Using & Abusing Judge's Guild's Frontier Forts of Kelnore By Judge's Guild For Your Old School Campaigns

"This book provides a basic, modularized map of a border fort (all Kelnore forts were designed to these specifications).  Since their construction, the forts have been populated by various monsters and tables are provided to put in random groups of creatures and individualize the forts on these basic designs.  There are three sample forts, filled out according to die rolls on the tables, to illustrate their application.  Using them, the Judge can easily create on the same basic map a different "dungeon" every time his players get together; this provides the maximum playing time with a minimal investment of the Judge's money and design time."
I received an email today from 'The Masked Dungeon Master' asking how I would go about adapting an old Judge's Guild product called Frontier Forts of Kelnore. This is a thirty page adventure location system in Judge's guild style. It has a wide variety of applications for OSR & old school  games.
"Frontier Forts of Kelnore is a supplement for fantasy role-playing games published by Judges Guild in 1978."

The supplement was written by Dave Sering who did a number of JG products  & this book provides everything a dungeon master needs to generate any number of weird or odd fortresses for explorers & adventurers to stumble upon.
"Multi-level adventure generation system; tables & charts to build scenarios; traps, monsters, treasures, maps; three complete examples given."

Frontier Forts of Kelnore isn't the usual Judge's Guild products that that gets tons of fan recognition these day. But its one that I own & have had lots of experience using it for generating large networks of fortresses & ruins in wilderness adventure  settings. My most recent brush with Frontier Forts of Kelnore is using the fortresses is for a network of Hyberorean forts that were abandoned during the Green Death in Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea second edition.
In Lamentations of the Flame Princess Europe the fortresses were abandoned during the Black Plague & were being used by a cannibal cult of demon worshipers. Frontier Forts of Kelnore was also used as staging ground for an interstellar invasion for or dangerous aliens in Star Ships & Spacemen second edition by Goblinoid Games.
These same forts were also used as stand ins for several Roman Empire style forts in Spain & Germany in LoFP. These same forts also were stand in ruins in Dark Albion's England and parts of Europe. They make excellent dungeon adventure locations. Judge's Guild material depends on a very vivid imagination to employ it constructively.


For pulp & super hero games Frontier Forts of Kelnore is a great resource for creating abandoned Spanish ruins & dungeon locations along the trails of the Wild West. These can serve as everything from vile villains lairs to bases for PC's who need a secure location for their adventurers. Several of Marvel Science Stories use this exact little trick to highlight some of their heroes adventures & it works quite well.

These types of fortresses also make excellent locations for various cults of Chaos to operate out of & for many a would be conqueror to stage his or her operations out of.
I've also used this product for the Gangbusters rpg as a smuggling location to stage various operarations for gangsters and outlaw gangs operating up the California /Mexican deserts. For Amazing Adventures! the pulp adventure style games are not at all limited except by the dungeon master's imagination. 

All in all there's a lot of things that can be done with Frontier Forts of Kelnore with some time & patience.