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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Merric Blackman

Merric Blackman Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @MerricB

30 May
One of the problems I'm having with the current D&D releases is that I've reached the limit of how many new setting books I can care about.

I mean, I still want a new Greyhawk book, but that's the setting of my primary campaign. But I don't think all do.
I'm not a person who starts new campaigns at the drop of a hat. And my new campaigns tend to be in a world that I've already used, so I can explore it further. There are places in the World of Greyhawk I've never visited - and I've been DMing there for over 20 years.
So my reaction on seeing a new setting book is "Oh, that's not for me" (with a few exceptions). And I know I'm old and have way too many D&D books... but I do wonder that, even for newer players, when comes the point when a new setting is "meh"?
Read 4 tweets
4 Mar
"In the Beginning", Dungeons & Dragons was a game about delving into dungeons, overcoming monsters, and getting treasure.

Except when it wasn't.

But the rules were written mostly for that playstyle.

Except where they weren't. :)
I was listening to an old episode of the Tome Show where @BrandesStoddard and @DMSamuel talked about XP in the early editions. And one of the things that is hard about discussing the playstyle that XP served is that the game could be so regionally diverse!
Read 24 tweets
7 Feb
If many DMs find themselves struggling with particular high level abilities, does that mean the abilities were a mistake, or that the game needs more advice about running games with those abilities in it?
One thing that we’ve seen over the years is that D&D does dungeons quite well at lower levels. Dungeons may not be the answer at higher levels, but do DMs have skills to handle them? Do adventure designers?
There is one glorious feature about dungeons. They’re self constraining, giving predictable paths. That starts falling apart later. How good is the DM at handling non predictable approaches to an adventure?
Read 5 tweets
7 Feb
Monsters do not need innovative mechanics to be interesting. The difference in the statistics between kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears and ogres in original D&D (and AD&D) is minimal. What makes them different? Culture, organisation, and story.
With any monster, when you're designing a story, you'd like to say "this is the only monster that fits that role." That they're identifiable and iconic enough in both your and your players' minds that it makes sense that they're there.
Dungeons & Dragons delights in having lots and lots of different monsters, but do you need them all in your campaign? You likely don't. Especially when you are building up the cultures and settlements in your world.
Read 16 tweets
5 Feb
If you have an ability in a game that has a chance of eliminating you from the game if you use it, what does that then do to the game?

What does it do to the enjoyment of the other participants?
Older board games were very fond of player elimination - where you could stop playing the game when your position was overrun. And these could be LONG games. Consider Diplomacy, which could be an 8 hour game where players were progressively eliminated.
And that meant that a person might set aside their afternoon and evening for playing this game, but then WASN'T playing for hours.
Read 14 tweets
4 Feb
In previous adventures (about 15+ years ago), the characters failed to stop the necromancer in Feast of Goblyns, and another player character became an important person in the Great Kingdom. #greyhawk #dnd
(I placed Feast of Goblyns in a west county of the Great Kingdom).
It's about 30 years later in the campaign world, and the current characters are about to visit the Court of the Overking. Some of the players played those previous adventures.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(