Thread by @MerricB

Although G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is not the very first adventure published for Dungeons & Dragons, it's close enough. :) And it is fascinating.

The framing of the adventure is simple: Giants have attacked the lands of men, you must explain to them that such is a bad idea. With as much force as you can.

To make things simpler, when you get to the steading, the giants are engaged in a drunken feast! They're all gathered together, and many fireballs will prove useful. :)

It is well worth noting that, in its original version, these giants have fewer Hit Dice and Hit Points than what came later. So, they can be taken down relatively quickly. 8 Hit Dice means 8 hits by swords, or possibly one 8-Die fireball can take them down!

Interestingly, there is nowhere on the *cover* of the adventure mentioning what levels the adventure is for. That's only found in the interior text, which suggests 9 characters of various classes, with an average level of 9th!

So the top level is basically "what would you find in a giant lair" and plays primarily as a military tale: do some scouting, get involved in a big fight, and take out some lesser monsters in the outer rooms.

There's little "exploration" as we typically associate with D&D. Except... there's just a few areas where we find items of interest. Especially hidden scrolls from a certain "Eclavdra".

It's really important at this point that the early D&D adventures are presenting a *story*. They're not dictating every beat of the story, but it is much more than "you go into a dungeon, wander around, fight monsters and get treasure".

Discoveries the characters find now pay off in later adventures. This series doesn't really dictate the ending (which is actually a flaw once we get to D3), but the overall structure of the series is LINEAR, but with a lot of freedom in each individual part.

I mean, there's still a lot of fighting monsters and looting treasure, but it's more than just that!

The dungeon level of the Steading is half mundane and half fantastical. The mundane half is "what would live in the dungeons of a hill giant steading". And the answer is the various humanoids and monsters that server hill giants!

But the fantastic half starts looking towards the weird things that might exist beneath the surface of the world.

This comes in two flavours:
* Unusual caverns and the monsters that inhabit them
* Forbidden cults lost to the world.

This is where the mundane nature of the giant steading pays off. It's no different than you'd imagine in a human settlement, except with bigger things. (Scale doesn't translate that well in a TTRPG, of course). So when you find the weird things, they stand out in comparison.

You'll find this in other adventures by Gary Gygax, btw. Keep on the Borderlands is a good example - the Priests of Chaos are *very* different in feel to the rest of the Caves of Chaos.

So, the early part of the adventure is mainly combat/scouting with a little exploration; the later part moves into more exploration material.

Role-playing? You have opportunities to do so. Especially because there's more to the dungeon level than meets the eye. Orc rebellion!

The thing about the rebellion is that it is hardly described in the text, and certainly not how the DM should handle it. There is *very* little hand-holding for the DM here. The adventure mostly just describes what is in each area, and then lets the DM handle it as they will.

This is one of the reasons that I found this adventure so hard to parse when I first read it. (I was about 10). I understood a little about how to run combat, but the complex environment here? Not so much. I think it would still confuse DMs today.

We've gotten better at describing possibilities to DMs. Although not perfectly! And there are times that, by describing what may happen, we restrict it too much.