THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS COMIC FULL

When I was a young lad, some of my favorite memories were exploring the woods near my house. Sometimes all you need for fun is a good cave to explore. Sometimes you don’t need a super original monster in order to have an effective RPG adventure. Whereas Keep featured some bugbears as well as some lizardmen that don’t appear in Ironfang, the point is that both adventure feature the long-known creatures of classic fantasy RPG settings. This “Ironfang Legion” features bugbears working as captains.

THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS COMIC FULL

Few D&D monsters are more recognizable than hobgoblins and bugbears, and they represent the fighting force in Ironfang Invasion.Īlthough it certainly doesn’t lack in variety as the adventure progresses, the Irongfang Invasion is the story of a hobgoblin army that invades a village to use it as a staging ground for a full takeover of the countryside. If you are going to have a back-to-basics adventure, you need classic monsters. Ironfang Invasion has that exact same feel, with the big difference is that players were sent out into the wilderness on missions in Keep on the Borderlands, whereas in Ironfang Invasion, players are forced out into the wilderness as they are on the run from an invading hobgoblin army.Īnd Ironfang Invasion is dripping with the same feel and flavor that made Keep such a beloved adventure. It was also the adventure that laid the foundation for the sort of open-ended “sandbox” adventures that are now relatively standard among modern D&D play. I’ll wait.) In short, the premise of Keep was players arrive at a keep that would serve as a home base as they’d venture out to investigate sprawling caverns in the nearby hills that are crawling with monsters. ( Please read our look at Keep if you aren’t familiar or are looking for a deeper dive. I’ve written extensively about Keep on the Borderlands before, so I’ll just sum up here. So Ironfang Invasion reads as a love letter to what is for sure one of the most classic and recognizable D&D adventures of all time: Keep on the Borderlands. Ironfang Invasion is their answer to that.īut what is clear is Paizo wasn’t just content to go back to the basics, they wanted to harken back to the classics. Paizo had written a string of more novel and imaginative adventures, so they decided it was time for a back-to-basics approach that serves as an homage to the old wilderness adventuring of Dungeons and Dragons. This is what Paizo understood when they created the Ironfang Invasion Adventure Path. Sometimes something wholly fresh and original is called for, yet other times, the best thing you can do is to play homage to the classics. If something worked–that is if it resonated and was beloved–then it’s perfectly cool to use a riff of that old idea as the basis of a new creation. “It’s better to be effective than original” is a phrase I use from time to time. There are times when instead of spinning your wheels trying to come up with something novel, its better to go back and play those greatest hits, except with a creative twist.

The keep on the borderlands comic