Keep on the Borderlands! Beginners welcome! BiWeekly! Lvl 3-4th
Adventure to the new frontier and make your fortunes and carve your reputations ! Heroes all! You were never meant to survive. Now prove why you did!
$27.50
/ Session
Details
Bi-weekly / Thursday - 2:00 PM UTC
Oct 29 / Session 7
Session Duration / 2.5–3 hours
Campaign Length / 5–10 Sessions
3 / 5 Seats Filled
Top Game Master
One of StartPlaying's top-rated GMs, a player favorite and highly recommended.
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Schedule
Meet your party members
3/5
About the adventure
You are the heroes—bound together in service to the Castellan of a Keep on the Borderlands...the bulwark against chaos. Armed with authority, weapons and training, your band of stalwarts step across the border to explore and conquer. Adventure with your band through haunted woods, uncover ancient druidic sites, fight bandits, make allies and locate the legendary Caves of Chaos! This is a mini-Campaign in a bespoke world. Your choices create the lore for this land. We will play through until players reach fifth level and become known as heroes of the realm. What to Expect: Classic D&D OSR Experience PLAYED IN D&D 5.5! Start with a 1st-level character. Some may die. The survivors become legends. Sword & Sorcery Tone Grim, strange, and unpredictable—magic is dangerous, monsters are unknowable, and victory is never guaranteed. Exploration & Player Choice Explore, dungeon delve and adventure using force, stealth, and cunning. Every path is viable—and deadly. Corrupt cultists, terrible warbands, strange altars, and the terrible power of the Caves of Chaos. Living Sandbox Finale Defend the Keep—then decide its fate. Claim it, burn it, or travel to new frontiers. Your surviving characters will emerge as Level 5 adventurers shaped by blood, loss, and hard choices. Why Play This Game? Experience one of the original campaigns. Make meaningful choices that shape the story. Embrace the Keep or the Cult of Chaos. Adventure with heroes and live by boldness, luck, and glory. Watch ordinary villagers become unforgettable characters This is old-school adventure at its finest—where survival is earned, not assumed.
Game style
Theater of the Mind
Rule of Cool (RoC)
West Marches
Hexcrawl / Exploration
Dungeon Crawl
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(27)
3 years on StartPlaying
589 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Knows the Rules, Storytelling
About me
You bring the characters. I'll bring the world. Together, we'll make it ours. I run living worlds where your choices matter. Bring me your character. I'll give you a world worth exploring—and then we'll discover together what happens when you start changing it. My games are story-rich, player-driven, and built around meaningful choices. NPCs remember what you've done. Decisions have consequences. Character backgrounds become part of the campaign. Stories develop in directions neither the players nor I necessarily expected when we started. With nearly 600 games hosted on StartPlaying and decades of tabletop RPG experience, I've guided adventurers through everything from sprawling campaigns to deadly one-night adventures. I welcome seasoned veterans and first-time players alike. I love sandbox campaigns, dangerous old-school adventures, mysteries, horror, exploration, and the occasional glorious dungeon crawl. My gaming library spans Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mutant Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Top Secret, Shadowdark, Dolmenwood, Mörk Borg, CY_BORG, Pirate Borg, and plenty more. But the system isn't the most important part. The players are. You bring the characters. I'll bring the world. Then we make it ours.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Create a character on D&DBeyond. Once we have created characters we will adapt them to the world. I will go through all of this with you before your first session but feel free to roll up some characters and get a feel for how things work.
Each Player has two to three characters. Every session they make up a party...so...make the characters you want to try. It's a true Westmarch campaign.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
The Theater of the Mind (audio portion of the adventure) will occur on Discord via messages daily supplemented by images and battle maps as needed. You will need an account on D&DBeyond. Free accounts are sufficient. Access will be provided to the rules. You will need an account on Discord. Access to the dedicated server will be open prior to the game. Owlbear Rodeo may be used. No subscription is necessary. Characters will be made or provided on Discord. Pre-made characters are always available. Players will make characters during session zero; or, we can make one prior to the game session.
What Mark brings to the table
What You Need No prior D&D experience required. I will guide character creation. Dice rollers and rules support provided. GM Style Expect cinematic descriptions, meaningful choices, and fair but deadly adjudication. Clever play is rewarded. Recklessness is remembered.
Homebrew rules
We will craft the house rules we want to play in the first session...or play by the rules as written. You decide! Fleeting luck, Luck, Deatiled Critical hits and fumbles are used for the true Sword & Sorcery feel to the adventure! Insidious luck and Hero Points are also recommended!
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How Mark creates a safe table
Each player will be provided with a private Discord channel for the discussion of issues or concerns before, during and after sessions. The content warnings will vary depending on the game choice, but it is highly likely the game will have levels of violence involving player characters and non-player characters, with death always being a possibility. SAFETY TOOLS ・During Session 0 we will discuss Lines and Veils. ・A 10 minute break will occur roughly halfway through the session. Additional breaks are always available on request. ・Further details of all tool implementations are provided within the discord server. Feel free to ask any questions for clarification. Nice statement on lines and veils. Thought about plagiarizing… Many games includes dark and potentially disturbing themes. While the setting can be grim, my goal is for play to be safe and enjoyable for everyone. Please direct message me anything you’d like veiled (using “fade to black” mechanics popular in movies) or set as a hard line. During play, if something feels uncomfortable tell or message me. If needed, ask me to check my DMs. We can pause or retcon anything to restore positive play.
Content warnings
Safety tools used