1st Steps - making this all work in a campaign built for 10 year old’s

 

"Read the module thoroughly; you will notice that the details are left in your hands.  This allows you to personalize the scenario, and suit it to what you and your players will find most enjoyable"

           - E. Gary Gygax, Keep on the Borderlands Notes for the Dungeon Master

 

As directed by the Master himself, the end goal of this endeavor is to personalize the scenarios, to come up with an over arcing campaign that my kids and myself will find most enjoyable.  So, if you are looking for tools and advice on how to play the Keep and the other modules we'll be covering "as written" or "by the book" look elsewhere, this blog is not for you.

 

Still here?  Good.  After many months of researching everything I could find on the internet that was even remotely related to the classic Gygax modules, I felt I was ready to start tackling the nuts and bolts of updating B1 & B2 for 1e.  I started here for two reasons.  First, it's the Keep.  How could I not start here, where countless novice players had taken their 1st steps into the "land of imagination."  Second, because somebody else had already done it before me.  No, really, most of the hard work had already been done.  I like that.

 

Starting with the Keep, DMPrada over at Knights and Knaves painstakingly converted the entire module (caves and all!) to 1e.  I used this as both a template and as inspiration for "personalizing the scenario." The .pdf version of his conversion can be found at http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/dmprata/B2.pdf.  And as for B1 (which we are using as the caves of the unknown), a literal ton of material has been accumulated and edited by Demos Sachlas (aka Paleologos) in his In Search of the Unknown Campaign Sourcebook https://sites.google.com/site/osrgrimoire/B1sourcebookwithmaps.pdf?attredirects=0.  Specifically, I used the suggestions for stocking by Aldarron, which combines several excellent ideas from other authors, and (as he did) paired it with Mike of Beaverton's revised map for level 1.

 

The end product, my complete conversion of B1 & B2 to fit in my Gygax Module Campaign, can be found on the archive.  You will find major changes to both the original modules.  The backstory of Zelligar and Rogahn have been linked to the Battle of Emridy Meadows, which occurs 80 years before the Campaign stars.  All of the encounters outside of the Keep, along with the humanoid forces gathered at the Caves of Chaos, are linked to the grand designs of Mareth, the evil cleric of the Shrine of Evil, who was sent there by Lareth the Beautiful (her brother) to further his ultimate goal of releasing the Lolth from captivity under the Temple of Elemental Evil.  Elements that do not fit the narrative, or are not appropriate for younger players (such as including females and children in an evil army) have been removed.

 

With these tools (and your copies of B1 & B2) in hand, you will be fully prepared to start your own group of Junior Adventurers on their first journey into the land of imagination.  Depending on the attention span of your group and the length of the session, there is enough material here to cover several weeks to months of adventuring.  And who knows, they may even pick up a little math along the way.

Disclosures, requirements & admonitions.

So, before we jump into the good stuff, I thought I'd go through some basic concepts and assumptions.  First off, the contents of this blog assume that you have access to and a working understanding of the following (all 1e unless otherwise noted):

Hard Cover Books

Monster Manual

Player's Handbook

Dungeon Master Guide

Fiend Folio

Monster Manual II

Modules

B1 - In Search of the Unknown (modified for 1e)

B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands (modified for 1e)

T1-4 - The Temple of Elemental Evil

S1 - The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

WG4 - Forgotten Temple of Tharizun

G1 - Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

G2 - Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl

G3 - Hall of the Fire Giant King

D1 - Decent into the Depths of the Earth

D2 - Shrine of the Kuo-Toa

D3 - Vault of the Drow

Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits

Accessories

DM Screen

Pencils and Art Gum Erasers

Notebook, graph and scratch paper

Ruler

1 set of dice per player/DM (2d4, 2d6, 1d8, 2d10 (different colors), 1d12 & 1 d20).  Each player should have their own color dice (except the d10s).  I was amazed how much time 8-10 year old's will spend arguing over dice.

Optional - Miniatures.  When I started this endeavor I still had over 2 dozen original miniatures from the 70's.  In the last few months I have picked up another 3 dozen or more original TSR, Ral Parthra & Citadel miniatures.  I was surprised how easy they were to find online.  My kid and his friends love the addition of miniatures to the game and I find that they help with visualizing the scene for newbies (Oh, that's why the cleric cannot heal the fighter that is on the other side of a 30 ft. chamber).

And before you beat me with the Mace of St. Cuthbert, yes, I know that B1 was written by Mike Carr, not EGG.  I am simply using it as the Cave of the Unknown, as countless others have before me.

Original versions of most of the hard cover books and modules (well played but still serviceable) can all be found for reasonable prices on Amazon or E-Bay.  The exception is The Temple of Elemental Evil, which as of this writing is hard to find for under $75.00.  You can also pick up reprints of all of these in .pdf versions (and some in soft cover versions, including TTEE) for reasonable prices at the Dungeon Masters Guild (www.dmsguild.com), which also has outstanding reprints of the Hard Cover Books available.

For each module, I plan to create a companion "cheat sheet" that will list the main stats (HP, AC, Dam & EXP) of all monsters along with treasure for each room.  Each of these will also include a "Notes for the DM" section that will detail how my additions to the story element deviate from the original modules.  I have already done this for The Keep, Quasqueton and The Caves of Chaos.  Next up, The Temple of Elemental Evil.  And now we have a problem.

As you probably know (seeing that you are still reading), as written TTEE does not fit into this grand adventure.  When T1 - The Village of Hommlet was released in 1979, it was Gary's intent to follow it up in short order with the Temple of Elemental Evil (says so right there on the front cover).  But a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple.  As D&D grew in popularity, Gary found himself going from Game Designer to Company Admin.  As a result, he had to put TTEE on the shelf where it would sit for six long years, until he finally turned his reams of notes on the project over to Frank Mentzer to finish up.  Unfortunately, by that time the Big Bad of the adventure (the Demon Queen Lolth) had already been used in a previous module (Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits).  So, in his home games where he play-tested the material he replaced her with a giant blotchy demon mushroom (?!?), which ended up in the version he turned over to Frank.  Well, not in my world.  (By the way, if you are interested in how this all played out back in the day at TSR, you could spend days going through the multitudes of multi-page threads over at En World and Dragonsfoot on the subject.  At least I did.)

Which brings us to one of the main goals for my grand adventure project, which is to return as much as possible of EGG's original intent to the Temple, staring with returning Lolth as the main big bad.  I have the general outline of how I plan to do this.  Now, for the grunt work.  Hopefully I'll be finished before the boys confront Lolth's evil cleric at the end of Cave K, which at the rate they are chewing up the Caves, will be in just a few weeks.

The other main goal of this project (the "pay if forward" part) is to ease the burden of anyone who wants to use some or all of this in their own 1e campaign.  Over 24 months of research preceded this endeavor.  During this process, on more occasions than I care to remember I would discover promising insights and references to useful information, only to be cut off by dead links or defunct web sites and blogs.  Where the resources did still exist, often they would be spread over half a dozen or more of unrelated web sites.  This resulted in countless wasted hours that could have been better spent on prepping the actual campaign.

To address this, I will be doing a number of things with this blog.  First, if still active I will be including direct links to all sources and materials used in the project with each post.  Second, there will be a separate reference page that includes all (working) links to materials used, organized by Module.  Don't want to waste your time with my ramblings?  Fine, go right to the source.  Finally, I will be keeping a Google Drive archive at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rimHzxRhObQEv8sX-og5GxZbIsm20y5M which will contain all of the documents that I used on this project (except the original Modules, of course), as a backup in case the original links ever go down.  This will include all 3rd party material as well as everything I have created.  If any of the original authors out there have a problem with this, just ping me and I'll happily remove your work from the archive.

Introductions

You might say that I am an "early adapter" of D&D, having thrown my first 3d6 to hit an orc back in 1976 (we didn't have d20's back in the day, just the three little brown books).  By 1979 my group of friends and I were veterans of D&D, and shunned the Basic BX version of the game (that was for kids & newcomers), jumping right into the "expert" version of 1e AD&D as soon as each of the original hardback books came out.  Amazingly, a couple of us kept the dice rolling throughout the 80's, by which time my original Elvish Magic User had astonishingly made it to 16th level (yeah, we had a few homebrew house rules).  Sadly, the start of the 90's saw the end of my adventuring days.  But I kept my dice.  And the books.

Fast forward to 2015.  That's when I first started noticing that the rest of the world seemed to have re-discovered this great game I originally played over 35 years ago.  Apparently, a few people had been playing it all along, through at least 4 1/2 official versions and countless variants.  But now, it was exploding back into the mainstream.  Everyone wanted to roll dice like it was 1979.

This in turn sparked my interest to revisit the game I loved.  I had no interest in this new-fangled version of the game but was more curious to see if anyone else out there had a soft spot for the good old days of Save or Die, where dungeons were meant for crawling.  Was I in for a pleasant surprise.  Over a long weekend of web surfing, I discovered that there was an entire community out there of Grognards and OSR enthusiasts that had been keeping the spirit of the game alive while I had been off going to Law School and starting a family.  And boy, had they been busy.

During the last couple of years, I have spent a fair amount of my free time devouring what is out there, from the excellent forums at ENWorld and Dragonsfoot, to the multitude of blogs dedicated to keeping the spirit of Gary & Dave's creation alive.  This allowed me to rediscover the roots of the game, going all the way back to that first meeting between Gary and Dave, and to relive those epic adventures of my little wizard and his group of merry NPCs and henchmen, including a legendary battle against a certain group of giants that were terrorizing the countryside.  To all the players and contributors out there that have kept the faith all these years, you have my undying gratitude.

This, in turn, got me thinking.  Why couldn't my son and his friends experience the same wonder and excitement that I had tossing funny looking dice and loping the heads off evil creatures?  Sure, they were a little young at the time, but this would give me plenty of time to prepare some epic adventures for them.  And out of this idea was born my grand plan to create the perfect homage to the early years of the game, to link the original Gygax Modules into one grand, career spanning campaign by combing B2, TTEE, S4, WG4, G1-3, D1-3 & Q1.  How hard could it be?

Well, in the coming posts I plan to tell you.  And at the same time, hopefully give back a little to the faithful community and pay forward the efforts of those that have come before.  To go with this blog I will be setting up a separate Google Docs page where I will store all of the 3rd party and original source material that I used for this project.  If you have made it this far, thanks for reading, and please check back often.  You see, my 3 and a half year project has finally born fruit, and my (now 10 year old) son and his friends have started their own epic adventure, heading out from the Keep and into the mysteries of Quasqueston & the Caves of Chaos (revised and updated for 1e).  For those suffering from insomnia, I may even post a game play log or two.