The Pale Keep

By Hephaistos Fnord
Canvas Quest
Some D&D Clone
Levels 1-3

The Pale Keep was built by the Crown of Albion in 3421 to fortify the bordermarch of the Pale against the Eire barbarians and their fey allies. The keep sits on a tall cliff overlooking the Barrow river to the south; the entirety of the island across the Barrow is referred to as “beyond the Pale” by the March’s inhabitants. The entire keep is hallowed ground, kept consecrated regularly by the abbey’s priests.

This 42 page adventure is a Keep on the Borderlands clone for some homebrew 5e system that thinks armor should reduce damage instead of making you harder to hit. It’s the Keep & Caves and a whole lot of shit ass formatting and large stat blocks. I loathe it.

It is the Keep on the Borderlands. The Pale Keep is the Keep and the caves/ravine in it are the caves/ravine from B2. There’s a lair of the lizard people (kobolds this time) and a crazed hermit with a big cat (an elven druid.) The minotaur is a demon this time and we’ve got a lot of types of “Beast Men” in that ravine.  Including a couple of tribes of rival “cousin/’ monsters/factions who war with each other. IE: the orcs. And an ogre boss-man. And the secret door stuff. And a map that shows the entire ravine AND all of the caves hanging off of it. Ok, the spiders are ettercaps. We’re got boar0men and shit like that. But this is VERY close to B2. Like, Basic Fantasy close. It takes every element of B2 and then uses it. Not (Ironwood Gorge?) sort of reimagining, but this is B2 cloned by someone with watercolors instead of acrylics. Complete with a running number system for encounters that persists throughout the caves in the ravine. If it happened in B2 then it happens here. It’s for their home system which seems a lot like 5e except armor reduces damage. Whatever. Arms Law did it first. (Hmmm, I wonder what the best version of Rolemaster is? Concise but full?) 

Man, I really fucking hate having to pretend like this shit is ok. B2 was ok I guess. The most special thing about it was that literally every D&D player before 1988 has played it, most likely multiple times. This has led to  a shared experience and the special kind of nostalgia where everyone remembers the same one toy they had, the only toy that anyone had that year. It’s raid after raid in a monster zoo, played straight. With some squinting there’s some more going on, especially in the Meta. But this is not a masterpiece. But, people have fond memories and so here we are again. Yeah. A B2 clone. For a D&D clone. Certainly a step from from, say, Vampire Queen. Some rivalries. The mercenary ogre. A bit of nudge & wink humor tossed in. Creatures sometimes doing things. Intrigue possibilities at the keep. Or, loot the fucking place. And, wrapped up in a terse writing style. But this makes it a historical object of interest. “Look! The cave paintings of people have faces now!”

So, what about this homage to B2?

Fuck you. No one deserved this. What kid of fucked up design/formatting decision is this? What the fuck motivated the decision to make this a … I don’t even know what to call it. Normal paragraph with some numbers embedded in it? Hey, I get it, room/key isn’t the best formatting for all adventures, or, even, for all parts of all adventure. More than anyone else I feel I’m a proponent of Do What Works. Some days I can even see where someone who has failed was trying to go and what they were trying to accomplish. This is how we move ahead. But we most certainly to NOT move ahead with this shit. What the fuck. You think that’s east to read? You think it’s easy to find information in it? Again, I think that room/key isn’t the best for a town but fuck man it is MILES better than just writing a page of text with some numbers in it. I guess maybe you were thinking you’d lead with an (unhighlighted) business name and then a number to locate it on the map? For my own sanity and faith in humanity I’m going to go with that. I get that, I’m looking for a blacksmith. In which case maybe you highlight the business type? Whatever. Let’s move on to the Caves of Chaos Crom-Cruach.

Oh, fuck, sorry, no. That’s one of the wilderness sites on the map. You know giant spiders, lizard men, hermit. “Wolf Pucca Champions in this case.” Hang on, I threw up a little there, gotta clean it up. (Yes, this IS subjective . While I try to keep my own particular genre tastes out of things for the most part I do have some things I LOATHE and this is one of them.) Anyway, the Caves of Chaos …

It’s the same format. That kind of conversational style that sticks a room number in it. What the fuck?! Also, you gotta have full stat blocks because the giant rats might need to make an Int save, I guess, so you need to know they have a -4/17+/. The veil torn asunder! Another min/max combat heavy D&D-mine. Arms Law indeed!

Ok, Ok, the rooms proper. I do like the Black Plague reference. I think it plays on relatability, the kind of ingrained cultural aversion we all have to the Black Plague that “The Infernal pox” doesn’t have. “You got scabies.” hits harder. The very clearly human/elven is nice. The rest of this is little more than “3 kobolds” padded out. Look man, the net trap is there, and the pit. It’s B2.

A lot of text for not much content beyond some minimal keying. I do enjoy some of the grounding in more relatable things. I thin those portions hit quite well. Then there’s this, for the Ogre …

And then this part in the Keep proper …

The Castellan has an elevator to his secret lair where he has an 18 foot tall Battlemech he can sit in. And your mage can also. Do battle the ogre and demon. Seriously. This is the only hint of this shit, besides those wolf pucca champions. Which makes me think that a D&D campaign where you are peasants adventuring and then eventually find out you are in Battletech and the ruling class just keeps you ignorant could be a cool idea.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. Enough to see the Keep and a few wilderness encounters, and figure out the fucked up formatting style.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/546367/the-pale-keep?1892600