Pyramid Review: Return to the Keep on the Borderlands (for AD&D)

Pyramid Review

Return to the Keep on the Borderlands

Published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast

Written by John D. Rateliff

64 pages, $12.95

Nostalgia made me buy this book.

Like a lot of you, I started role-playing with Dungeons & Dragons. And the very first adventure I played in was TSR's module B2, The Keep on the Borderlands. It was a classic dungeon crawl. You started off based in a remote fortress, traveled through a wilderness area rife with random encounters, then started hacking and slaying your way through the "Caves of Chaos," a dungeon inhabited by several humanoid tribes and evil cultists. Return to the Keep on the Borderlands is an updated version of the classic adventure, part of TSR's Silver Anniversary series, set 20 years after the original adventure. I'll be honest: much of this module is a dungeon crawl, but it's an intelligently designed one, with a fleshed-out base of operations for adventurers, an interesting wilderness environment, and some very good characterization of non-player characters. It could easily provide the basis for an extended campaign for low-level adventurers.

The first section of the book (five pages) provides advice for novice gamemasters. It's not bad advice at all, but it is basic. If you've gamemastered before, you can skip on to the meat of the book. If you're a novice GM, this material looks like it would be useful, much better than many GMing advice sections I've seen elsewhere.

The next section of the book (15 pages) . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: January 7, 2000

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