Keeps of Chaos and Law

[WARNING: This is an ugly draft version that's up while I look for a graphic designer and perform playtests. The adventure itself is largely complete (if only on a first draft), but the usability and general sexiness level is way lower than what will be in the version that I actually charge money for.]

Stab a goblin! Hear a rumor in a tavern! Befriend a rat! Rob a corrupt government official! Get murdered by a cultist! Dig for treasure in a pile of filth! Bother an ancient wizard! Negotiate a peace! Win a war! Grab the treasure and make a run for it! Get into any type of trouble you can imagine in the Keeps of Chaos and Law!

Two great and ancient keeps stand on the borderlands of human civilization: one, a Keep of Law, treated as an fortification by the Human Empire to protect its borders and regulate trade, the other, a Keep of Chaos, recently occupied by a motley army of humanoids and Chaos-worshippers as a forward staging area as they prepare to mount an attack on the first. The Empire has put out a call for adventurers and mercenaries to gather in defense of the Keep of Law, to delve into the Keep of Chaos, and to attempt to disrupt the tenuous alliance of humanoid factions before it finishes aligning itself against humanity. The clock is ticking. . .

KoCaL started when I decided to research how B2: The Keep on the Borderlands, the 1979 D&D module featuring the Caves of Chaos, was actually meant to be played. Online discussion of the module usually takes one of two forms: either that the module is a masterpieces that exemplifies and teaches the old-school sandbox playstyle of early D&D, or that it's a borderline unplayable mess of 40-foot rooms full of 30 kobolds and little to no guidance.

I decided to remake B2 using modern information design conventions and more explicit procedures for how it wants to be run, but the process quickly went way beyond that, becoming its own thing--with, granted, many homages and nods to B2 and other classic game settings. The module became a faction-crawl: a small but incredibly dense open-ended pair of dungeons featuring personality-rich NPCs, opportunities for both diplomacy and violence, and a multitude of different factions all struggling against each other.

KoCaL features 2 mapped locations containing a total of 141 rooms, 14 factions (9 humanoid, 5 human), 62 NPCs (each with unique motivations and abilities), and 43k total words written. As a sandbox, it encourages the players to create their own story, but also features huge amounts of advice on how to handle many of the more common situations that may come up, such as dungeon crawling procedures, diplomacy, bank robbery, or murder investigations. It runs within the Adventure Machine engine, a digital RPG module program that makes cross-reference and mid-game editing easy.