Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Great Game. Big Poppa will return for more lady chasin' fun next year.

You forgot the pooping Owlbear, but I guess it was dispatched while doing it's business.

Thanks again for running it. It was a hoot. (hey! I had plans for that centipede on my belt)

BX D&D, Keep On The Borderlands, Sat. PM 6/4/16

8 people had signed up for this game, but only 4 actually showed. I offered the group a choice, to play KotB as written, or an adventure merely inspired by it. They all wanted to play it as written, which was unfortunate because, using basic D&D PCs, 4 really isn't enough to play KotB unless you use a ton of hirelings, which is a drag.

We spent the next, hmmm, hour? trying to recruit more players. Eventually we got one more, so ran through the Caves of Chaos with just 5 players.

They all played 3rd level PCs with juiced up stats and max hp. I also had each player roll for two magic items from the Expert magic item lists. They started with some choice loot: a sword +1/+3 vs. undead, scroll of protection vs. undead, scroll of sleep, CLW, find traps, treasure map, etc.

The party consisted of a fighter, a thief, a halfling, a cleric, and an elf. Two of the players were middle-aged guys who I think were friends. They hadn't played KotB in over 20 years. One of the guys was there with his teenage son and teenage friend (and we recruited another teenager), who had never played KotB. The adults allowed the kids to call the shots. It was a very cool honor to DM several players into the fellowship of KotB veterans.

Scouting The Caves
The standard operating procedure was for the halfling to take off his armor, have the elf make him invisible, scout the cave, and then return with the group.

They started with an orc cave, the one with a bunch of heads. After exploring it for a bit, they decide to scout another cave. The halfling avoids the tripwire trap of the next cave (more orcs) and takes a look around. The party decides to check out another cave, the Bugbear cave. They party didn't like the sound of that one, so the halfling explored the Minotaur cave. Not liking the magical effects of dizziness, the halfling immediately turned around and left that cave, too.

The Owlbear Cave
Finally, they scout a cave they like, the Owlbear cave. The thief and the rest of the party gets into ambush position at the crossroads of several caverns while the halfling lures the magical beast by throwing some rocks. Since the Owlbear doesn't know there are actual humanoids there, it merely comes out to check the sound of rocks, this gives the party a chance to pepper the Owlbear with arrows before closing for melee. When the Owlbear does, the Thief lands a major backstab which enrages the beast. The next round, it turns against the Thief and the Thief is lucky to only get hit once (the Owlbear has 3 attacks per round, and could have easily killed the Thief right there if 1 or 2 more attacks connected).

They slay the Owlbear and begin work on their Caves of Chaos fashion line. (As teenage boys are want to do, they chop the Owlbear's head off to make a hat.)

They then turned their attention to the fancy goblet protected by the Gray Oozes (the party only spotted 2 of the 3). They go through a long process of the Thief luring the oozes around the cave, while the party runs in and out of the cave, shooting projectiles. They roll very poorly and this takes forever, but they eventually kill the 2 oozes without injury.

The party ties a rope around the Thief and send him wading into the pool to recover the goblet. As the Thief recovers the goblet, the group spots the 3rd ooze heading for the Thief. There is no way for the Thief to get out in time, and the ooze drops on him! What follows is a desperate combat, and the round the ooze dies is the round that drops the Thief to -6hp! Normally 0hp is death, but since we were so short staffed, I decided to use the AD&D -10hp rule. The cleric casts CLW, rolls max hp, and the Thief is restored to 1 hp! Well done!

The party rests for a few days in the Owlbear cave, and are lucky that nothing enters the cave during that time.

Ogre Cave
Next, the invisible halfling scouts the Ogre cave, which split into two parts, one part containing an ogre counting his gold, and in the other what appeared to be a sleeping cave bear. (The cave bear is really the ogre's bed covered with a bear rug, but the players thought it was a real sleeping bear!) The party discusses how to lure the ogre out without waking the bear. I was amazed at how cautious and prepared these young players were, certainly they were nothing like I was as a kid playing the KotB. I didn't even make it out of the Keep!

They send in the Halfling to lure the Ogre out with arrows, and the party ambushes the Ogre and kill him without taking a hit. The Thief sneaks into the cave to stab the bear, but it was just a bed pile. They rejoice over the amount of loot they had won!

Goblin And Hobgoblin Caves
After scouting the Goblin cave, the party takes out some Goblins before wandering into the Hobgoblin lair. While one of the Hobgoblins runs off for reinforcement, a Sleep spell from the Elf helps the party claim an easy victory. The Hobgoblin reinforcements arrive just as the party is finishing off the Hobgoblins, and the battle is joined in the doorway. With a rise in the Hobgoblin bodycount, their courage fails and the Hobgoblins flee. The party gives chase until they come to the Hobgoblin cave entrance/exit and decide to leave instead of taking a chance of getting swarmed.

Just Say No To Gnolls And Yes To Evil Shrines
Next, they explore the Gnoll cave entrance, but they decide to avoid it. The last cave for them to explore is the Evil Shrine cave. The Halfling spots the Zombie guard room, the Skeleton throne room, and the Evil Shrine area when he hears the footsteps of wandering Zombie guards, so he runs out of the cave to inform his party of what he saw.

The party wants to loot the gems in the Skeleton throneroom, but they decide to wipe out the Zombie guardroom first in an attempt to keep the monsters from piling up on them. While they are fighting the Zombies, the Zombie wandering guard comes by. Here is where the party made their one mistake. The cleric decides to Turn Undead, which sends the Zombies running down the hallway. They would have been much better off just killing the Zombies, because now they had to flee, since they would certainly warn who knows what else. So the party leaves the Evil Shrine empty-handed.

Minotaur Cave
At this point, the only cave they hadn't at least scouted was the Kobold cave, which they never entered. They decided to go back to the Minotaur Maze cave. They killed all of the firebeetles, and managed to kill several of the Stirges, causing the rest of the Stirges to flee. Then they got surprised by the Minotaur, who tore into them from behind!

The minotaur proved to be no match for the party, and they began searching his lair for loot. (Like the Owlbear and the Ogre previous, the party turned the Minotaur's head into a hat, too.) They found his slab, and how to open it, and pulled out several locked chests. The Thief checked the boxes for traps, but didn't find any. The Thief then picked the locks and as he did, one of them pricked him with a poison needle trap that he had failed to find. On his save vs. poison, he of course rolled a 1.

The Thief's player asks his group when are they going to take his body back to town to pay to have it raised. The party lets out a group belly laugh like they do at the end of every classic He-Man cartoon as they return to town with the loot, leaving the lowly Thief's corpse to feed the hungry Stirges.

And so ends another chapter in the Keep On The Borderlands.

Excellent write ups, Steve! I really had a hell of a good time playing in your game. I sure hope I get to game with you some more!

You'll have to ask francisca about how I came up with Captain Fuzzynuts for my dwarven fighter's name. And by the way, fuzzy nuts should give a dwarf a hefty charisma bonus. I'm just sayin'.

As for my backup character, that was my halfling thief, Koo Da Graw the Trustworthy. Since you were riding me pretty good about almost betraying the party in a previous game, I figured adding "The Trustworthy" to my character's name might act as a subliminal message to convince you to trust me. Yes, trust eightbits.

And Jeff's right, we totally punked that owlbear while it was droppign a deuce. And didn't someone go digging through it's crap to look for gold or something before I gutted it and checked its stomach? You can tell Steve runs a hardcore game. Our characters were so close to being down and out that they were desperate enough to dig through random entrails and intestinal contents for every copper piece they can find!

(Trust eightbits.)