If I had a nickel for every time I’ve reviewed a D&D 5^th Edition Starter Set, I’d have four nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s a weird that it’s happened four times.

This particular starter set is Heroes of the Borderlands, and it’s designed to introduce new players to the D&D 2024 version of the game. I’ve previously reviewed:

• D&D Starter Set (2014, featuring The Lost Mine of Phandelver)
• D&D Essentials Kit (2019, featuring Dragon of Icespire Peak)
• D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (2022)

If you’ve read those reviews, then you know that what I’m looking for in a starter set is a complete game. I feel strongly that no one should buy a game, take it home, and then discover that it’s just a disposable advertisement for the game they should have bought in the first place.

I also feel strongly that an effective starter set desperately needs to do a superb job of introducing new Dungeon Masters to the game. When new players buy a D&D starter set, they’re expecting it to show them how to play their first roleplaying game, and the entire experience is lynchpinned on the DM. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope they’ll figure it out on their own.

Last, but not least, the introductory adventure should (a) ideally be multiple adventures and (b) show off the unique strengths of tabletop roleplaying games. If your premiere gateway product is a railroaded nightmare or makes D&D look indistinguishable from Gloomhaven, then something has gone wrong.

(You also get bonus points if you include some sort of solo play option, so that someone opening the box on Christmas morning can immediately dive in, get a little taste of what RPGs can be like, and get excited enough to gather their friends ASAP for a proper session.)

With these principles as our guiding light, I concluded that Lost Mine of Phandelver, in the 2014 Starter Set, was quite possibly the best introductory adventure ever published for D&D (in no small part because it was actually a full-blown campaign). The rulebook in that set was also notable because it included enough source material (monsters, magic items, and so forth) that it felt like a DM could continue designing and running their own adventures even after completing the included adventure. It was hampered only by the lack of character creation rules.

The Essentials Kit, in 2019, significantly improved the rulebook by including character creation, but lacked the same robust selection of monsters and magic items. The Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure was a solid entry, but also a bit of a downgrade from Lost Mine of Phandelver. Combining the Starter Set and the Essentials Kit, on the other hand, would give you a near perfect introductory set.

In 2022, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle tried to supplant both its predecessors… and failed. Character creation was gone, the rulebook was gutted, and the adventure was mediocre at best. This was a disposable and disappointing set.

In the end, Frank Menzter’s 1983 D&D Basic Set remained the reigning champion of D&D introductory sets.

Can Heroes of the Borderlands dethrone it?

OPENING THE BOX

The core content of Heroes of the Borderlands is contained in the Play Guide, which serves as the rulebook, and three adventure booklets: Keep on the Borderlands, Wilderness, and Caves of Chaos.

Then you’ve got the bling:

• 9 double-sided poster maps
• 5 glossy handouts
• Pregen character boards for a Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard (1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd level for each)
• Gobs and gobs of tokens (monster tokens, player tokens, terrain tokens, power tokens, hit point tokens, gem tokens, gold piece tokens)
• Background cards
• Species cards
• Magic item cards
• Spell cards
• Equipment cards
• NPC cards
• Monster cards
• A pad of Combat Tracker sheets
• A full set of dice (include 4d6 and 2d20)

It’s a lot of bling! And most of it is fully illustrated. You can definitely see where the $50 MSRP went.

RULEBOOK

In looking at the Play Guide, I think there are two key questions:

• How well does this function as an actual D&D rulebook?
• Would I want to learn D&D by reading this book?

And, obviously, these questions are obviously pretty intertwined with each other.

Well, let’s start at the beginning: The sequencing of the Play Guide is quite poor. For example, they try to describe all the Actions in the game before they explain how Turns work, which is hopelessly confusing. And they mention D20 Tests like a dozen times before telling the reader what they are. Simple procedures are needlessly cluttered up with exceptions, and the exceptions being based on rules that don’t appear until later doesn’t help.

At a more fundamental level, the Play Guide, following the lead of the 2024 Player’s Handbook, is a glossary-based rulebook. Glossary-based rulebooks kinda suck for a multitude of reasons, but they’re particularly disastrous at teaching new players how to play a game: Instead of presenting the rules as a series of instructions, they instead decouple the mechanics and expect the reader to reassemble the procedures of play. In addition to being inherently confusing, they’re also prone to making glaring mistakes, and the Play Guide inherits a bunch of mistakes from the core rulebooks without blinking an eye.

For example, in the main text the Influence action is defined as making a Charisma check to alter a creature’s attitude. In the glossary, however, the Influence action is defined as making a monster do something you want and the monster’s attitude is now a modifier on the check. If you’re an experienced DM, this is the kind of thing that just makes you sigh and shake your head. But it’s a needless booby trap for a brand new player just trying to figure out the game.

(The rules that directly contradict each other probably also distracted you from the Influence action only being usable on monsters, not NPCs. Which is just a straight-up mistake.)

You’ll also discover that core game concepts are missing from this rulebook. Proficiency bonuses, for example, have been baked into the pregen character sheets without any explanation of what they are or where they come from.

So, would I want to learn D&D from this book?

No. It’s sloppy, poorly organized (particularly for a first-time player), and incomplete.

And how well does this function as an actual D&D rulebook? Or is this just disposable trash designed to be thrown away after playing it once?

The answer here is a bit more nuanced, because the box does, for example, include a pretty diverse array of monsters, while the adventures books, as we’ll talk about in a moment, make a couple of half-hearted attempts to encourage the would-be DM to create their own adventure content. The limited character creation rules, on the other hand, have to be a pretty large ding, and the overall vibe is definitely disposable.

Most damning for me, personally, is that if you learned the game from this rulebook and then joined a group playing with the Player’s Handbook, you’d immediately be blindsided by the missing core concepts. So it’s very limited as a stand-alone experience, but also inadequate as a pathway to learning and playing the full game. It’s just a subpar manual across the board.

THE ADVENTURES

The three adventure booklets are a lot more exciting.

A single DM can take the three adventure booklets — Wilderness, Keep on the Borderlands, and Caves of Chaos — and use them as a traditional adventure or mini-campaign. But Heroes of the Borderlands also offers a more radical proposal: You can give each adventure booklet to a different player, with each one serving as the DM whenever the PCs go to the region covered by their booklet.

This is insanely cool!

First, it’s incredible to see such a big, daring concept in a product aimed at new gamers. It really challenges the engrained expectations of the RPG hobby, and even if only one table in a hundred takes the bait and begins experimenting with shared campaign worlds and other alternative structures for organizing their campaigns, that’s still a triumph.

Second, it’s such a great way to encourage more new players to try out the role of the Dungeon Master.

I’m assuming Justice Ramin Arman, the lead designer on Heroes of the Borderlands, was the one to come up with this concept and he deserves all the kudos in the world for it. This kind of thinking — and a willingness to experiment — is vital if you’re serious about growing the hobby.

As far as the adventures themselves go, there’s a goodly amount of adventure material in each one (you can expect to run this boxed set for several sessions) and, in terms of quality, it’s solid stuff.

For each adventure booklet, you start by pulling out the poster map for the region and laying it on the table:

Then you simply ask the players, “Where do you want to go?”

In the case of the Wilderness, as seen above, the choices are:

• Trail
• Woods
• Tamarack Stand
• Fens
• Keep on the Borderlands
• Caves of Chaos

In this case, if the players choose to go to the Keep or the Caves of Chaos, you would swap to those adventure booklets (although possibly only after triggering one or more Trail encounters on the way there). Otherwise, you simply flip to the matching sub-region in the adventure booklet and run the encounters and/or locations detailed there.

Everything about this great. It’s a simple structure for a novice DM to grok and use. It empowers the players without overwhelming them. And the adventure material is lightly spiced with just enough clues, job offers, and the like to link the various regions together and give the players the opportunity to start pursuing specific goals.

(Although if they just keep pointing at stuff and saying, “Let’s go there now!”, that works, too.)

QUIBBLES

I do have a few quibbles with the adventures, though.

For starters, if you’re going to suggest that separate DMs could each take a separate adventure booklet and swap their PCs in and out, then you need to make sure that none of the booklets have spoilers for the other booklets. There aren’t too many of these, but they do crop up. Notably, several of these are actually phrased as tips or reminders: “Hey! Don’t forget the huge spoilers over in the Caves of Chaos!” Normally that would actually be good praxis, but here it’s fighting one intended use of the booklets.

The biggest misfires of Heroes of the Borderlands, in fact, are often places where it seems to be fighting with itself.

For example, the original Keep on the Borderlands adventure by Gary Gygax on which Heroes of the Borderland is based, is, in my opinion, a brilliant introductory adventure in large part because of the moment when the PCs step into a gorge and behold the Caves of Chaos for the first time: A dozen different cave entrances line the gorge’s walls! Which one do you want to enter?

The very first action that the PCs take in the adventure is a choice. And that choice will completely reshape how the adventure plays out. It’s a moment that immediately tells a new player everything they need to know about how an RPG is supposed to work.

Initially, it seems like Heroes of the Borderlands is going to capture that same magic! “Look at this map! Just point at where you want to go!” it says. In fact, it does it three times over! Once for the Caves, again for the Wilderness, and again for the Keep!

… but then the authors immediately tell the first-time DM to take the choice away and tell the players where to go. For example, from the Caves of Chaos booklet:

Cave A functions as a tutorial with helpful sidebars. If this is your first time as the DM, encourage the players to start there.

And you can see that the intention is good: We prepped a tutorial for you!

But look at the effect it has! Instead of teaching the DM to give the players free choice, you tell them to take it away. Instead of new players having that defining moment of realizing THE CHOICE IS YOURS, their first moment in the game is instead the DM telling them what their choice will be.

First impressions matter. Wizards of the Coast has this immense privilege of being the gateway to the RPG hobby. It’s a shame that they so often prove utterly incompetent at introducing new players to the game: Not just failing to help them, but actively going out of their way to teach them the wrong things to do.

In any case, as I mentioned before, the wealth of adventure material is generally well done and supported with a plethora of poster battlemaps.

There are a few encounters that are conceptually weird: A huge forest fire that’s also surprisingly short-lived. An NPC hireling that follows video game logic (just standing around until the players click him and tell him to fight, then returning to his spawn point where the players can fetch him again). A bank that charges 10% interest per DAY. An unintentionally hilarious bit where three hobgoblins and their four goblin followers are planning to besiege a castle that has dozens of armored knights defending it.

I think my favorite alone these line is: “We’ve set up a town where you can’t buy rations because we didn’t want to include rules for that, but we’re going to frame up a ‘your hungry RIGHT NOW’ encounter where you have to immediately choose which color of pine nuts you’re going to eat, and if you choose wrong you’re going to be POISONED!”

Beyond these oddities, the material in general does suffer a bit from a lack of depth. I think the intention was to make it easier for 8-year-olds to run the game (even though the box says 12+), but I’m not sure it was the right approach. In my opinion, it’s easier to run a scenario when you understand WHY stuff is happening in the scenario. So shallow material occasionally plagued by illogical nonsense tends to leave a lot of booby traps

There are other booby traps, too, like a quest to make a map with more details than the maps given to the DM (which puts the new DM in a tough spot to start improvising the necessary details) and milestone leveling guidelines in each of the adventure booklets that, as far as I can tell, are simply incompatible with each other. (Not inconsistent. Incompatible.)

But these are, as noted, quibbles and isolated incidents. Everything here is serviceable enough. It’s mostly frustrating because it’s so close to being a lot better than the “this is OK” that it ends up being.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Along those same lines, there are some pretty big missed opportunities in Heroes of the Borderlands.

For example, at the end of the Wilderness book, there are eight random encounters given for each of the four sub-regions, for a total of thirty-two encounters. With just a little bit of cooking and a few hundred words, this material could have been coherently presented as an example of how to restock and expand the scenario.

Instead, it’s presented without any structure at all, and just kind of assumes that the new DM will magically know how to use random encounters.

Similarly, every cave in the Caves of Chaos book includes utterly inadequate “guidelines” for adjusting encounter difficulty. For example:

You can add monsters, such as allied Goblin Warriors, to the cave to make this scenario longer and more difficult, or you can remove some monsters to make it easier and shorter. One or two Hobgoblin Warriors might be out on a patrol elsewhere.

The new DM is given no indication of how or when or why they would want to adjust the difficulty. And if they do, for example, decide to make this lair more difficult… well, how many Goblin Warriors should they add, exactly? Two? Four? Eight? There are no encounter guidelines in this boxed set, so they’re shooting in the dark. Hope you don’t screw up and kill everybody!

Here’s another unforced error:

The characters can leave the Caves of Chaos any time they choose, provided they aren’t inside a cave or engaged in combat. If they return to a cave later, it is as they left it.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily advise brand new DMs to run fully dynamic dungeons with enemies building fortifications, adversary rosters, restocking events between visits, and so forth. But I also wouldn’t go out of my way to tell them NOT to do that. Just because they’re not ready to take the next step, it doesn’t mean you should steer them onto the wrong path!

And if you’re going to include woefully under-documented suggestions for monsters DMs can add to the caves, why not include the idea of using those same monsters as a way of restocking the caves for future visits or brand new adventures?

BLING!

I’ve already listed all the additional bling in the Heroes of the Borderlands. The production values on this stuff is top-notch. It’s very attractive.

But I have to admit I have a bias against unnecessary knick-knacks. I understand the desire to add a lot of stuff make the cover price seem “worth it,” but I just think it’s a bad idea in an introductory product to create the perception that, for example, you “need” an equipment card for every piece of equipment the PCs are carrying.

This is particularly true when the desire to have some physical component actually gets in the way of teaching new players how to actually play D&D.

But if you like bling, it’s very nice bling.

THE VERDICT

Spreading Heroes of the Borderlands out on the table in front of me, what’s the final verdict here?

Well, I can’t recommend the rulebook to anyone. Its primary job is to teach new players and DMs how to play the game, and it’s really bad at doing that.

I’m going to give the adventures a C+. It’s solid material and lots of it, and I have to give credit for the bits where the booklets dare to dream big. (Even when they’re simultaneously cutting the legs out from under a lot of those dreams.)

Combining these things together, I’m going to give the total package a C-. (I’d probably give it a D+, but I’m going to bump it up a notch because all the bling does add tangible value.) As a Starter Set for D&D, this mostly gets the job done, and there are places where true genius shines through, like the shared DMing duties and point-at-the-map introduction to exploration and adventure. I wish they’d fully committed to some of those ideas, spent more time teaching new DMs essential skills, and spent less time sabotaging both themselves and the new players trying to learn the game.

GRADE: C-

Lead Designer: Justice Ramin Arman
Designers: Jeremy Crawford, Ron Lundeen, Christopher Perkins, Patrick Renie

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 96

BUY NOW!

ADDITIONAL READING
Keep on the Borderlands: Factions in the Dungeon

Go to Part 1

The thing I value most about the Old School Renaissance – and the reason I enjoyed exploring the ur-game of OD&D – is that a lot of valuable and experimental mechanics and game structures were functionally abandoned as the hobby and industry kind of dashed headlong towards a post-AD&D / post-Dragonlance homogenization.

So when I’m struggling with something like urbancrawling I find that it can be very useful to dip back into the primordial pool and poke around a bit to see if anything useful pops out.

KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS

It’s interesting to note that the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide doesn’t actually include guidelines for urban adventures: Dungeon adventures, wilderness adventures, aerial adventures, waterborne adventures, underwater adventures, and even planar adventures all get coverage. Urban adventures? Nope.

I believe this is because Gygax primarily saw cities as the hub around which adventures were based: You came back to the city to get supplies and hirelings. You left the city in order to have adventures.

Gygax’s handling of the Keep in Keep on the Borderlands seems to largely confirm this. Five specific points are given under “DM Notes About the Keep”:

I. Specific responses to PCs who break the law.

II. “Floor plans might be useful… exceptionally so in places frequented by adventurers.”

III. Rumors can be gained by talking to people at the Keep. (Example: “Talking with the Taverner might reveal either rumor #18 or #19; he will give the true rumor if his reaction is good.”)

IV. How to enter the Inner Bailey of the Keep and get a special mission from the Castellan.

V. After the adventure material in the module has been used up, you can “continue to center the action of your campaign around the Keep by making it the base for further adventures you devise”. Examples given include leading a war party to fight bandits, becoming traders operating out of the Keep, or exploring the wilderness to find additional adventures in the surrounding area.

(What I love about that fifth point is how casually Gygax drops the idea of three radically different game structures as potential avenues for developing the campaign. It’s very suggestive to me of how different the early GMs were in their approach to the game, compared to later “sequential dungeons” or “follow the plot” styles.)

In other words, the Keep is treated as a place for PCs to shop and as a place to gather information that will point them towards adventure.

THE VILLAGE OF HOMMLET

T1 The Village of Hommlet, also by written by Gygax, was published around the same time that B2 Keep on the Borderlands was published and it shows a consistent methodology: Every building is keyed. The places “frequented by adventurers” are given floorplans. Rumors are keyed to specific individuals (replacing the generic rumor table). Basically, there are only two significant departures.

First, no specific response scenario is given for PCs breaking the law. This, however, seems to flow as a natural consequence of the lack of a central legal authority in Hommlet.

Second, there is a seemingly odd desire to itemize the valuable contents of every single commoner’s hut.

In combination, however, this actually makes sense: Instead of legal response scenarios, a lot of attention is given to alliances and friendships. So you get entries like, “He has 20 gold ingots (50 g.p. value each) hidden away in a secret hollow under the stone wall in front. He has become quite friendly with the magic-user, Burne.” The clear implication, at least to my eyes, is that if you mess with this guy or steal his shit, Burne’s going to come looking for you. (Whereas if you mess with his neighbor, who is a member of the Church of St. Cuthburt, you’ll be dealing with the Church.)

The underlying assumption here (and in a lot of early city modules) seems to be that some significant percentage of PCs are going to be murderhobos: B2 deals with that by specifying centralized legal repercussions. T1 assumes that the PCs will succeed in looting a house or two (and therefore specifies the loot), but also lays out a comprehensive social network that’s going to come looking for their blood.

This is mostly a digression, but it is interesting to note that having these sorts of explicit or semi-explicit structures in place for dealing with murderhobos is an essentially universal aspect in all of the early city modules I’m looking at.

THE FIRST FANTASY CAMPAIGN

Let’s turn our attention from Gygax and instead focus it upon Dave Arneson. Although not published until 1977, the First Fantasy Campaign “attempted to show the development and growth of his campaign as it was originally conceived”.

First, an important note: “By the end of the Fourth year of continuous play Blackmoor covered hundreds of square miles, had a dozen castles, and three separate Judges as my own involvement decreased due to other circumstances. But by then, it was more than able to run itself as a Fantasy campaign and keep more than a hundred people and a dozen Judges as busy then as they are today.”

Even with my experience running an open table supporting 30-40 players, the sheer scale of what the Blackmoor campaign was like in this timeframe is really difficult for me to wrap my head around. And we need to keep in mind its unusual needs and demands as we try to unravel what the city-based game structures of the campaign were.

We’ll start with this: Over the course of its first two years, Blackmoor “grew from a single Castle to include, first, several adjacent Castles (with the forces of Evil lying just off the edge of the world) to an entire Northern Province(s) of the Castle and Crusade Society’s Great Kingdom. As it expanded, each area (Castle’s first and then Provincial Counties) was given a pre-set Army. Later, the players were to organize their own forces based on experience and goodies procured enroute to their Greatness.”

In other words, the early dungeon-based portion of the game was designed to prepare characters for establishing Castles which would be used to raise Armies in order to participate in wargames. “The entire 3^rd Year of the Blackmoor Campaign was to be part of a Great War between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.”

So one of the primary uses for a city in Arneson’s campaign was to supply the Army.

In terms of how the Town of Blackmoor was actually run at the table, however, we are regrettably only given a half page of information.

“This map shows Blackmoor Castle, the town, and immediate area. All those areas named in the first years of play are labeled. Some names were later changed by the players so that Troll Bridge became known as Mello’s Bridge … Also the East Gate became known as Gerri’s Gate (named after Gertrude the Dragon who was killed there by the Baddies.”

The impression I immediately take from this is that the city was highly responsive and could be radically transformed by the actions of the players. This is further confirmed in the next paragraph:

“Buildings 1, 5, 23, 40, Town Inn, Comeback Inn, and Merchant Warehouses are owned or lived in by Minions of the Merchant (run by Dan Nicholson, these quickly became the local Mafia and spread to several areas of the campaign). Buildings 13, 15, 20, 21, 24, 27, 35, 39 were those of the followers of the Great Svenny and the secret society set up by Mello the Hobbit and “Bill” (sort of a counter to the Merchant’s Mafia).”

The overall image is one of powerful, influential organizations being established by the PCs. This is awesome stuff and it really gets my blood pumping. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on for the future (in much the same way that kingdom-building sits atop the hexcrawl structure, this type of Great Society play would naturally sit atop a proper urbancrawl structure), but in terms of the urbancrawl structure itself it is, unfortunately, not terribly informative. Therefore, I’m going to lay Arneson aside (at least for the moment).

Go to Part 7: City States of the Judges Guild

Couple congruent thoughts synchronistically spun themselves into my head recently.

First, Delta’s D&D Hotpost asked, “Was Module B1 a Good Design?” This revived my old argument that B1, B2, and the original version B3 are — at least conceptually — a really solid introduction to dungeoncrawling:

B1 teaches the DM how to key a dungeon. For those unfamiliar with it, the module provides a map with an incomplete key: Rooms are described, but blanks are left for monsters and treasures. At the back of the module, a list of monsters and treasures are provided: The DM is supposed to take them and assign them to rooms. In practice, this teaches the DM that:

(1) Rooms are not defined by the monster you fight in them.

(2) The distribution and arrangement of monsters and treasure will fundamentally change the gameplay of a dungeon.

(3) You can stock a given chunk of geography in many different ways (and many different times).

B2 teaches the players how to play. When you go the Caverns of Chaos, you enter a valley and the first thing you see are a dozen cave entrances: So the very first action the players have to take in the module is to make a choice. And the choice they make will completely alter the future course of events through the module. It’s an incredibly empowering moment and a really important lesson for any player of an RPG to learn.

Finally, the original version of B3 (which was very different from the version eventually published) introduced what was originally supposed to be the centerpiece of every D&D campaign: The megadungeon. Jean Wells provided the upper levels of the dungeon, but included several “empty” rooms which the DM was supposed to key for themselves. And she included a number of passages that would lead down to lower levels that the DM was supposed to design for themselves. Although sometimes crude and inadequate in its presentation, B3 would have transitioned the DM into designing and expanding their own megadungeon on the superstructure it provided.

None of these modules were perfect. But new players who worked their way through them received a really solid education in what it meant to run and play an RPG.

In the years since then, a lot of introductory adventures have been produced by the RPG industry. And the interesting thing about most of them is that they take a very different approach: They try to simplify and carefully curate the first experiences of new players. They spoon-feed the GM and hand-hold the players.

Which brings me to the second thought, this one from the Psychology of Video Games: “How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity.” In this essay, Jamie Madigan discusses a psychology experiment which demonstrated, in brief, that:

(1) If you take a toy with many different functions which are not immediately evident and introduce a child to it by “spontaneously” discovering one of its functions, then the child will experiment with the toy and discover its many different functions.

(2) But if you take that same toy and introduce a child to it by saying, “This is an awesome toy. Here’s how you use it.” And then demonstrate one of its functions, the child will spend less time playing with the toy and discover fewer of its functions.

(Madigan’s discussion of the study is excellent. I recommend clicking through the link and reading the whole thing.)

The application to roleplaying games should be almost self-evident: Introductory scenarios should be robust (so that new players don’t become stymied or lost). But that robustness should not take the form of hand-holding or railroading. If you want to introduce a new player to roleplaying games, then you need to embrace the Caverns of Chaos: You need to show them twelve options and say, “The choice is yours.”

Because, ultimately, it is that power of choice which makes RPGs special and exciting and worthwhile.

In “(Re)-Running the Megadungeon” I talked about how to keep a dungeon complex fresh by restocking the room key and using wandering monster tables as a form of low-tech procedural content generation. In “Wandering Adventures” I talked about how the OD&D wandering monster tables could be used to generate entire adventures. Now I want to build on those ideas by touching on the basic concept of factions in the dungeon.

To immediately boil the idea down to its core: If your dungeon has a life beyond the activities of the PCs, it is much easier to revitalize the dungeon between delves. The life of the dungeon will naturally generate the ideas necessary to restock the dungeon (and, thus, carry a lot of the weight for you). This becomes even easier if the dungeon contains multiple, independent factions. (And even moreso if these factions are openly hostile to each other.)

Nor does this have to be something that you need heavily pre-plan. It can largely just be a matter of keeping one eye on it during your restocking process: “Okay, the PCs killed 70% of the orc population on Level 3. Who can take advantage of that? What will the Orc King’s response be? Actually, wait, they killed the Orc King. Have the orcs broken into factions? Could the Red Prince (I just made that name up) have allied with the goblins on Level 2 to push his claims? How will the other orcs feel about being asked to co-exist with lowly goblins? Will they turn to the Voodoo Necromancer (just made that up, too) who was once the Orc King’s advisor?” That’s about 15 seconds of brain-storming. Follow it up with a couple minutes of actual prep and you’ve got orc-and-goblin warbands with faces painted bright crimson squaring off against orc warriors ‘roided out on alchemical strength-boosters wearing the bone fetishes of the Voodoo Necromancer. It doesn’t even really matter if the PCs get involved in the actual politics of the situation: Even if they just hack their way through these orcish factions, they’ll (a) recognize that the dungeon has changed in their absence and (b) get some unique and interesting hacking out of it.

(You can see a similar real-play example of this in Delve Seven of “(Re-)Running the Megadungeon” when the elementalist gets killed.)

So, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with winging it. In the process of winging it, however, I’ve found it generally useful to prep two key pieces of information:

1. Identify each faction.
2. Identify the territory controlled by each faction.

Most of the time, it’s not necessary to get really obsessive with this. For example, in the Caverns of Thracia I don’t really have much more than a general sense that “the cultists control this chunk of the map”, “the lizardmen control these rooms”, “the anubians are based out of this complex”, and the like.

My understanding of the complex is fairly amorphous, and putting more detail into it is probably counter-productive: It’s unlikely to ever be noticed by players, it’ll bog down your prep, and it’s rarely representative of the fairly amorphous nature of contested territory. Precision will also tend to bog down your ability to flexibly interpret the results from your random encounter tables.

(Of course, if you’re designing a scenario in which particular focus or importance is placed on factional play, more detail may be merited.)

RANDOM FACTION INTERACTION TABLES

With that being said, it might be valuable to build some quick, light tools that will allow you to procedurally generate the ebbing shifts of factional fortunes in the dungeon. For this purpose, let’s turn to the Caves of Chaos from the classic B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

For those unfamiliar with this module, the Caves of Chaos are particularly useful for this purpose because they’ve already been conveniently split into factions: Essentially you’ve got a small valley full of caves, with each cave leading to an interconnected system of caverns and serving as the lair for one of several chaotic factions. The factions are:

(“Wandering Adventurers” refers to an NPC party entering the Caves of Chaos.)

FACTION CONFLICT CHECK: After each visit to the caves by a party of PCs, make a faction conflict check. Roll 1d6. On a roll of 6, conflict has broken out between the factions. Roll twice on the faction table to determine which two factions have come into conflict. (If you roll the same number twice, either re-roll or assume some sort of civil strife.) Then roll on the Conflict Resolution Table:

Stalemate Skirmish: The factions are largely unaffected by the conflict. Their forces may have been reinforced, or you may wish to subtract 1 or 2 members from one of their encounters. (The conflict may leave them ripe for alliances against their recent foes; or leave a chamber showing recent signs of conflict; or a couple of corpses tossed onto the valley floor to be feasted on by the owlbear.)

Faction Damaged: A damaged faction has suffered losses equal to roughly 25% of their strength. Subtract 1d4 members from each encounter (keyed or random) with that faction.

Faction Crippled: A crippled faction has suffered loses equal to roughly 50% of their strength. Eliminate entire encounters or subtract 1d12 members from each encounter (keyed or random) with that faction.

Faction Destroyed: A destroyed faction has been eliminated. Their lair may lie empty, be occupied by the other faction involved in the conflict, or restocked randomly. Their population has been killed, driven off, or enslaved.

Factions Unite: The two factions have allied with each other. (One of the leaders may have been killed. The alliance may be for some short-term goal. Or the populations might be fully intermixed between the lairs.)

USING THE TABLES

Like a random encounter table, the output here is designed to be flexibly interpreted. Once again, the Caves of Chaos are great for this sort of thing because it already includes some short notes regarding the relationships between the factions. (For example, the owlbear is described as having recently munched on some gnolls. The two orc chieftains have a secret meeting room that only they know about. And so forth.)

Mostly for the fun of it, I’m going to roll up a couple actual examples using these tables. We’ll start by assuming that I’ve just rolled a “6” on my Faction Conflict Check and go from there:

1. DETERMINE FACTIONS: I roll 1d12 twice, generating 9 and 5. That’s the Minotaur and the Ogre.

2. DETERMINE OUTCOME: I roll 1d8 and get 8. That’s Factions Unite.

3. INTERPRET RESULT: The Minotaur and the Ogre are the two solo factions in the Caves. (There’s only one Ogre and one Minotaur.) Scanning their entries, I see that the ogre is willing to sell his services to the highest bidder and the minotaur has a lot of money. So let’s say that the minotaur has hired the ogre for some purpose. What could it be? Well, the minotaur is willing to help the bugbears if they pay him in slaves. What if the bugbears cheated the minotaur and now he wants a little help to get the payment he feels is his due? That sets up a scenario where the PCs could arrive in the valley to see bugbears fleeing from their caves; or find bugbears shackled in the minotaur caverns; or just the minotaur and ogre huddling up in the minotaur’s cavern while they plot the glories of their revenge.

Let’s do it again:

1. DETERMINE FACTIONS: I roll 4 and 12. That’s Goblins and Wandering Adventurers.

2. DETERMINE OUTCOME: I roll a 5 for Both Factions Damaged.

3. INTERPRET RESULT: This one is pretty easy to figure out. A group of adventurers entered the goblin caverns, wreaked some havoc, and then got driven off.

4. GOBLIN ENCOUNTERS: There are 36 goblins total in this lair. A 25% loss would represent 9 goblins. I can represent this loss pretty easily be eliminating the wandering patrol of 6 goblins (the surviving goblins have bunkered down) and the 4 goblins guarding the store room.

5. ADVENTURERS: Where’d they go? Well, let’s say it was a party of 4 adventurers. One of them is dead and his corpse can be seen on a spike outside the goblins’ lair. The rest are either (a) camping nearby and looking for allies; (b) sold to the hobgoblin slavers; or (c) both.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It should be pretty easy to see how this simple system can be used to add a little quick spice to the complex between PC visitations. Combined with the ability to simply use some generic wandering monster tables to rapidly determine the new inhabitants of any lair complex emptied out by the PCs, it’s pretty easy to see how the Caves of Chaos could be easily used pretty much endlessly for low-level adventuring.