The Weirder Lands of Dark Fantasy - Using Nightshift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars With B2 Keep On The Borderlands And World of Bastards Rpg

 
Temperatures in Connecticut are high and so tempers are running just as quick.So last night myself & DM Steve got into a huge if somewhat heated debate over the classic B2 Keep on the Borderland By Gary Gygax. DM Steve insisting that we take out our Weirder Lands of Dark Fantasy campaign then add it into the back end of  Using The Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Rpg With The Sisters of the Seven Sins (Wretched Version).  Make it like a Summertime adventure event with five or six pieces for our group sorta like Marvel comicbooks did with their five or six issue crossover events back in the Eighties. 

The cult of Chaos & the keep itself are key here. The idea is that various chaos driven humanoid tribes are united by the cult of Chaos and they've been making in roads into the lost back doors of reality. This isn't the first time we've run this but the idea of the various humanoid tribes united under the banner of one decisive cult is tempting. Jason Vey goes deep into using the Nightshift rpg for running OSR style games here. 
Nasty brutish gnolls, pig faced orcs, and more serving under the banner of the cult of Chaos makes sense. But where could one put the keep in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy?! The heavy lifting has been done for ages in fact with this thread back in 2012  for ironically D&D Next by Rpgnet member Brookdragon; "A few years before the Keep on the Borderlands ever existed, their was a Judges Guild supplement published in 1976-77 called, Frontier Forts of Kelnore. The frontier forts were set in Tarantis, in the Wilderlands, of course. Kelnore was a great empire, until the Green Emperor with several Vasthosts attacked, looted and sacked the city of Tarantis in an extended campaign. In the collapse of the Kelnore empire, the border forts fell into disrepair and ruin, and this supplement would help you create a bunch of them, all slightly different for your campaign..

My understanding is that when TSR wanted a basic setting, in 78 or so they looked reeeeaaaal close at the Frontier Forts of Kelnore, borrrowed what they liked, threw in an active hamlet, along with a storyline, and called it Keep on the Borderlands." 

Yeah, while I have no idea if any of this is true, I happen to own Frontier Forts of Kelnore & cross comparing the two has yielded some interesting results. 

The keep from B2 could easily be placed right in line with the Frontier Forts of Kelnore. Then there's the fact that frontier forts resemble ancient Roman fortresses ( heavy breathing here). Hmm, so let's take a look back at this campaign idea. A good chunk of the region's chaos influenced humanoids & even the bandits in B2 have gathered under the banner of Chaos. What if the bandits are in point of fact working for The Seven Bastards who are a rival adventuring party waiting to take on their next score. Why?! Because the cult of Chaos has reveved up the local orc tribes using the adventure points of 'The Sound of Madness' 

But how does any of this lead back to the keep you maybe wondering?! Well it's two fold. One is the sleeper agent of the cult of chaos  in the keep. And the second is the medusa within the caves of chaos. The medusa is actually a senior member of the Daughters of Darkness cult. This cult wants their elder leader back and has agents within the keep and in the city in our reality. And they have ties too the cult featured in the Sisters of the Seven Sins. 

The daughters have been quietly doing mercenary work for the cult of Chaos but them taking a  senior member is too much. The sisters may come across the party with an offer to work for them to recover the medusa. 

Now how does the party get involved from our end of reality?! That's simple the wild vampires from Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Quick Start Kit are actually the crossover point. Once the wild vampires start showing up in your local campaign city the balance of power & magick shifts. This allows a few of the orcs, gnolls, and bandits to appear then run wild in the city. And that's all it takes to kick off this campaign. The PC's could be from either world who are forced to work together. 

So why do this with the Wilderlands of High Fantasy rpg campaign setting? Well supposedly Bat in the Attic is going to stop producing his fantastic maps & products. The IP is dead, etc.  And since we ordered everything yesterday I thought I'd put the material to work.