[Review] Mike’s World: The Forsaken Wilderness Beyond

Lately I have been gearing myself up to run the venerable Keep on the Borderlands for my son, as I still think it’s pretty good as a starter adventure. And while prepping it again (or rather, moving it between Google Docs and Zim Desktop Wiki, because I found the latter to be working fine on my current computers), I found Geoffrey McKinney’s Mike’s World on drivethrurpg.

There is a particular genre of writing for roleplaying games that is concerned not so much with generic usefulness, but instead with expanding on one particular scenario or other supplement that is just so well known it has an (likely very small) audience, despite that. And Mike’s World fits into that. I guess the biggest sub-subgenre of this subgenre is the expansion of Keep on the Borderlands. The module was after all one of the most played scenarios in the history of Dungeons and Dragons, and shines by the sheer applicability towards all kinds of settings. So there have been multiple attempts at expanding and emulating the module, from simply working out the Caves of the Unknown (which were left to the referee to work out in the original) to complete reworkings, as in Barkeep on the Borderlands. Mike’s World is closer to the former than the latter.

Now you might be familiar with McKinney’s name for writing the old OSR classics Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, now already decades back. His Mike’s books are not quite as high-concept as these, but also hardly as controversial. Their central conceit is that they are dungeon and wilderness area expansions of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, as designed by a 12-year old DM named Mike in 1982. You can check out those three supplements for free on drivethrurpg, as McKinney decided to put the whole document behind the preview link. Which is good, as I was not quite convinced about the two Mike’s Dungeons and Mike’s Dungeon: The Deep Levels supplements which expand the Cave of the Unknown and the Caves of Chaos into a 117 level megadungeon that has been (generously) described as lo-fi: It effectively is combat encounter after combat encounter, in level after level of same-looking geography. I could maybe see a use for it as a very lazy, video gamey expansion of the Caves, but on the other hand…

nah.

On the other hand Mike’s World expands the brief original Wilderness section of the original beyond the surroundings of the Keep into a wilderness crawl in the same dimensions of the B2 Wilderness. This still annoyingly leaves the area west of the Keep frustratingly blank, but it does some interesting things for the areas past the fens and up the road.

The Wilderness we encounter here has been described as B/X filtered through ODnD and the ADnD monster manual. It is not too worked out. Every single of the additional maps, all in the style of B2, faithfully emulates a 12 year old working that all out for himself, smudges and all, and has about 2-5 new encounters, progressively harder the further you get away from the Keep.

According to McKinney the idea is that our 12 year old DM took the map of the Keep from B2, and worked out encounter areas roughly based on concentric circles, spreading out from there. Which means that the maps right next to original map might be appropriate for about level 2-3, with the danger increasing the further one gets into the unknown wilderness beyond the Keep, up to encounters appropriate for about level 14 in the eastermost sections.

Soon enough certain themes will become apparent: The area was until recently the scene of a rather bitterly fought war between dwarves (called dwarrows for some reason), gnomes, hobgoblins, and giants over the so called Glimmerstones (which clearly came from Carcosa as they glimmer in Ulfire, Dolm, and Jale), which caused multiple elemental upheavals and changes in the landscape. Some areas are situated on an elemental fracture, while the so-called serpent path snakes it’s way (hehe) through the setting, empowering ophidian beings.

The encounters are not quite as weird as one would expect, but McKinney’s trademark focus on all kinds of colors holds sway even in this world. Sure there might be an Ulfire stone from outer space, but there are also blue harpies, a clear river running over amber-colored gravel, rainbow colored hippogriffs (I suspect a My Little Pony connection with those), pinto centaurs, and white apes (that might transport you to a red planet). It’s all a bit jumbled together, one could even call it a gallimaufry of themes (a word I learned from the trading post on map 4), but it can serve it’s use as an expansion of the module quite nicely. I do think it needs to be expanded by your own ideas a bit more. As it is it sometimes appears just a bit too barebones and generic. Which, to be fair, is exactly what it sets out to be.

The whole setting is supposedly the untamed wilderness. So the DM takes his inspirations from his reading material. The woods in the untamed wilderness are as dark as Mirkwood, with spiders to match. But the place is also somewhat… small… Using the scale from B2 we have an area here that fills about a 20 mile hex, filled to the brim with weird encounters, and a level scale from 1 to 14. That all seems a tad over the top, but it might just be what a starter campaign needs.

I do have to admit that there are things that bug me about the whole thing: yes, the scale is one thing, but it fits what it sets out to do. But I somewhat dislike just how low-fi the presentation of the product is. And I know it’s part of the aesthetic the author is going for, but I think I’d really love to have the whole map in a cleaner format. (at least there is a 3rd party overview of the whole setting available somewhere…)

I decided to use this expansion, and locate some of the dungeons I had planned for my starter sandbox further into the area. The Caverns of Thracia fit well closer to the Serpent Path, Quasqueton somewhere into the northern parts, and The Tomb of the Serpent Kings… I guess also somewhere in the hills close to Thracia. I am wondering if I can get the monastery from B5 anywhere as well. Maybe in the south.