OOC
I don't mind the setting too much. The Halthrag Keep setting works, I think is a good setup for a dungeon crawl type of game. How it played out felt a bit... stiff? Like how I went into the keep at first, and then your following post backtracked and forced me into a multiple choice answer instead. If I understood the point of the journal, the idea is that the Keep is nearly impossible to beat on the first try, and with each character experience being recorded, each new adventurer gets a better shot at completing it. Is that assumption correct? If it works like that, I think you should probably advertise it more. I think it's a fun setup, but it only really works if the players can experiment inside the dungeon IMO.
You can even have a similar setup where it's a Groundhog Day kind of setting, if there are only one or two players. When the party is wiped, they wake up imprisoned by the Jackals again, but with the memories of the dungeon.
