Four Foodies visit the Keep on the Borderlands

 What happens if you take non-adventurers and send them to a dungeon. In this post I am going to send four foodies on a fact-finding mission to The Keep on the Borderlnds and the Caves of Chaos. They might drink an Ogre's wine and sample Hobgoblin hors d'oeuvre. 

This comes out of my last post where I decided that my problem with dungeons is that actually I don't like playing as adventurers. It also comes out of discussions on the FKR server about where do you find dungeon-like adventures that are not "grimdark". 

I felt that if you take a different perspective on a dungeon you can find them to be far less miserable than they at first seem. 

This is a semi-tongue-in-cheek experiment and is in no way an attack on Keep on the Borderlands (though there are a couple of funny things in this module). 

Why the Keep on the Borderlands?

In my last post I talked about the idea that dungeons are coloured by the assumption that the people going into them are adventurers. This dungeon is a perfect example as everything is described from the perspective of risk and reward. If we remove the assumption that everything is violent by default and recognise that I actually have no interest in the number of silver pieces carried by kobold women and children then the dungeon can have its veneer of "evil" cleaned off fairly easily. 

You are indeed members of that exceptional class, adventurers who have journeyed to the Keep on the Borderlands in search of fame and fortune. 

The majority of subsequent depictions of creatures and places are in line with the abilities and the desires of an adventurer. If we take for instance the Minotaur (Room #45) we see a creature that is all about attacking, and who does it attack? 

    When intruders enter the area, the minotaur immediately moves to attack.

Intruders. Those who are there searching for a good time and a chance to win (or, you know, steal) 930 gold and 310 electrum pieces... . 

Additionally, if we strip away the word 'evil' a lot of the sinister things also lose a bit of bite. Take the brilliantly illustrated Lizardmen. These beings are exceptionally evil, the type of staggering evil that is betrayed by the wicked act of not bothering individuals moving about in daylight unless they set foot on the mound.

I also like the TEMPLE OF EVIL CHAOS. This EVIL CHAOS manifests itself in disgusting red radiance, some dancing lights and, at its most truly diabolic, the adventurers being compelled into singing a song. 

Now, there are obviously grim things in this setting. The presence of slavery is am just going to omit. There are also mentions of torture chambers, but we could just consider these as gaols or prisons and consider that the groups who live here perhaps have the right to detain people same as the people in the keep? We might even imagine that the communities here have laws and a judiciary system of sorts. 

So, it is a classic dungeon for adventurers but we can pretty easily make a cognitive step that elides a lot of the EVIL.

Why foodies? 

Well the first thing that jumped out to me is the meticulous list of food in the keep's tavern. All kinds of drinks and their prices laid out: Soup for 1 sp, Stew for 1 ep, Pudding, Fruit, Cheese, Honey Mead, Ale, Bark Tea! Yum, it's like a Redwall novel. 

I can easily imagine that this information was gathered by people with an interest in food and its relative price. 

I'm going to propose that a group of tavern owners who are writing a book on food in the area have made there way to the keep and being so impressed about the food want to explore some of the cuisines of people who live on the borderland.

Lets start re-writing the game to pick out these details. 

The Keep on the Borderlands - Foodie Edition

Awaking from a restful nights sleeps and refreshing themselves with a cup of bark tea, our foodies ask around for guides towards the Caves of Chaos. As luck would have it a halfling wanderer was willing to come with them, on promise that he got to eat everything they came across. 

Their first port of call are the Kobolds of  Festergrin. Upon entrance they are greeted by a guardsman (1). There is a slight smell of waste down the entrance to the left and the sound of something rustling. 

Iron-gut, wonders aloud if they use Giant Rats to destroy their waste - the meat of a Giant Rat is particularly delicious when roasted. 

The Kobold guard tells them that they are going to see the chieftain. It is the culture of Kobolds from ancient times that the one who holds access to the food becomes the chieftan. When our foodies enter, they see the storeroom key with a large gem on a golden chain on the chieftan's neck.

A rather insecure man, the Kobold is surrounded by women who help him feel important. An importance that he is more than happy to show off, leading the foodies in procession to a storage room of foods: salted meats, grains, vegetables and even some wine. 

Som-eller wonders if this is genuine Kobold wine - a very thin and vinegary wine that is used in sauces, as a dripping liquor and to pickle food. 

In a large common chamber, the foodies are fed. Kobolds make little use of fires, and eat primarily raw food, using their wine often as a pickling agent. Simple cakes of grains ground together with a little of the wine and some water create a nutty, savoury based alongside the vegetables and meat. 

They write: ‘It is a good of great simplicity. I felt like I had never eaten a cabbage leaf or carrot before. Simply torn loose, washed, and lightly soaked in the kobold wine vinegar, I felt as if I was eating something that through its roots connected me to the very primordial earth: the dark space of silver nutrients from which we all arise and all descend.’

Meadow, is slightly less impressed, not finding any kind of tipple. 

Considerations for RPG Design

Let's wrap it up here - not least because our friends are going to have a much worse time of it with the the orcs. 

This post was obviously a silly thought experiment but I think it captures the point that the perspectives of the characters massively impact on the nature of the space they go into (just as in real life!).

In terms of game design then, this highlights the role of the writer/GM in determining who the characters and, therefore, the nature of the world around them. 

An interesting consideration when we come to think about who the "narrator" is when we design RPG products. 

Thanks for reading, any counters, confusions or questions please put them in the comments!