I do so love the older D&D modules. There's a sense that the entire game functions as a well-oiled machine when you find rules actually reiterated in the pages of the original adventures. I'm especially a fan of those adventures written by E. Gary Gygax himself! But there are a few reasons why this is so. First and foremost, the creator of one of the best games I have ever played was consistent (at least in the earlier days) when it came to instructing new DMs on how to run the game. He also tried to tie rules into the narrative, to give the adventure a verisimilitude in how a D&D campaign works. When a DM and his players are all on the same page, so to speak, and seem to all understand exactly how the game works, it's pure magic!
Now, I know it's very hard to remain consistent all the time; and good editors keep most of the glaring mistakes out of the text. But eventually, every writer and game designer fails to keep his or her facts straight or misreads a rule somewhere. And I can't fault anyone for their mistakes - they happen to us all at some time or another. However, that being said, I find module B2: Keep on the Borderlands to be one of the best written modules of its time. It is clear and concise, instructional and informative, and has remained a powerful DMing tool for hundreds, if not thousands, of DMs, from neophytes to grizzled veterans. Just reading through the pages inspires me to run something in Basic D&D once more!
My only quibble with the module, and it is very minor, is that there is so much happening in a mere 3 by 2 mile area. The map scale for the Wilderness Map is strange, set at 100 yards per square. First off, we were taught that wilderness was usually mapped in hexes, not squares. It says so in the Expert D&D rulebook! Of course, it says that wilderness could be mapped using graph paper, but that hexes make it easier to figure movement (ah, those pesky diagonals). Gygax's use of graph paper for his Wilderness Map is peculiar. Also, his scale used is even more curious, but makes more sense when you realize that he is trying to explain how outdoor adventures work without making reference to the Expert set rules! As long time fans of Basic/Expert D&D know, distance outdoors is measured in yards, not feet. Therefore, a character who moves 90'/turn indoors will move 90 yards/turn outdoors. Since each square is 100 yards, that's almost equivalent to what a Man can move in 1 turn if wearing light armor or is lightly encumbered. Why he didn't simply make 1 square = 90 yards is unknown. In any case, the scale is strange because 17.6 squares is 1 mile (1760 yards/mile), and if you are going by normal outdoor movement (and assuming that the party contains slow/moving members at 60' movement rate), then they can cover a distance of (60/5 = ) 12 miles per day (see page X19 in the Cook version of the D&D Expert rulebook). If that's the case, and there are roughly 50 squares of travel along the road from the keep to the Caves of Chaos, then the distance traveled by the characters is only about 5000 yards or 2.84 miles. So, the time it takes to get to and from the Caves of Chaos is roughly 1/4 of a day's travel. Assuming that one must travel there and back to the Keep, that's half a day blown on travel.
But that's not the same rate as listed in the B2 module! In this case, Gygax states that normal movement rate is 1 square per HOUR searching, or 3 squares per HOUR walking. Walking in the fens is equivalent to searching (1 square/hour). Walking in the forest is 2 squares per HOUR. He then states parenthetically that wilderness adventures are more completely explained in the D&D Expert set rulebook. Hmm, so according to the D&D Expert Set, the total distance from the Keep to the Caves should take no more than 1/4 day (assuming a 10 hour travel period, that would be about 2½ hours). Yet according to Gygax's bizarre scale movement, 2½ hours would only get me about 8 squares from the Keep! Something here doesn't add up.
I wonder if the map was originally to a different scale? Assuming a 60' movement rate for armored and/or encumbered characters who will not likely be able to afford horses for a while, they should be able to move at 60 yards per turn or 360 yards per hour. I think I see some disconnect here. The miles per day rate is assumed to be on a road, not mapping just traveling, and definitely not expecting to be attacked or being on alert for danger. Given that rate, the party could travel 3 miles in 2½ hours or 1.2 mph. Given the map scale of 2.25 miles east to west and just under 3 miles north to south, the party would be long gone off the map before they had to make camp. It states on page X19 that ten minute turns are rarely used in outdoor play - one either uses rounds during combats, or uses miles/day to determine how far they progress.
The hourly movement proposed by Gygax would have the characters traveling for almost 17 hours to reach the Caves of Chaos using walking movement speed (and that's actually if they have already located the place and know where they are going). The sandbox nature of the module, however, does not give hints on where the Caves are located on the map - the characters have to adventure and explore the area in order to locate them. Although this is great for a campaign setting, it's not so great for a one-shot adventure (not that the module should or could be finished in a single play session, unless the players are in for one marathon session lasting through the night and into the next day). Also, given the numbers of creatures involved in the Caves, attrition is likely to kill off the party long before they complete it. Using the hourly rate for movement doesn't make much sense. The calculation for daily movement in D&D Expert is movement rate divided by 5 equals the number of miles traveled per day. Therefore, an unencumbered Man moving at 120'/turn can travel (120/5 =) 24 miles per day. This would be the equivalent of moving 10.6 map widths in a day (since the map is only 2.25 miles wide! So something is very wrong with the scale of movement here!
So how does one rectify the glaring discrepancy in the travel rates in B2? Remember that the characters should not have to travel all day to reach the Caves once they are located! In fact, according to the movement rates in the Expert Set, they should be able to reach their destination by mid-morning. If however, you do use the hourly movement rate, you should take something into consideration: Is that movement rate for someone moving at normal (unencumbered) speed, or it is assumed that everyone will be moving at the metal-armored (encumbered) speed? To say that 300 yards per hour is slow is really understating things. It's even slower than breaking speed down to turn movement! However, it is somewhat accurate. Assuming the movement rate really IS 360 yards per hour for a slow moving party, then that would be 3.6 squares per hour. How many hours of travel are there in a day? That's not stated anywhere. It could be 8 hours, 10 hours, or 12 hours depending on the time of year. I typically use 10 hours for travel. Assuming a party rises at dawn (roughly 6 am discounting seasonal variation), spend 1 hour in the morning preparing for travel, then spend 5 hours traveling, stop at noon for lunch (1 hour break), and then continue walking until 1 hour before dinner, then eat dinner at 6 pm and make plans and set camp, feed and care for horse, etc. By the time they bed down it would be close to 8 pm losing the light fast. Assuming then that watches begin at 8 pm and continue to 6 am, that's 10 hours of watch time or thereabouts. This is really a bit more in depth than typical D&D adventures get, but one has to know total times for most activities.
Assuming a 10 hour travel day, the party moving at hourly speed will be able to cover 36 squares in a day's travel. That means that the party will have traveled 3600 yards in total, or a little over 2 miles distance for the day. I used to walk 1.5 miles to school every morning with a heavy backpack filled with books and it only took me 1 hour to do that. If the 10 hour day is used, and the Expert Set movement rates per day are used, then we end up with a 1.2 miles/hour speed (2112 yds/hour), almost 6 times faster than the hourly movement rate, but jives better with real life movement!
So what factors could exist to justify this slow movement rate? Again, I think the map scale was changed at some point, or maybe someone made a conversion mistake when trying to figure out how far the Caves should be from the Keep. Note that terrain factors have not really been taken into consideration yet. However, the bulk of the journey from the Keep to the Caves is on the road and, according to page X20 in the Expert Rulebook, movement along a road is at 1.5 times the normal rate! With that assumption in place (but never mentioned in B2), travel along the road should be at 5.4 squares per hour. With this movement rate, the party should be able to make it to the Caves of Chaos by nightfall. This is still much slower than the daily rate of movement, however, and I wonder why that should be so. If the daily movement rate of 12 miles/day is modified by the 1.5 x movement rate, then the party can travel 18 miles/day on the road and it should only take about 1/6 day (about 1½ hours) to reach the Caves once they have been located. Keep in mind that forest movement is at 2/3 normal rate, and swamp (fen) movement is 1/2 normal rate. The fen is not all that large and it shouldn't take several days to slog through it to locate the lair located therein. Using the 1.2 miles per hour rate, the characters would travel 21 squares per hour walking in clear terrain, 31.5 squares per hour on the road, 14 squares per hour in the forest, and 10.5 squares per hour while searching or moving through the fen.
Daily movement and turn movement are not the same and should not be equated. How these values are determined are two completely different methods that have no mathematical equivalency. Also, the hourly rates in the B2 module should be ignored and the Expert Set movement rules used instead, unless the DM decides to make module B2 into a much longer campaign. It's hard to justify moving at the listed search speed of 1 square per hour. That would be the equivalent of taking an hour to cross a football field - preposterous to say the least! Given the size of a typical D&D party, unless they were all looking for a lost copper piece in heavy brush and light forest, there's no way they would have to move that slowly to search an area of wilderness.
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