Players are asked to either clear out some monsters (The Clearing of Castle Caldwell), explore a crypt in the basement (The Dungeons of Terror), rescue a princess (The Abduction of Princess Sylvia), break out of prison (The Great Escape) or defeat an evil menace (The Sanctuary of Elwyn the Ardent).Įxcept for the Princess Sylvia and Great Escape adventures, very little attention is given to environmental ecology or dungeon layout - most of the sites are a grab-bag of monsters, traps, and adversaries that don't have a logical connection to each other. B9 showed how a new DM could build a simple, fun adventure using the approach shown in the Basic Set's DM's Guide.ī9 was also one of the first attempts made to describe the adventure in terms of real-time play requirements (I had to learn the hard way).Įach adventure includes about 15 keyed encounters, no random wandering monsters, and very straightforward narrative goals. It provided a set of simple, straightforward adventures that could be run with minimal preparation background info is no more than half a page for each adventure, and the encounters are generally compartmentalized enough to run on the fly. Even though they were considered "introductory" adventures at the time, there was a very steep learning curve for a lot of people.ī9 is one of the first attempts made to help with the learning curve. A new DM could struggle to run one of the months(or years!)-long sprawling sandbox campaigns described in The Keep on the Borderlands (B2), or The Lost City (B4). The previous modules in the "B" series are (mostly) celebrated classics, but Castle Caldwell and Beyond tends to not receive the same level of respect. ![]() ![]() Of the two adventure examples included in the basic set, one of them was specifically called out in the DMs guide as being a bad example! Although Frank Mentzer's Basic Dungeons & Dragons set made great strides in teaching people RPG concepts and how to run (DM) a game, it was constrained by the language and low page budgets of the time only 3 pages in the DM's guide were set aside to help new DMs design an adventure. Back then, role-playing games and D&D were still relatively new creators and players were still struggling to define "role-playing" as a game - a composite of several genres of story-telling, tactical wargame rules, and shared fantasy world-building. The module does not offer pre-generated characters. The introduction in the book states that each adventure is designed for a group of 4-8 players, with characters of levels 1-3, and that each can be played independently or as a connected series. ![]() It is 32 pages, not including the outer cardstock cover and contains five single-session adventures (3-4 hours per session): Castle Caldwell and Beyond is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons basic game published in 1985.
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