At some point during the pandemic I became obsessed with Keep on the Borderlands. This is nothing new for a person who spends their off hours poring over the tomes of old dungeons and dragons modules. I don’t have anything to say about the keep that I believe to be more eloquent than those who came before me, but I do have a vision for running it that is a continued project that I dip into on occasion.
One of the beautiful things about Keep On the Borderlands is that it’s in many ways a blank slate, capable of flexibility within your game world. As a LORE JUNKY I decided I wanted to start fleshing out the keep and giving new life to many of it’s titled, yet unnamed characters. As I said the project is ongoing- but here’s a chunk of what I’ve done in various levels of usefulness or completion.
A few notes from the past on what I was thinking about:
This version of the Keep would be set in the future. A keep long in disarray that was the new pet project of a team of adventurers just having completed an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. The Lady Greenstone, having organized the mission decided she would take the treasure and knowledge she earned on that adventure and apply it to revitalizing the old castle.
The original Keep on the Borderlands includes a character who acts as a "guild master" and tends to the guild hall and is kind of a buzzkill. I decided it would be more fun to split the Guild Hall into two factions and let them squabble over space. Gordo is a former council-member of a different mages guild who was forced out for some reason, so he's come to Greenstone to start over and prove something. He's a cranky old man (gnome?) and isn't terribly excited about sharing the space, though he doesn't really have any better options. Alok is an outlander who probably adventured with Lady Greenstone at some point and liked the cut of her gib, so when he heard she was taking over the old keep he offered to start a hunters guild. Don't let his appearance and brash manner fool you- he may look like a Beastmaster, but he's a big nerd at heart, and he spends a lot of his free time studying monster biology.
If Alok and Gordo can figure out their differences they could probably collaborate on some really interesting projects...
Father Gabriel is modeled after a friend of mine- Gabe Soria, the creator of Sword & Backpack- an excellent rules-lite RPG that I've done some art for in the past. Gabe was the first person in RPG's to commission me to make something way back in 2013 after I made some Sword & Backpack fan art and we've been buds ever since. I decided he would be a perfect fit for the Curate- I hope you agree!
I also went ahead and decided that while the parish in Greenstone is multi-denominational, Father Gabriel is a cleric of a lawful snake god. So I made a little snake sigil for him, to go with the snake staff that's listed in the original text.
There was definitely also a journal entry I had written from the perspective of Devin Coldwater, but I can’t for the life of me find it right now.
