Basic D&D – The Dice Pool

The Editioning, Basic D&D, the End

The Kept on the Borderlands

You see, it’s past tense because the game’s over now. Anyway… dear reader, if you are reading this and you don’t know what any of the words in the title or sub-heading mean, maybe go back and have a read of the entire collection of posts on the Editioning, our challenge to play every edition of the original fantasy RPG, and on this game of B/X or Basic D&D.

We finished up the game on session 11 a few of days ago and I have been thinking about it a lot since then. There’s a lot to consider! After all, this was the adventure that kicked off the role-playing lives of so many nerds from 1981 on, since it came with the Basic Set. Not only that; in the context of the Editioning, playing it now, in 2026, allows me to think about it in a way that players at the time could never have. As well, it’s the adventure that launched a thousand clones. Could Gary Gygax ever have foreseen the enduring popularity and desire to emulate this scenario, when he first designed it?

But, when it comes down to it, I want to take this game that we played at face value. That’s the real purpose of the Editioning as I see it. That, and comparison. I want to compare this experience with the experience of playing every other edition of D&D. And that’s something I can usefully begin to do now that two of them are done and another is under weigh.

Beginnings

The About page of the Keep on the Borderlands - inlcudes a gnraly illustration of a band of adventurers fighting an owlbear in a dungeon. — Info Page

One of the major attractions of Basic D&D for many will undoubtedly be the ease and speed with which you can create and even detail your PCs. You can easily roll up stats, choose a class and equip a level one character in about half an hour, maybe a bit more depending on your familiarity with the game and the genre. Genre is an important point here. There are no gonzo elements, really. It’s pretty straight-forward medieval Europe with dwarves, elves and goblins. Most anyone interested in playing D&D is going to have at least a passing cultural understanding of the broad strokes and tropes. This ease of character creation is a major bonus, from my point of view, it allowed us to have our session 0 and session 1 in the same evening. But, maybe more importantly, it allows you to roll up a new PC on the fly while the others mourn the loss of the one that just got an arrow through the eye. What this means, in many instances is that any particular PC can be easily substituted by another of the same class.

To compare this aspect of the game to OD&D all I can say is there is not a huge amount of difference, except to say you have slightly fewer decisions to make in Basic. OD&D allows you to choose race as well as class, so, for instance, we had a halfling thief and an elf magic user in our OD&D game. From this perspective, I often think of AD&D as the natural descendant of OD&D rather than Basic. AD&D 2nd Edition is determined to overwhelm the player with options, however, and requires multiple decisions to be made simultaneously. From alternative ability score rolling methods to the inclusion of kits, non-weapon proficiencies and schools of magic, the complexity is ramped up ten-fold from Basic. This is a matter of preference, I think. Some of my players enjoyed all the options quite a bit. While others would much rather get to the game more quickly, like you can with Basic or OSE or most OSR games these days.

Map of the Wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands. A great forest in the north surrounds the Caves of Chaos and the Cave of the Unknown. A river meanders through the central part of the map, with marshes along its edges and more forest to the south. The Keep stands just north of the river on the western side of hte map. — Map of the wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands

As for the beginning of the adventure itself, The Keep on the Borderlands encourages the DM to take the Background section and expand on it or tailor it to their own campaign. Isaac did this for us by indicating that we were the last surviving members of a mercenary band that was returning from a failed campaign in the wilderness. This worked well to explain the relationship of the PCs, why they were traveling together and to give us a motivation to seek out gainful employment so we could get back on our feet.

My experience with OD&D and AD&D 2nd Ed is quite different. Of course, I created the OD&D adventure from scratch so I necessarily created the starting situation for them as well, but for the Eternal Boundary in 2nd Ed, the DM is presented with two options to start, and it’s quite proscriptive otherwise.

Middles

The map of the caves of chaos - a finger-shaped ravine with cave systems branching out from it. — Caves of Chaos Map

The Keep on the Borderlands adventure booklet consists largely of location descriptions. The “plot” such as it is, is contained within those. This is a familiar adventure design methodology for anyone who has been paying attention to the OSR. One of the first descriptions is of the Inner Bailey of the keep. In the two paragraphs devoted to it, the major points made regarding it are that the PCs must do a great service to the keep to gain entrance and if they do that, they’ll have a feast thrown in their honour, where the Castellan will gain the measure of them. If they impress him, he will send them on missions later, have them blessed on the way out and pay them a reasonable rate each time.

Isaac nicked a great little mechanic from the Root RPG for handling our reputations with the various factions involved in the adventure. Root uses reputation trackers to record how well liked or despised your PC is by the various woodland factions, with PC actions able to add points to or subtract them from the tracks. You can find a good description of that here on the Cannibal Halfling Gaming site. Gaining rep with the various factions and being aware of it definitely made us push our characters to make certain choices that we might otherwise not have. Mostly, we wanted to build reputations with factions we were already friendly with and tank all the others. The fact is, the way we ended up playing the adventure, it was about 75% impressing or pissing off factions, 15% dungeon crawl, 10% getting absolutely fucked by random encounters. So, the gaining of rep was at least as important as gaining experience. The module does refer to the possibility that the PCs might become aware of the conflicts between the denizens of the Caves of Chaos and use that as a way to set them against one another. But, it doesn’t provide any useful advice as to how to handle it beyond, “be careful to handle this whole thing properly,” which is genuinely worse than useless. What it does not do, at any stage is present the monsters as anything other than elements to be eliminated. We don’t need a name and background for every monster NPCs but at least the leaders should get that! Once again, Isaac took it upon himself to fill in those blanks, naming the leader of each faction, giving them personalities and motivations that we could attempt to work with or butt up against. He never managed it from a combat-first perspective, and I really appreciated that, because combat is exceedingly lethal and to be avoided at all costs. This might have just been the random encounters which included monsters of higher levels than us who were quite capable of one-shotting our toughest members, but it did feel more lethal than the other two games I’m comparing here.

Comparing all of this to OD&D, once again, in my own home-brew adventure, I actually felt there were some things I could have learned from it. I often felt I should have had more factions and even NPCs in general in my OD&D game, even though the concept I had for it did not require that. Combat-wise, OD&D and Basic both have a hitting problem, in that it’s really hard to do. We missed a lot and it was generally agreed that having a shit-load of hirelings was a necessity, if only so that the law of averages would be on our side. This was true of the enemies killing our party members too. We lost two PCs throughout the campaign, but oh so many more hirelings.

It’s harder for me to compare the middle of the adventure to 2nd ed, since we are not there yet, but I can compare the style of adventure. The Eternal Boundary is an entirely different beast. Of course, it does have the factions of Sigil baked into the adventure, and the factions the PCs belong to have a real effect on things, but they are not trying to ingratiate themselves to the factions, really. It involves a lot of investigations that may involve factions, but that’s about it. Actually, it would be interesting to include a Root-style rep track but, there are so many factions involved in the city, it might become like too much overhead. One thing is for sure, so far, it seems like a more diplomatic than combat-oriented adventure. Combat-wise, I can’t comment too much. We haven’t had any fighting yet, but, from what I remember, combat had the potential to take an age and to be very crunchy compared to Basic. Still quite lethal but with a lot less instant death. I’ll revisit this after we have a few more fights in Planescape.

Endings

An illustration of a minotaur, GHolds a weapon. Looks angry, — Minotaur

Isaac gave us an ending more because we had to move on to other games than because we came upon it naturally. The fact is, looking at the adventure now, we had barely scratched the surface of the Caves of Chaos. We missed the entire minotaur labyrinth! There are caves denoted by letters A to K and we only entered three of them. That third one, though, that was a doozy.

Isaac had been coming up with a variety of events through the course of the adventure, and we had no idea they weren’t detailed in it. The main area of his invention involved the Serpent Cult and its relation to the Curate of the church in the keep and his relation to the Castellan’s advisor, an elf. Now, we had immediately discovered the Curate’s elf-racism since one of our party was an elf, but it ran deeper. One day, we returned to the keep to find that the advisor had killed the curate when he accused him of being a spy for the Serpent Cult. We investigated and found no evidence that the elf had anything to do with the cult, but did discover evidence that the cult was operating from one of the Caves of Chaos. On our word, the Castellan released the imprisoned advisor and then promised us a permanent residence in the keep and his eternal gratitude if we would clear out the cult. In order to take on the cult, we recruited the assistance of the goblins we had previously made friends with and then marched on the evil cave.

This led us to the last session of play. As a cleric-heavy group, we turn-undeaded our way through the majority of the encounters leading to the final boss, the Chaos Priest hiding in his chamber beyond a chapel swarming with skeletons and zombies. We used Hold Person on him, he failed his Save against it and we stabbed him to death and cut off his head to bring back to the castellan. Hurrah! We lost the majority of the goblins on our team but otherwise came out a great deal richer and even more experienced.

Isaac had us do epilogues for our PCs, since we are unlikely to return to them and I will genuinely miss playing Thaddeus Nightbane. He finally proved that not everyone he cared about had to die and that felt like a good end to his arc. I will say that, as far as running this only in Basic D&D goes, I think it could be difficult. Thaddeus ended up as level 5 and, thechnically, Basic only goes to level 3. You would have had to have the Expert set on hand before you finished playing the adventure, I feel. Or, just make sure, as DM, that you don’t hand out too much treasure or encounter XP.

So that was the end for us. But, I’m quite sure you could continue playing in and around the Keep and Caves for twenty or more sessions if you wanted to explore every cave and every faction. It’s even got re-playability, especially with a different DM. Isaac put so much of himself and his ideas into it, I’m sure, if I ran it myself, for instance, it would be a very different game.

Comparing to OD&D’s end, it’s difficult, once again, but I can say that my adventure, the Woes of Sorrowfield had a very clear ending, although they might have approached it from different ways. This has nothing to do with the edition either, of course, more the adventure. Woes was a totally different type of adventure compared to Keep, so, like I said, it’s hard to compare.

As for the Eternal Boundary, although we are a long way from the end of that, I know, for sure, that the ending also be at a very definite time and place, although, once again, they might arrive at it in any one of a number of different ways.

The main difference, here is that Keep on the Borderlands is not really interested in telling a particular story, so much as presenting a situation, but both the AD&D 2nd Ed adventure and my own OD&D adventure, had a specific story to tell.

Conclusion

I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This adventure tops a lot of people’s favourite adventures lists and I can see why now. Although, I would say a lot of my enjoyment came from the way in which Isaac ran it rather than from the contents of the module itself. But the module gives a DM the freedom to expand and improvise as they want, so that is a very cool aspect of it. As a teaching adventure, I can see its value.

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Character Attacks, Saving Throws, and Cost of Equipment and Weapons — Useful Tables in KotBL

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Clerical Abilities, Armour Classes, and Wandering Monsters — Useful Tables in KotBL

As for Basic D&D, I thoroughly enjoyed this pared-down version of the game. It’s freeing having no real skills and only a few stats you need to keep track of. Some things like saving throws and THAC0 still bother me but I look at them now as more of a nostalgic idiosyncrasy than a real bother. They are not difficult to get used to and they don’t get in the way too much in play.

The Editioning will continue, dear reader, but its time to leave the Keep on the Borderlands behind along with poor Edmund, my cleric who died in session 2 and whose corpse we found shambling around in the Chaos Cult’s lair. We put out his other eye and chopped off his head for good measure.

The Editioning, Weeks Seven and Eight, Basic D&D

The Basic Box

The Shop on the Borderlands has me in its thrall, dear reader. Every Friday, about lunchtime I receive their newsletter, News from the Borderlands, and my wallet doth quake with fear. There is, invariably, a long list of classic D&D titles newly received as stock. They tend to get them in job-lots, so one week, there might be a preponderance of AD&D 1st edition Greyhawk books, and the next there’ll be a dragon’s hoard of DCC adventures. In fact, it has been invaluable in building my collection of D&D books for the Editioning. The vast majority of books that I didn’t already own, came from the Shop on the Borderlands. It’s great. It has an amazing selection of used and new RPG books, from the original OD&D books going for thousands of pounds, to the latest 5E titles, not to mention all the other RPGs they stock. I would highly recommend checking them out, particularly if you’re in the UK. Check out one of my newest purchases in the gallery below. It’s the 11th printing of the Moldvay Basic D&D set. It’s missing the dice and the rulebook has seen better days, but, since I didn’t buy it as a collector’s item or an investment, that doesn’t bother me. I have been using it at the table while we continue our adventures in the module included in this very set, The Keep on the Borderlands!

The front cover of the Moldvay Basic D&D Boxed Set. A green serpent attacks a sorceress in red in dungeon surroundings. — Moldvay Basic

The back cover of the Moldvay Basic D&D boxed set. Shows and describes the contents. — Moldvay Basic

Hard on the Hirelings

One moment, things are going your way. You and your mates have gone out on adventure, sowed seeds of war between rival clans of humanoids living in the Caves of Chaos, gained the respect of the local authorities and have even made a coins along the way. And then, dear reader, the random encounter table just fucks you. We have learned this the hard way, over and over in this adventure. We’ve been unlucky with our encounter rolls most of the time. On our very first encounter, my first PC, Edmund, went down to the very first arrow that was loosed in an ambush of Ospreys. Later, after braving and surviving the storied Caves of Chaos, our resident halfling PC, Lotharia was brutally disembowelled by a griffon while returning to the keep with a spell book delivery. In our most recent random encounter disaster, we lost half of our eight hirelings in an encounter with a troll on the road back from the Caves. We defeated it narrowly and followed its trail back to its stinking, filthy lair, where we took care of some larval trolls too, but not without first losing another of our hirelings.

These were heavy losses, all of them, although, I’ll be honest and say we had a respectfully understated celebration of the fact that we didn’t have to split the xp between all eleven of us…

Anyway, the point is to expect the unexpected in old school play. Also, that the more hirelings you have the more targets there are that aren’t PCs, so that’s been helpful.

Murder and Intrigue

Adventurers! A black and white illustration from the rule book depicting a variety of adventurers — Adventurers!

Events are moving along without us, or, perhaps because of some of our choices. As I noted in my last Basic D&D post, we’ve taken the side of the castellan of the Keep and taken the ears of a number of Ospreys, the rebel band who want to overthrow him. Perhaps, if we had decided to support the rebels instead, the most recent shocking events might have been prevented (though probably at a very high cost in lives.)

In the last Basic D&D post I mentioned we had been attacked by a band of mercs sent to kill my character, Thaddeus Nightbane. After killing them, we proceeded on to the caves of the Shakkelwart Clan of orcs. We spotted and safely set off a trap in the mouth of the cave. This attracted the attention of the guards, who we convinced to allow us to talk to their leader, Baralgus Dorden (no idea if that’s spelled right.) We convinced her to welcome us in and we feasted with them before delivering the arms sent by the Thyrenian Guild. This was a fun scene where we learned a lot and, hopefully, planted some seeds of doubt in Baralgus’ mind regarding her allies, the Barrowdelve clan and the gnolls as well. We gained a RESPECTED reputation with the Shakkelwarts in the process.

By the way, I mentioned in a previous post that there was a reputation mechanic built into this module, but that’s not true. Instead, this is actually DM Isaac’s genius addition to it. He was inspired by the Root RPG, and it has enriched our experience of the game. We are actually going out of our way to ingratiate ourselves with particular factions to improve our standing with them, instead of thinking of them all as fair game.

Following this, we returned to visit our other besties in the Caves of Chaos, the goblins led by Sharktroll. We delivered another cache of weapons and armour to them (in fact, this is just stuff we’d picked up from looted enemies, some of whom belonged to this very goblin clan!) We’re hoping for all out war between the orcs and the goblins, and we might get it if we keep pushing this way. The goblins also released some prisoners that our Thyrenian Guild contact, Richard “Dick” Kirkdon, has asked us to retrieve for him.

With that, we set off back to the Keep again. And that’s when we ran into the aforementioned troll. I have to give props to Isaac here once again. Trolls are common enough in D&D and related media, that we generally feel we know them, we might fear them a little given their regenerative abilities and all, but, the knowledge of them makes them a little less scary. Isaac turned this on its head with his sensory descriptions of its look, its smell, its otherness. Scared the pants off us. And then it started killing hirelings. Anyway, that was bad, as I mentioned before, but we did get some treasure out of it.

Back at the Keep, we went first to the Temple of the Holy Sun, where the entire populace had gathered for the funeral of Father Burgoyne. The mourners were giving Tom’s Elf character, Eandril, the dirty eye. We soon discovered that this was because the priest had been murdered by the Castellan’s elven advisor. So, of course, we went to talk to our good buddy, the castellan. After enduring some more anti-elfism from he guards, we were granted an audience. He explained that Cywyn Morningflower, he advisor had been accused by Father Burgoyne of being a member of the reviled Serpent Cult that had once made its home in the Caves of Chaos. In response, the elf had drawn his sword and run the priest through. The castellan had little choice but to imprison his advisor since the murder had happened in his hall and in his presence!

We told him we’d crack this case wide open so he let us talk to Cywyn (genuinely have no idea about this spelling either btw.) Turns out, the elf was just sick and tired of Burgoyne and his constant racism and this was the final straw. He really did murder him in anger. But one other thing came up. The priest had claimed that he had evidence that proved Cywyn’s cultishness and that it was in his chambers beneath the altar in the church.

Next stop, church! I distracted the gathered acolytes while the Anastasia and Eandril investigated the hidden chambers below. They discovered no evidence against Cywyn, but they did find a snake staff and some magical armour and maces, which raised questions more about the church than the elf.

Conclusion

How to use the dice. Black and white illustration depicting some polyhedral dice, a mini, a pencil and some paper — How to Use the Dice

I think there might only be a couple more sessions of our adventures on the Borderlands. I’ll miss it when it’s over. I have grown fond of our little band and and the relationships we’ve built in this place.

I probably won’t miss the random encounter tables quite so much, but even they have introduced elements of true peril and danger to get the blood really pumping.

Back with more soon.

The Editioning Weeks Five and Six, Basic D&D

Taking Sides

The Keep on the Borderland wants you to commit to a faction, become their champion and do quests for them. Or, at the very least, it wants you to pretend you’re doing that so you play one faction off against another. We got deep into these politics in our latest session.

Losing Friends and Making New Ones

The image of the Keep on the Borderlands on the back cover of the adventure, showing a large keep at sunset, a group of adventurers running up the road towards it. — The Keep

We have been growing in the esteem of various factions and drawing the ire of others for the last few sessions. For instance, as I mentioned before, we have ingratiated ourselves to the Castellan of the eponymous Keep, but, we have decided to go against the Ospreys, the bandit-like rebel band who want to overthrow our friendly Castellan. With that in mind we used an osprey feather and a secret handshake to convince a group of these bandits we wanted to join them. This turned into a fight, of course, since they came in force and, although we only needed to capture one of them for questioning in the keep, we couldn’t separate them. This all worked out in our favour as we came away with not one, but two prisoners, one of whom was a high-ranking lieutenant. But one of them escaped the ambush, no doubt returning to Lord Osprey himself. I’m pretty sure we’ve ruined any chances of being best buds with that guy.

Anyway, we went back to the Keep for some carousing and continued making enemies and rivals. Our DM, Isaac’s carousing table has not necessarily been very kind to us so far. This time proved to be even worse than the last. The only thing that happened last time was that we woke up in the street. This time, my thief, Thaddeus Nightbane, got barred from the Blue Wine Tavern for being a know-it-all, Tom’s elf, Eandril, managed to get into a duel with the keep’s armourer and Lotharia, Charlie’s halfling, pissed on the spell book of Thaumic Juggernaut Billiam Asda (is that right, Issac?) Now, we had a bunch of booze back in our apartments so I didn’t mind getting barred too much and Eandril won the duel, impressing the armourer so much that she offered us discounts. But Lotharia? Well, the only way we could satisfy the Thaumic Juggernaut was to quest in search of a replacement spell book. So, we took ourselves off into the mountain woods in search of the Hermit, Dimblemist. It wasn’t too hard to find him, but we wanted to get out of there as quickly as we could. The frog-like man gave us all the ick. Anyway, we traded my ill-fated first character, Edmund of the Sun’s old holy symbol for the spell book. Dimblemist hung the symbol on his pet puma’s collar, oddly enough. They both seemed pleased with the result.

Dimblemist the horrid little hermit in his tree home.

It was on the return journey that we ran into a random encounter. A griffon attacked a shepherd and his flock right in front of us on the road. The shepherd was already a goner by the time we got there, so we decided to try sneaking around to avoid a fight. No such luck. The bird-brained pussycat spotted us and attacked, making short work of Lotharia. She was rent asunder by the beast’s great talons. I’m sure it would have killed us all if we hadn’t had a small army of hirelings with us. So we defeated it with sheer numbers. Poor Lotharia, we barely knew her! She was only the second PC fatality. I’m sure there will be more to come…

Anyway, we returned to town with the replacement spell book and poor Lotharia’s corpse, in an effort to glean a little sympathy from Thaumic Juggernaut, Billiam Asda. Surprisingly, he paid us 100 GP towards the funeral costs. We later heard that Billiam had Power Word: Deathed a man in the pub for shit-talking his mum or something. Counting ourselves lucky, we wrapped that session.

Ethics in Business

Look, this is a game, alright? I want you all to remember that before you judge Tom, Charlie and me on the paragraphs below. Especially as, you know, we’re just doing what our characters would do or whatever.

We buried Lotharia and greeted Charlie’s new PC, Anastasia, Cleric of the Sun and newest member of the Company of the Dark Sun (we change the name from the Company of the Summer Sun after Edmund died.) Soon after we received a visit from Richard Kirkdon of the the Thyrenian Guild, a group of merchants with a base of operations in the Keep. They had been paying us for Osprey ears and, unsurprisingly, were very happy to hear with had ambushed a bunch of them and taken prisoners. Dick paid us 900 GP just for being cool. He then offered us a small fortune to find some of his mates who had been captured by the hobgoblins in the Caves of Chaos and, oh yeah, to deliver a shipment of arms to the Shakkelwart Clan of orcs, also of the Caves of Chaos. He even paid us a third of the fee up front. We agreed, and bid him farewell.

Now, Thaddeus Nightbane’s immediate instinct was to sell out the Thyrenians to the Castellan for arming his enemies. He saw it as a win-win, especially as we had already been paid so much for doing nothing. But the other PCs talked me around. Several other plans were thought up and shot down. We considered damaging the shipment and delivering it to the orcs, thereby damaging their relationship with the Thyrenain Guild. We thought of just destroying the shipment and telling Dick we delivered it. In the end, after a debate that consumed the lion’s share of the session, we decided to deliver the shipment as requested, but also to deliver another shipment of arms and armour to the goblins we’d made friends with earlier. The idea was that, if both sides were well armed, they might just weaken each other enough to make them both easy pickings for the keep’s forces, thereby increasing out standing with the Castellan and earning the rest of the gold promised us by the Guild.

So, off we went, back to the ravine containing the Caves of Chaos. As we were scouting out the best way to approach the Shakkelwart Clan’s caves, we encountered a few representatives of a rival mercenary group, known as the Great Company. They took one of our hirelings hostage but we managed to defeat them despite that. In searching their belongings, we discovered they had been contracted to find and eliminate Thaddeus Nightbane!

Conclusion

Less and less am I concerned with the mechanics of playing the game, now. We almost never need to refer to the rules or even question the way things work in Basic D&D. Its fair to say that “basic” is the right word for it. Your characters are simple, the rules are straightforward and everything that isn’t spelled out can easily be ruled upon by the DM.

More and more am I invested in the occurrences of the adventure, the faction play, the NPCs and the quandaries we are presented with. We are figuring out what we want from this whole caper and we are also figuring out how the various groups involved can help or hinder us. It is bringing the Machiavelli out in us quite a bit, whether we’re lawful, chaotic or neutral. And it’s very fun.

The last session we played was Session 7, which is one more than I thought we’d be playing for this whole adventure. Isaac asked us if we wanted to continue until we reach a reasonable end point. This obviously sticks a spanner in the works of the Editioning plan, but I had already come to the conclusion that if we were having fun with it, we may as well keep playing. I’m coming to the realisation, actually, that we won’t get through an adventure in each edition in a single yer. More likely, it’ll take two. And I’m fine with that because, right now, I’m enjoying it so much!

The Editioning Weeks Three and Four, Basic D&D

Keepin’ on Keepin’ on

We’re two more sessions into the classic Basic D&D adventure, the Keep on the Borderlands. And we’re getting into the meat of it now, I think. We’ve got multiple factions, both in the Keep itself and in the Caves of Chaos. We’ve got spying and betrayal. We’ve got court intrigue! But most of all, we’ve had laughs and fun with this.

Donkey Konging

There are some spoilers for the Keep on the Borderlands below. If you think you might want to be a player in that adventure, you might want to choose a different post to read.

We launched straight into a fight at the start of session three. We managed to trick and ambush a dozen strong goblin patrol, trapping them in a pincer movement. The fight didn’t last too long, actually. We took out their leader and the rest pretty much dropped their weapons and happily consented to be tied up and gagged so they couldn’t follow us as we went to pillage their home. We did bring one of them with us as a kind of guide. Gaw was a congenial sort of goblin, and very eager to help. He told us about their leader, Sharktroll. Now, Sharktroll, is, it turns out, neither shark nor troll, despite the name. She’s a goblin and the other goblins seem pretty scared of her. Armed with this knowledge, we proceeded along the tunnel to the west, keeping a sharp eye and ear out as we went.

At the start of the campaign, Isaac presented us with a list of traditional roles for players that he cribbed from the Retired Adventurer blog. Tom took the Quartermaster and Timekeeper roles. I got the Rules Coordinator and Mapper ones. Normally, in our groups, the GM just gives out the map and trusts in the ability of the players to compartmentalise the knowledge they have, with the understanding that the characters don’t have it. It works well, saves time and avoids frustration. But we thought it would be an interesting experiment to do it the old fashioned way. So far, it’s going ok. Isaac has been good about providing accurate measurements for rooms and corridors, and I’m using graph paper to maintain consistency. At times, it has been hard to picture some of the rooms correctly in my head, but in those instances, Isaac has kindly showed us that part of the dungeon map from the adventure. Keeps me busy.

A map drawn with pen on graph paper. It shows a wide canyon and a caves sytem where the goblins live. — A photo of the crude map I have drawn so far of the goblin caves in the Caves of Chaos

So, we went exploring the goblin caves, found a sack full of gold which we robbed, and a barrel full of javelins, which Thaddeus Nightbane, my thief, peed in. Of course, we almost immediately found cause to use those miturated upon javelins as another goblin patrol approached the guard room where we found that stuff. We were able to get ourselves set up to launch a surprise attack on them, chucking spears and, even more fun than that, rolling barrels of water down the narrow tunnel! Donkey Konged the hell out of those gobbos. Killed ‘em all in one fell swoop. It felt like a really great old school moment; setting up a ridiculous plan with very little time and only the few items to hand. Surprising that it worked out so well, though, to be honest.

Snakey

We pushed on, thinking to find this Sharktroll character and maybe do her in. But, instead, we found a large room full of goblins: men, women and children. We didn’t alert them to our presence, luckily, but this “family room” as we called it, gave us pause. We all cooled on the idea of clearing out these goblins, now that the ramifications of doing that were staring at us with big green, baby eyes. It was at this point, in the tunnel outside that room, that we turned to Jabeck, the so-called Priest of the Sun who had asked us to accompany him to rid the caves of the monsters. We delicately questioned his real motives here. And with the lightest of verbal jabs, he revealed his true colours, as an adherent of the Cult of the Great Serpent! He and his acolytes attacked and we were forced to kill them. The acolytes went down without much hassle, but Jabeck weathered round after round of attacks. He was wearing magic plate mail, so his AC was ridiculously low. He did us some damage too, but, eventually, we brought him down and took his stuff, and his head.

I had known there was a treacherous priest somewhere in this adventure, as it happens. I think I read it in the Wikipedia article I linked above, in fact. But I didn’t know which priest. It could just as well have been the racist one back in the keep, who had asked us to keep an eye on Jabeck. So, it was fun to discover this in this way, while delving this dungeon.

Of course, the noise of battle attracted the attention of the goblin civilians. We spotted them in the entrance and then all our torches went out (thanks to Tom’s timekeeping for that incredibly dramatic event!) some of them ran to get Sharktroll, who returned with her bodyguards and wives. Through our goblin-speaking dwarven hireling, Gimleth, we conducted some negotiations. I remembered that the rumour I had received about this place was that the Great Serpent cult had been wiped out by the goblins, orcs and gnolls so they could take over the caves. Deploying this bit of knowledge, we convinced her that Jabeck was the one who was to blame for any deaths amongst her people, that we might have caused. Unlikely as it may sound, she bought it. She seemed far more pre-occupied by the enmity between the goblins and the orcs and gnolls who occupied the other side of the canyon. On top of this, someone was stealing from their stores. Loot, food, everything was going missing, and they wanted us to help discover the culprits.

Our elf, Eandril, Tom’s character, used his secret door seeking abilities in the store room and immediately discovered a hidden entrance to the lair of the hobgoblins, Sharktroll’s erstwhile allies. So, we convinced her that it must have been the hobgoblins who were creeping in and stealing their hard earned booty, right from under their noses. We got her good and riled up and sent her off into the hobgoblin tunnels with a warband and a whole lot of righteous indignation.

We did not accompany them. Instead, we left them to it and scarpered off back home. Isaac rolled up the results of the goblin assault and was able to determine that they were successful in defeating the hobgoblins roundly. Huzzah! This seemed pretty good to us, as it reduced the number of Caves of Chaos factions we had to deal with by one.

Factioning

Back at the Keep, we returned to the racist priest with Jabeck’s head. In fact, I threw open the church doors while Lotharia the halfling, atop Eandril’s shoulders, hoisted aloft the head, declaring for all to hear that we had killed the priest! This didn’t go down very well with the other members of the clergy there gathered, and for a second, we were about to get into another fight. But then Father Burgoyne intervened, calming the situation when we told him what happened and showed him Jabeck’s forked tongue. Burgoyne congratulated us on a job well done and then went off to report these happenings to the castellan. We blagged our way into an invite to talk to his castellanship. We told him what we had found out about the goblins, how we had gotten them to defeat the hobgoblins and what had happened with Jabeck. In turn, he rewarded us handsomely. He gave us the use of Jabeck’s quarters, exempted us from the 10% gold tax at the gate of the keep and trusted us with an all important mission to capture one of the rebellious Ospreys alive!

On top of this, Isaac informed us that we were now RESPECTED with the Castellan. Not only that, but had also gained important reputation boosts with the church so that we were ESTEEMED in their eyes. We had even, somehow, gained respect amongst Sharktroll’s goblins! This reputation game was not something I knew was part of the adventure but it’s very welcome actually. Oddly, it struck me, at first, as a very video-gamey element. It reminded me of the reputation trackers you get in games like World of Warcraft. Indeed, the reps in the Keep on the Borderlands work very similarly as they unlock new quests and options within the confines of the adventure, as you can see by the offering of the quest to discover the thief in the goblin lair and the unlocking of the quest to help the castellan with the Ospreys. It adds a richness to the adventure and makes it, perhaps, quite re-playable. I imagine that, if we had gone to meet the Ospreys representative on our first night in the Keep, things might have turned out very differently indeed. Or if we had decided to explore the hobgoblin caves before the goblin ones, maybe the goblins would be the faction that got wiped out first instead. The possibilities are fascinating. I’m beginning to see why this module is so well loved.

Conclusion

We’re all getting very invested in this adventure. We’ve had a little while with our respective characters and they are very much developing their own personalities. Equally, there is an inter-character dynamic appearing too. The NPCs are compelling, especially as portrayed by Isaac, and the plot is doing enough to keep me interested in getting involved in it. What I had thought would be a relatively standard dungeon crawl is turning into something with far more bite and complexity, or it is the way we’re playing it, anyway.

As for the D&D Basic rules; I feel as though we have all more-or-less adjusted to things like THAC0, descending AC, etc, and, where the rules fall short, Isaac has been very pro-active in rulings. In several instances, he decided that the best way to resolve an action was just to make an ability check, i.e. a d20 roll under the PC’s defined ability score, such as a Strength check to lift those barrels of water to go Donkey Kong on those goblins. This has served to move things along nicely in instances which could have been bogged down in rule-checking.

I think we will be having a bit of an Editioning break over the next couple of weeks. I have another report on my last session. Of OD&D to come next week though, so please do come back for that, dear reader!