Yes Dice goblins like to roll them bones

Good points

This is so true More than 6-7 players is really hard to manage

I agree I’ve been playing since 1AD&D and enjoyed all the different editions I’ve played

Thank you again for coming! I really hope we get to game soon!

B2 is even more fascinating today than it was back in the eighties. In the Caves of Chaos, each room description tells not only what the place looks like, not only what loot is waiting to be found, but it crucially also tells how many noncombatant women and children are in each room. These caves are on the edge of a war-torn region. The lower levels in particular are filthy, depressing, and occupied by families with children who certainly did not grow up living there. To any modern audience, it is absolutely clear from the text that this can only be a refugee camp, and the players have been sent by the "good guys" to slaughter them all. Whenever I run this module I always replace the kobolds in the first cave with a group of mixed humanoids whose minds have been totally destroyed by magical curses. The humanoids scream and sprint to attack everyone on sight. They clearly have no conscience and cannot be saved, so the PCs can feel fine about killing them and looting those rooms. I love doing this because it delays the obvious "are we the baddies" moment until well after most players have already become complicit in this grotesque and obvious war crime. When that moment comes, they face a choice: play it the way most players do, as an "evil" campaign where they kill everyone including the children so they can get loot and level up, or try to figure out who is ultimately behind this arrangement and stop them. Makes a great story every time.

The only roll I made was to throw a sausage. 😄

Oink! = @ )

Oink! = @ )

Nah, the blog post is 100% correct - Keep on the Borderlands is an incredibly stupid module. Huge hosts of monsters live in close proximity to each other without killing each other off? Stupid. Those same groups of monsters would ignore the sounds of battle when players are killing off others groups next door? Stupid. Intelligent monsters don’t post guards at the entrance of their own caves? Stupid. Into the Unknown was a better introductory product, and a better module in every way.

Happy Father’s Day

Opinion, but whatever.

I remember seeing a copy of this years ago in a game store in Yonkers, NY (not far from Bronxville, actually). Very surprised to hear that it had nationwide distribution.

Some of our coolest game experiences and some of my worst GM fails have come from not telling players, "No." 😂 😊

This is pretty clearly an early game that's only interesting for nostalgic or historic reasons. It explains a lot. Hindsight is 20/20. It seems like they lifted a lot of ideas from other systems, that had already come out, although one can never be 100% sure. It's interesting that the system is already 'broken' mathmatically, as far as the engine goes and that they never show up again in gaming history. I wonder what would have happened if you had bought a different game instead? Nostalgia is powerful. : @ )

I like your streamed content btw. It's cool to get this kind of stuff from you as well, of course. Oink! = @ )

Dude, you know what I am going to say to this. I don't have to say it. It was right there in front of you man, the whole time. 😢

Awesome dude! More commentary coming later but i justed wanted to let you know this was very interesting.

That's one thing I really like about books like these - they're like springboards for the imagination. =)

I will remember this "Do Not" involving accelerator and Super-Glue! Yow! Ha ha. =) While goals are always good to have, I think the journey to often be as important (or more) than the goal. I want to enjoy both! Doesn't mean it's an easy thing to have happen, but boy is it worth it when I look at back at games, goals, things that Real Life requires, and realize that both the journey and the goal were worth the time and effort. =)

Hate that I only got to watch a couple of minutes of this live. Real nice break down of the big differences between MSH and Heroic.

Hey! You look familiar! Ha ha! Liked and subscribed, Elf Bait! =)

The article writer seems like he's describing Into the Unknown, not Keep on the Borderlands. Which makes me believe they've read neither. Also, look up the author. He's all about AI dungeon generation and AI based gaming, as those aren't drawing on all the things he bashes in that article.

These people today want to bash old school D&D every chance they get. I don't care because I've noticed these people are impossible to play with anyways. Its "Too hard" when you don't coddle them. They are offended when Drow attack them. They are offended when slavers attack them. They are offended by historic descriptions of war. ect ect ect.....So I'm A ok with them talking themselves out of playing in our Keep on the Borderlands campaign. Because it just becomes a big headache when they decided they want to play with you. And they always forget the #1 rule in D&D....what the DM says is the law. You are playing in the world made by whatever DM you chose.

Sorry, I missed it.

My personal favorite game system is Palladium. I know it has its flaws, but I still like it.

Love B2. So much playability. I've built the Cavern of the Unknown to take characters from 4-6 after cleaning out the caves. The chaotic caverns ,for me, are lead by a lose group of evil in that Cave. The Caves ,for me, spring up as a response to a Keep that was sunk too deep into chaotic territory. They are the pearl created from the irritating grain of sand of the Keep. Outdoor hex crawl and fun encounters. The logic isn't great but you work on it. And Come on "Bree Yark" Evil Beserker Hero. Rescued Merchant and Family. Bribable Ogre. Our First Crying Medusa. A Wight. A Minotaur. Giant Spiders. Mad Hermit. Gygax hit a lot fantasy ideas that I like. If he had thrown in some dragon teeth growing into giant warriors, a witch who turned adventurers into the animal they most resembled and perhaps a party hiding in a large wooden badger to invade a castle, it would have been perfect Took my Nephews and Niece through it a little while ago and know it so well I could make it as complex or simple as they wanted it. They weren't keen on role play, let's jump to the dungeon. Let's Hack and Slash. You rescued the Merchant but don't want to interact with him. That's fine. We played it , it was easy. I'm not sure why he thinks it's unplayable. Yeah we figured it out, now I was 15, but it was easy. Again Played it last year and keen to play my expanded version again. Save the Goblin children, slaughter them, create an orphanage. My wife talked to the Orcs. They thought it was some sort of trap, but it slowed them down. Came away loving Bugbears and Gnolls. Oh and yes the unexpected but inevitable betrayal.

This is good stuff. Im a new DM and this style makes more sense to me than everything else I see. Learning lots and enjoying the series.

I like the idea of using lego as minis and terrain. My son is turning 10 in a couple days and I want to introduce him to RPGs, what a better way then to use his (and mine) Lego figs and bricks!

APAs! not the flying bison but the amateur press associations. Those were great! The ones I have are comics and animation focused, but there were so many and so many were great.

meh.. I missed this when it went live.. (on a side note, I did play vampire, mage, werewolf - tho I found it incredibly difficult to play mummy..)

Found you via Bandit’s Keep comments. Daniel is terrific! Old AD&D dude in Houston here. Leaning OSR. Subscribed! Thx

The Uprising on Ullern is one of my favorites!

100% spot on!

When actual game developers and their flocks of acolytes express that guys like me can't leave the hobby soon enough. What adequate degree of acceptance should be applied?

Stop being a jerk better.

Great video! Part of me wonders, has the genre always had these issues? Are we only recently learning about it because youtube\media allows expression of opinion over a larger audience? Or is this really a newer phenomenon? Hmm. Thank you for posting! Good food for thought!

"Ripening on the vine" - haha, we've well and truly withered! Spot on Elf, keep on gaming.

Great reminder. Keep up the good work.

Wow. What prompted this? Good points. I am surprised that they needed to be said at all? What happened? All that having been said though, things will still be better, as soon as you acknowledge, that everything is just a microcosim in my Traveller Universe! 😂😊 Oink! 🐗👍🏾 = @ )

I agree. It is okay to play with people you want to play with. It's okay to say something is better as opinions are implicitly subjective. It's okay to promote things you like by providing reasons as to why you like those things.

I think most of the vitriol is just a contrivance. It appeals to the basest instincts of consuming the misery of others by reveling in mockery and hateful rhetoric. For the most part, it does not result in anything that viewers can adapt to their own RPG gaming choices. It epitomizes that which is "full of sound and fury...signifying nothing." We have entered an age of mechanical solidarity. Alterity is conspicuous; it is decried by those who peddle influence, whether they truly understand their complicity or not. It is as the masters wish it; they require thralls and drones, to produce and consume, without needing to be given why(s) and wherefore(s). The recalcitrants, that contumacious few, are reduced to a shrinking ice floe rafted upon a boiling sea....

Absolutely correct, just support fun

It can be fun trying new games and new ways to play too. One of the reasons I like conventions.

Great message! It always struck me as particularly odd to take so seriously something as frivolous as gaming. It's just games. It's a form of entertainment, not a public safety matter. I feel like at some point in what must have originally been a dialogue along the lines of "You should try this other cool thing!" a bit of ego got introduced and it became surprisingly tribalistic. We all love games, we all even love pretty similar types of games. That's something to bond over, not fight over.

Great insight. I like the term adjusting your fun meter. Changing the fun dial works best if the player has the self awareness and changes it themselves, if not, the DM should try to help them consider group fun over self fun. If that doesn't work, then they should seek a table where their fun meters align.

My guess based on everything you said…wait you can’t be a rabbit person? Orcs are evil?! That’s racist, they are offended.

I got the Basic set for christmas in 1981 (not previously knowing anything about D&D or even that it was a thing), and I read it cover to cover and then went and bought the expert set a week later with christmas money...although i wound up starting to play AD&D a month later in an established group, i did run keep and isle of dread as my first attempts at DMing...of course I sucked, but i learned everything I needed to know about how to make my own adventures from them.... based town, hex crawl, dungeon crawl, rumor tables...sure those adventures are not the best (as-is, with no DM edits), but i learned 90% of what i needed to know to be a DM from reading and DMing them!!! anyone who doesn't see that is more likely to prefer the WoTC-designed campaign with a start point, three or four possible (known) endings, and the DM's job is to just get the PCs on a railroad to one of those endings (just like video game design)...the guy who made that comment probably has no idea of the context surrounding it...Which is sad. By what subjectively generated standard did he use to make that "objective" opinion? His opinion is really rooted in non-empathetic ignorance, and a sort of self-righteousness...I would give up on trying to convince him of anything because he already knows everything. let's just say, he is lucky that B2 brought so many people in the hobby, or stranger things woudl not have popularized it for him to join the 5e bandwagon later.

It is clear from the list that he just dislikes old modules and the way they were made back then. It also speaks to playstyle as you hinted at. Keep on the Borderlands is very sandboxy and that usually means that there is no clearthru plotline. A complete opposite would be some of the Dragonlance modules that has lots of story, so much in fact that one might argue they are better of as novels (just read the novels if you like that story) and has almost no wriggleroom for players to act. The key persons cannot even die in those modules. And thus Dragonlance would sadly rank as some of my least favorite ones despite all the hype and such.

'That you can't play it any longer.' What a bad take that was. I adapted 'Against the Cult of the Reptile god' into 5th ed, without a reprint. I did this with screenshots of the maps and from youtube reviews of the module itself. You can do anything, with a middle school (I started with AD&D in the 90's; have alot of 3/3.5 and started running 5th-ed, a bit over a year ago) mindset and access to multiple editiions. Just use a bit of creativity, a bit of commitment and some (or a lot) of work. Have started this mod in 5th edition, right now actually. They cleared out the Kobold Cave, just last session.