I always turn to the Fallout game and its ability to put something in the distance that you want to travel to.Īnd, related to this, are the interconnections between the places. Related to this is visibility … how far can you see? Some guidelines in this area would have been helpful (is that in the Expert set?) I want to get the party moving towards things, and climbing a hill and looking around would cause me to fumble through the book looking through all the nearby encounters to see what the party can see. As I mentioned, a little highlighting of the encounters on the map would have helped a bit. The misses in the “adventure” are all generally related to the map and the nature of hex crawling, in general. I might have twisted Geoffrey’s “Mike” backstory a bit and put them in a read circle or something, to make them stand out a bit more as features.
The keys, proper, alphabet letters like A, B, C, and so on, do blend in a little, or rather, don’t call attention to themselves. While they appear to be quickly drawn with pencil, they are clear and easy to read. The maps proper are interesting, with terrain features likes hills, ravines, rises and bluffs, rivers and the like. Geoffrey hits time and time again with his encounters, four to five per page, with one page per map. Weathertop meats the harpies, anyone? Every plains is filled with cactus, every stand of trees a mirkwood.
Fuck! Yeah! A woman suspended in a cage on the top of a rocky hill. Goblins climb among the mirkwood style dark forests, dwarf heads, skins and skeletons from a recent devastating war are displayed in the branches. Almost every runs that knife edge between underexplaining and providing enough information for the DM to bring the situation to life. Just off hand comments but enough to get he DM going. It makes you think “I could do this, and this and this and I could use this in this way …” The entries have just about the exact amount of details, describing interesting things, using its word budget wisely, not overstaying welcomes and in some cases leaving some hooks or threads to follow up on. Well now, that brings the borderlands home, doesn’t it? In a way that never felt like it in the keep, the forces of chaos can come calling at any time … and did.Īnd that’s what this product does, over and over and over again.
The road from the keep ends on the edge of the map at the FORMER keep that was on the borderlands … now in ruin for 20 years from a gnoll assault. Maybe something like Tharizdun, with its wilderness travel? But I seem to recall that was on roads and paths … and they aint here. You got a lot of dungeons, and isle of Dread, which always seems too minimal to me. The expert level game, the X in B/X, was never really expanded upon well, IMO, in adventure products. Not necessarily allies of man but generally not ready to stab first and eat later, unlike a decent percentage of the humanoids. And, of course, it’s not all barren wilderness, there are those that were here before, elves, dwarves, gnomes and the like.
THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS MAP FULL
A wilderness full of weird and interesting things to explore, as well as being well stocked with monsters ready to eat your face. If the keep in B2 represents the edge of the borderlands then this wilderness map represents the borderlands proper. Totally unlike the rather drab Mike’d Dungeon, this may be Geoffrey’s best work, and is certainly one of the best things to come out of the OSR. An absolutely fantuckingtastic collection of encounters, about the right length and level of detail, imaginative, and with some occasional themes running between them. This 32 page wilderness “square crawl” contains fourteen pages of pages with four or five encounters for each, expanding on the wilderness from module B2. It is perfect for all levels of campaign play and for both complete novices as well as for those who have played for decades MIKE’S WORLD includes 14 hand-drawn wilderness maps of war-torn lands with details of their monstrous denizens, ancient ruins, eldritch mysteries, and more.
If you have ever wondered what perilous lands further surround the Keep, this is the book for you. MIKE’S WORLD: THE FORSAKEN WILDERNESS BEYOND expands on the fantasy world first introduced in Gary Gygax’s dungeon module B2: THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS.