Keep on the Borderlands 5E

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com

Ulairi

Pompous Windbag
Joined
May 1, 2017
Messages
656
Reaction score
1,171
apparently this is out and I cannot find it anywhere. Anybody here get it?
 
I ordered a copy way back when it was announced. Copied were shipped out about 2-3 weeks ago but I still haven't received mine. I am checking the mailbox pretty regularly...
 
Is it just a reprint with 5e stats?
 
A friend of mine picked up a copy at the store over the weekend. He was pretty stoked about it. He began gaming with me during D&D 3rd edition, and continued on when I shifted to Savage Worlds, which he liked a lot more. I moved away right at the point where I began delving back into B/X, so he never got to try that. After I left, he didn't have an RPG group, so he became a serious boardgamer.

His kids play games with him a lot, and he has been getting ready to try running D&D for them with 5E. He's a little tempted by Old School stuff, but he is unsure of diving into that yet. He was really excited by the sparseness of description in the encounters and how easy they would be to parse during play. He didn't have much else to say yet, as he had just scanned it. I'll report back next time we talk.
 
The Borderlands. An untamed wild region far flung from the comforts and protection of civilization.

A lone fortified Keep is the only bastion of Good desperately striving to maintain the forces of Chaos at bay. But Evil is everywhere, lurking in dark caves, fetid swamps, and forlorn forests. Bands of cutthroat brigands and ruthless tribes of humanoids eager to clash with the forces of Good rove the region. The Borderlands hold many secret wondrous locations, and the opportunities for fame, prestige, and fortune are plentiful. But equally abundant are the perils, risks, and challenges to those brave enough to explore the wilds.

Sharpen your swords and axes. Purchase your iron rations and tinderboxes. And don’t forget at least one 10-foot pole. Adventure awaits those with the mettle to confront Chaos in the Borderlands!

This tome is an homage to the origins of Adventure that began decades ago with B1: In Search of the Unknown and B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. Herein you will find high-quality scans from multiple printings of the original first edition adventure modules, plus commentary by such gaming luminaries as Luke Gygax and Mike Mearls. Full fifth edition conversions of both adventures are included, as well as brand new additional adventure locations to further expand and develop the Borderlands. This is a fully playable mini-campaign to start off your new fifth edition adventures, with a distinct old-school vibe.

Hardcover, 384 pages. Includes 16-page full color cover gallery.
Done by Goodman Games, can be found here.
 
Is it just a reprint with 5e stats?
Nope, it's much more.
This tome is an homage to the origins of Adventure that began decades ago with B1: In Search of the Unknown and B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. Herein you will find high-quality scans from multiple printings of the original first edition adventure modules, plus commentary by such gaming luminaries as Luke Gygax and Mike Mearls. Full fifth edition conversions of both adventures are included, as well as brand new additional adventure locations to further expand and develop the Borderlands. This is a fully playable mini-campaign to start off your new fifth edition adventures, with a distinct old-school vibe.

Hardcover, 384 pages. Includes 16-page full color cover gallery.
The original was only 32 pages.
 
I love the original and would like to pick this up somehow without paying an arm and a leg on shipping and the exchange rate.
 
There’s a joke in there somewhere.

i-have-seen-enough-pornos_o_656213.jpg
 
Nope, it's much more.

The original was only 32 pages.
It's an entire sandbox, complete with campaign and adventure hooks in 32 pages. And every time I ran it people only wanted to go to the caves and hit thngs.
 
I have it, and can give a brief recap. Physically, the book is large, and heavy. 344 pages puts it at textbook size. The covers of B1 and B2 are reproduced for each section, and again as color plates in the back, along with maps. The interior of the book covers and flyleaf pages are copies of the Caves of Chaos and Quasqueton maps, respectively. The book has a glossy cover; most pages are like 20# paper, fairly thick and durable feeling. The book opens easily and is a good tabletop volume to have.

There's interviews throughout; I must admit I was a little disappointed with Luke Gygax's interview; I was hoping he'd have some insight into the module's genesis, however, we get this somewhat in the interview with Mike Carr. Although he talks about B1, it's an interesting insight into the publication history of that module as well. The rest of the interviews I honestly don't care about.

The earlier iterations provided in the book are as you might suspect identical to when they were first published. If you don't know about the slight variations of Basic D&D, you might miss it, but earlier editions of B2 list a "DX" (Dexterity) stat for monsters: under Holmes Basic this is largely how initiative was handled. The better (higher) Dexterity went first during combat, a d6 was used during ties or times of uncertainty as to who would go first. By the time Moldvay Basic D&D was out this was depreciated from the rules and a d6 for initiative was universal.

There are minor art differences; the earlier B2 contains a large drawing of a minotaur rendered by Erol Otus (one of my favorite pieces of D&D art, really), and a smaller piece by Willingham is in its place in later versions. The earlier edition also mentions AD&D 1e if you want to convert to it.

B1 came in both pastel monochrome and full color cover, and notably suggests the World of Greyhawk as a setting for B2. I know how hot people are to have the "Known World" as Mystara, but B1 (which is ostensibly linked to B2, many put B1 in the "Cave of the Unknown" area on the B2 wilderness map) is noted as being in Greyhawk and I think that holds for both editions.

The 5th edition version of B1 is perhaps the most curious item; I did not buy this book for use with 5e and don't really care about it but I thought it was a little weird that they felt it necessary to completely stat out B1 for 5e as "examples". Honestly, I think Goodman missed the plot on that. The point is that B1 is a "teaching" module. It was an ideal opportunity for new 5e DMs to get their feet wet with adventure design. I mean, they can still do that by ignoring the input from Goodman and going ahead and statting encounters themselves, I guess.

As to the suitability or how well the 5e conversion was handled of B1 and B2 I couldn't say, as I don't DM 5e and am not a regular player of it. I did playtest 5e and a 5e compatible B2 came with the playtest material, but I honestly don't remember much about it, and so much of that ruleset was in flux at the time that I hardly think my recollection would be relevant, anyway.

So is this a book you should buy? "Should" is a difficult term. B2 is very important to me as part of my gaming gestalt. It was the first RPG product I ever owned. I didn't even have a D&D rulebook for another couple of years: that's right, I learned to play the "Silvey Variant" of D&D by reverse-engineering the rules as presented in B2 (B2 contains a pull-out sheet of minimal rules and instructions on how to use the charts). My weather-beaten, dog-eared copy of B2 is autographed by Gary, I felt it was that important to me...so yes, for me, this seminal module being enshrined with it's B1 brother was a must buy. With that said I don't think the price tag necessarily justifies it if you're looking for a good copy of B1 and B2 for yourself; those can be had on eBay and Amazon resellers and so forth. The interviews are flat, I don't care about them, and they (again, other than Mike Carr) don't really add anything to the experience. If you feel the same way and you don't really "need" B2 (or B1) as I "needed" it then this probably isn't for you.

A+ on presentation
B- on content (other than the original modules)
C- on overall value (for the average gamer at large)
 
I'd never noticed th changes re:grin:ex in B2. I have several copies and only the one in my box with chits has Dex listed.
 
I’m picking up the 5E release today. Might get me to play vanilla 5E
 
Grabbed it at lunch. It’s $50! It’s a big hardbound tome that includes a lot of of discussion around B2 from Luke Gygax, Mearls, some Goodman Games folks, and Mike Carr. They also reprint both B1 and B2 using high quality scans.

I don’t know if they restatted the modules for 5E or just give guidence on converting the modules within the book.

But this takes me back! My first D&D box product was the Moldvay basic box set.
 
I'd never noticed th changes re:grin:ex in B2. I have several copies and only the one in my box with chits has Dex listed.
Yeah Holmes Basic is weird. He was kind of flying blind on a lot of things because "Dungeons & Dragons" (there was no "Basic" back then) was supplanting the digest sized "Original D&D" and was intended, at least from Gary's perspective, to be a door into AD&D. In the first 3 or 4 pages of the Holmes rulebook there's references to "Play AD&D for more character classes and higher levels" that were probably edited in either directly by Gary or at his behest. But since Holmes otherwise had his own say in how things worked, stuff like Monster Dexterity was A Thing.
 
I will say if Goodman publishes more like this, I might pick them up, depending. I don't really want to pay $50/module, though, so like G1 thru G3 should all be in a volume, even if it costs $10-$15 more. G1 is only eight pages long, even converting it to 5e and adding a couple of interviews wouldn't take that much space up. Hell the GDQ1-7 supermodule is only like 160pp and that's 7 modules...
 
It's interesting that Goodman is actually getting to put out products that have "D&D" on them. Have any other companies in recent memory gotten to do that? Paizo, of course, put out both Dungeon and Dragon for a while. I think that was a reason that Paizo had a lot of pull with the D&D fan base. They weren't just some random company using the OGL. They put out official D&D product for a while.

I wonder if this will give a boost to Goodman's 5E products.
 
Do they feature Doug Kovacks art?
I'd have to double-check, but I don't think so. They aer definitely meant to be distinct from the DCC modules - less gonzo and more classic FRPG. Having said that, they do follow the game design philosophy of including new monsters, or at least variations of classic ones, rather than being purely vanilla D&D, so they aren't completely different either.
 
I love the DCC art. I love the 70’s/80’s tone to the whole thing. I tend not to like the overt produced modern D&D art
 
I love the DCC art. I love the 70’s/80’s tone to the whole thing. I tend not to like the overt produced modern D&D art
Yah, the DCC art rocks. I do like the 5e module art, though. In general, the modules remind me of older modules: B&W interior, mostly text, just a smattering of smaller B+W drawings here and there. It's definitely NOT overproduced, but it still may or may not be to your liking.

EDIT: Check out the full size review of Glitterdoom to see what I mean.
 
I wonder if there's a magical saddlepoint to profitable publishing that has 'begats' so many larger works nowadays across publishers? :money: It is a bit uncanny. Is the hobby that much larger and profitable, or is because the target demographic now has greater disposable income, (like "Classic Rock" Concerts,)?
 
I have to say that I'm pretty jealous of all the people who already have their copy of Borderlands. I ordered the damn thing almost as soon as they announced pre-orders, and I got an email to tell me it shipped about 2-3 weeks ago. I sent a gentle complaint to GG yesterday and they had an explanation that made sense. Still, I'm getting tired of checking the mailbox everyday and not seeing it.
 
I never really paid any attention to their D&D5 line but now I'm curious. Which ones have you got? Which do you like best?
I have them all. :smile: When I'm home later, I'll get them all together and report back.
 
So Friday I came home at lunch to find a rather heavy box from Goodman Games on my doorstop. By the way, if you've ever mail ordered anything direct from GG, you've had the pleasure of receiving one of their custom shipping boxes. This time, I got one like this:

Shipping-Cartons.jpg

Anyway, it turns out that it held not only Into the Borderlands hardcover, but the Mutant Crawl Classics hardcover and the print block of eight MCC adventures they are releasing out of the gate. So this was a really cool Friday surprise on one hand, but it really makes me wonder why I got a notification that ITB was shipping three weeks ago and I got the shipping notification for MCC two days ago. The same day I emailed GG a request for the tracking number for my ITB shipment. Which they couldn't produce, even though I had already received the tracking number for the MCC shipment. Hmm. Oh well, at least I got it all.

I haven't had time to read much of either. One thing I can say is that I think these bindings are improvements on the DCC hardcovers that I've owned and seen (which were shoddy IMO). I'm not surprised that a collaboration with Wizards would force them to up their game, but it's nice to see that seems to have rubbed off on MCC as well.

I've already skimmed/read the various MCC PDFs that I've received for all these books. I still haven't really dove into the core rules, but that's because I was waiting for this. Although I'm a massive DCC fan, I have to straight up admit that the MCC system as a whole is not lighting my world on fire, but the adventures seem pretty solid. I might prefer it as a side setting for DCC like Purple Planet.

Wait, this wasn't supposed to be a review of MCC. Sorry about that. I'll return with more when I've actually read a bit of Into the Borderlands.
 
So Friday I came home at lunch to find a rather heavy box from Goodman Games on my doorstop. By the way, if you've ever mail ordered anything direct from GG, you've had the pleasure of receiving one of their custom shipping boxes. This time, I got one like this:

Shipping-Cartons.jpg

Anyway, it turns out that it held not only Into the Borderlands hardcover, but the Mutant Crawl Classics hardcover and the print block of eight MCC adventures they are releasing out of the gate. So this was a really cool Friday surprise on one hand, but it really makes me wonder why I got a notification that ITB was shipping three weeks ago and I got the shipping notification for MCC two days ago. The same day I emailed GG a request for the tracking number for my ITB shipment. Which they couldn't produce, even though I had already received the tracking number for the MCC shipment. Hmm. Oh well, at least I got it all.

I'm guessing your delivery guy set aside the first box so he could show how cool it was to some of his friends before delivering it. Then he got sidetracked and forgot to actually deliver it. When the second box came along, he suddenly remembered the first box and scrambled to get them both to you.

I've already skimmed/read the various MCC PDFs that I've received for all these books. I still haven't really dove into the core rules, but that's because I was waiting for this. Although I'm a massive DCC fan, I have to straight up admit that the MCC system as a whole is not lighting my world on fire, but the adventures seem pretty solid. I might prefer it as a side setting for DCC like Purple Planet.
I don't have MCC, but it seemed a weird direction for Goodman to go as the Crawling Under a Broken Moon third-party line already seemed to be doing a good job with the gonzo, post-apocalypse thing for DCC.
 
I backed MCC but my copy hasn’t shipped yet. I really like ‘Into the Borderlands’ a lot. Hopefully, WoTC does this again.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top