made this obsolete, but it was helpful at the time, at least to those who were old enough to understand the concepts...or even the terms for that matter. I'm talking about me...

Rating: Could give it the 5 stars my heart desires, should give it the 1 or 2 star rating it deserves, but I'll go with 3.5.