"But I need bands out there wanting to make the perfect album, wanting to piss in the face of every Reign in Blood, every Paranoid, every Master of Puppets. Wanting to fuck metal up the ass rather than the other way around. And while I'd like to know there were hundreds of bands like this, I'll settle for hoping there are four or five."
"Much of my appreciation for metal is based around conveniently ignoring lots of things."
(these quotes from two different authors, taken from METAL #2: Reborn Through Hate, published 2001)
The laws that govern metal also govern RPGs, and thinking about metal leads to revelations about RPGs.
Let's stop ignoring things for a few minutes. Let's take an attitude not of respect but of skepticism. Let's take some old things and dissect them a bit, poke around their insides, not to see where they are strong, but to see where they are weak. Let's see what we can learn that doesn't just repeat the methods of success, but will allow us to improve upon failures.
Let's stop chasing the perfection of the Daughter and deal the necessary violence to her brothers.
Keep on the Borderlands is one of the classic D&D modules. Everything that people recognize as D&D is captured in this adventure.
The good stuff, and the bad stuff.
The good stuff is great: You have a home base filled with potential for intrigue and interaction, you have the assumed adventuring area, wilderness in between, and room for customization and expansion. The setting is generic enough (none of the people have names!) that you can set this just about anywhere with a roughly medieval technology (defined by the presence of plate mail, catapults, pole arms) without culture being assumed. It fits just about every campaign's culture!
Awesome!
... except that it hard codes several other assumptions as well. It's unavoidable in a module (and perhaps desirable - the point of a module is packaging someone else's gaming for your table). It's particularly unavoidable in Gygax's work because he obviously loved to pile everything on... the monsters, the treasure, the magic. It's his style, and damned if he should change it, even for publication, to suit anyone.
That isn't the issue and it isn't the problem.
The problem happens when someone looks at a module and decides "This is what D&D is supposed to be!" Like it's the untoppable ultimate example of anything.
Keep on the Borderlands creates that impression both for marketing reasons (it was the first adventure for perhaps millions of people) and its in-many-ways (but not all ways!) superior design.
This is a beginning adventure. Designed to begin characters' adventuring careers and players' role-playing careers. And it's not a one-shot tournament design, it's designed to be both a mini-campaign in its own right as well as the springboard to an honest-to-goodness genuine ongoing long-term campaign.
There are 21 different monster types in the module.
This includes humans and does not count the generic random encounter charts given in the advice sections.
That actually doesn't sound so bad (my last play-through of the Keep took 5 sessions of play to complete, so we can do a bullshit calculation to average out to about 4 monster types per session). It does take the idea of "monster-infested caves" and crank it up to 11 (of course this cavern includes gray ooze, of course there's a random minotaur in the middle of this mini-society of humanoid mini-tribes), but most of it makes sense on the local level.
I mean, there are little stylistic bits I might quibble with (those bandits and lizard men seem awful close together in the wilderness, I'd drop one or the other, that sort of thing). But if you must have the minotaur, the fire beetles make sense otherwise there'd be a lot more predatory interaction between the minotaur and the rest than the adventure assumes, for one example.
But looking at the big picture, there's effectively an apartment complex of different creature types that doesn't make sense as a whole. It's kept together with chicken wire and duct tape. (quick, someone stat up a Duct Ape, right now!)
I would think that the Chaos Shrine wouldn't want to be so close to the humanoid creatures unless it had a master-slave relationship over what would be their troops... but that obviously isn't the case according to the the Tribal Alliances and Warfare section. It's too small of an area to handle all the infighting that obviously didn't begin the day before the PCs come into the picture, and those weaker humanoids who "hope to be forgotten by all" wouldn't live right next door to those who would presumably kill or enslave the weak, would they?
But it has to be a fractured environment or else the Caves aren't suitable for levels 1-3.
So there's a bit of a conflict there between gameability and... well, what? Showing off D&D's possibilities like it's a catalog listing?
I don't buy that people in 1978 were somehow less creative or easier marks for plain illogical concepts. I could buy that they were less jaded than fantasy and RPG fans are now, but with that assumption I would expect the situation to be reversed... "You know, those quaint 70s RPGers may have made do with two factions back then, but people have seen it all so now our 2010s Keep reboot needs 8 factions to keep people's interest!"
Of course, over-explanation is no good so going more in-depth about the relations between the factions is not the answer; it's boring and much of it gets glossed over or outright ignored in actual play, because who wants to read and internalize all that stuff? It's a bit of a conflict, but in this case the conflict can be solved by simplifying the whole thing and not having eight factions squeezed into a small ravine. Either cut some of the tribes (and thus decrease the number of different monster types) or don't make the Caves of Chaos be scrunched all together. Spread them out on that wilderness map. If the module could include maps of the guild and reprint charts from the basic rules, then it could have done this.
If things had been more spread out, it could still satisfy those who want their gonzo D&D while reinforcing the exploration aspects of the game (the module already expects/assumes PCs to poke around the wilderness and find things scattered within it), and at the same time those who want a bit more grounded approach wouldn't be forced to change details to have it all make sense, or hope PCs didn't ask inconvenient questions about it all...
Hindsight is, especially nearly three and a half decades on, 20/20, but Gygax had at least a half-decade of experience playing and running D&D at this point, had read far more fantasy and history by 1978 than the majority of people reading this blog post in 2011, not to mention all that keen game-logistics thinking he honed from being an avid wargamer. The art of module design may not have been mature in 1978 but Gygax himself was a mature and experienced gamer.
Oh, I forgot to mention...
There are 69 magical items found in Keep on the Borderlands.
(probably a few more, I likely missed a couple... bundles of magic arrows count as 1 item, as do scrolls no matter how many spells are on a particular scroll... and not counting all those amulets of turning resistance and protection from good medallions which would add dozens more to the number)
Even for a near half-dozen sessions of play, that's a fucking lot for what is assumed to be the start of a long term campaign, isn't it?
But that number doesn't begin to describe the situation.
The majority of the permanent (non-scroll/potion) magic items are in the Keep itself! Sure, that cuts down significantly on the amount of items the PCs are expected to gain for themselves, but what the hell?
I wonder if I did a treasure count if I'd find that there's more treasure in the Keep than outside it... oh hell, let's do some addition!
The Castellan's Chamber has nine magic items (one of which is so unimportant it is used as decoration) and 6200gp in treasure (not counting coins!).
But maybe he's just the example of what a successful adventurer can aspire to, and so a bad example of "The good stuff is already where it needs to be!" Fine.
The loan bank's vault has 26,965.5gp worth of treasure in it.
To compare, the entire Shrine of Evil Chaos complex has 18,504.34gp worth of treasure in it (assuming maximum values of coin in the Gelatinous Cube). The minotaur cave has 4,185gp in treasure, the gnoll cave has 1743.02 (again, assuming maximum values of coins), the bugbears 1797.8gp.
If you completely looted the four most difficult caves (which in D&D logic would carry the most treasure), you still wouldn't have as much treasure as the bank vault in the Keep, and the Castellan keeps as much treasure as any two caves not including the assumed final one.
Holy shitballs.
This is genius if you take the position that it creates a very open module where role reversal is possible and evil parties can ally with the humanoids and/or raid the Keep. Or if you assume some sort of corruption at high levels within the Keep. But neither of those are the intent at all. Proof of that is not only the printed background material, but also suggestion alliances with Keep authorities and giving PCs extra experience for destroying evil artifacts in the Shrine of Evil Chaos yet having no equivalent bonus for screwing around in the Keep. And good luck to a low level party assaulting a fortress with a unified garrison, even with 100 humanoids in tow.
So we have a very large fortified garrison (157 soldiers, many in plate mail, plus all the warhorses and catapults, and that's not counting the curate or others in the chapel, or those in the inn, or the merchants and their guards, or the lackeys and pages... just the armed garrison of the Keep) that's better organized, better equipped, is better protected, has more magic, and has more valuables than the evil critters out in the Caves of Chaos.
And fortresses like this aren't for hiding away and locking the door, they are for projecting power. Which Gygax knew well as a student of military history.
So what's the story of this squabbling collection of inhuman tribes so close to the Keep? Seriously, if a small group of adventurers who fell off the turnip truck yesterday are supposed to be able to conquer the Caves of Chaos with a series of clever incursions, how easy would it be for an organized, well-equipped force with high level characters on hand to just wipe all that shit out? The Castellan is "a very clever fellow, but at times he can be too hasty in his decisions," so why is there a single living thing left in the Caves?
It seems utterly ridiculous that a place out on the absolute fringes of civilization, expected to be an adventuring environment menaced by evil, would be so wealthy and this secure. What, then, must the heart of civilization be like? The areas where the evil forces of chaos aren't less than two miles down the road? How must it be when this armpit of a stronghold directly in harm's way is so filthy stinking rich and well-stocked?
So the PCs could clear out the Caves of Chaos, rid the wilderness of all the threats lurking there... and what will they have accomplished? They'll still be returning to the Keep which was never realistically in any danger to begin with, and any appreciation given by those in charge will be for just doing the job they couldn't be bothered with. All that loot they got still won't make them seem hot shit in the Keep because the place is overflowing with riches (yet I bet the rank and file soldier will resent them for taking their share of loot from when the Keep would have gotten around to dealing with the problem) and half the officers seem to be equipped with magic anyway so bully for you and your +1 doodad.
Shit, if that's all "gold and glory" is worth on the borderlands, might as well stay home and milk cows.
I would think the entire setting makes more sense, that the impetus for the PCs to act is much stronger, that it better matches the written background description and develops the atmosphere described in the module, if the Keep is weak and ill-equipped compared to the menace outside its walls.
... and here I should put some sort of summation or closing bit for all this, but frankly, I think I'm rather done with this...
