I think Jean Wells’s version of this adventure is far superior to the Moldvay version, and is indeed superior to the much-lauded Gygax adventure “The Keep on the Borderlands.” It’s tragic and all too common how Wells got sidelined and fall-guyed by TSR. She deserved better.
I was already playing D&D in 1981, and it was a very boy-heavy activity. But a couple of years ago when I was wearing my D&D t-shirt I passed by an older woman who commented that she used to play back in the late 1970s with a group of other young moms. There was always the audience for role playing games to be diverse and welcoming, but there were way too many gatekeeping trolls back in the day.
To present this lost classic module to a modern group, I wanted to use a system that replicates the old style of play better than D&D 5e does, and Shadowdark is literally the perfect system for this type of throwback dungeon crawl. It’s got streamlined modern mechanics, but the freeform deadly playstyle of ages past.
I gave my spiel about the system and the module and a little bit about the setting, and we jumped into character creation. Everyone rolled up two level-0 characters. I allowed rerolls if all the stats were under 14, but people were amazed by how bad their characters were. I reminded them not to get too attached, hahaha. They chose one character to focus on and the backups were just along for the ride.
In the old days you could just plop a party in front of the dungeon door and get right to it, but I prefer a little bit of story prelude. The PCs have all been press ganged into the Gulluvian army where they have been treated awfully. They’re part of a detachment collecting taxes and their NPC sergeant suggests lockpicking the chest and running into the mountains where there’s a haunted castle they can hide in. Everyone is on board pretty quickly.
They open the chest and grab a bunch of coins, but as they try to sneak out of camp, one of them manages to roll a -1 on stealth (nat 1 with a -2 bonus). The chase is on even before half the party has left camp! But with some creative misdirection, half of the guards go the wrong direction.
They run through the woods on a moonlit night, guards in pursuit. The halfling members of the party are able to go invisible and sneak far enough to get away. The goblin members followed one of the guards out of camp pretending to help and murdered him from behind once they were alone. The half orcs just got enough lucky rolls to survive. The sergeant who suggested the plan? Got speared in the chest by a nat 20, but the party managed to loot the body!
They regrouped and kept heading north, and I kept rolling for encounters without hitting a 1. They huddled up for the last part of the night between moonset and sunrise, and by then it was time to stop for the night.
I rolled a nat 20 for the army tracking them, so they’re not out of the woods yet, but I let them level up to 1 and I think I’ll have them encounter the tinker and his daughter if they want to buy any gear with their stolen coin before the soldiers catch up to them. Then it’s just a couple of mountain hexes to the Palace!
I was surprised by the variety of alignments my players chose, so there could be a fun amount of intra-party shenanigans. Despite coming from a couple of 5e campaigns before this, my warnings seemed to work and everyone played really smartly and had some creative ideas (while invisible one player made spooky noises that made a guard fail his morale check and head back to camp). There was plenty of tension, in a good way, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.