Author(s): Mike Carr
Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David Trampier (Original Cover)
Level range: 1, preferably party size 4+ players
Theme: Tutorial Dungeon
Major re-releases: Original Adventures Reincarnated: Into the Borderlands
A quirk of early DND that people sometimes forget is that you had to learn how to play this game. The assumption, prior to the Holmes Basic set being released in 1977, was that you knew a guy who knew how to play, in a kind of 1970s & Gary Gygax version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Holmes had obviously made a big dent in this, but still there were complaints about the game being confusing and hard to learn. In steps Mike Carr who made the following bold proposal:
What if we made a paint-by-numbers DND module to train new GMs with?
In 2024 you might scoff at this, because it feels an awful lot like they just sold you half a module and told you to finish that. This is an unfair read, but this is a genuinely good habit to instill early into a GM. Too many times have I seen a new DM just, run books entirely stock and then be confused why it went badly. This breaks the back of that habit very, very early.
For those of you that remain unconvinced, in the OAR re-release of Into the Borderlands they included three stocked versions of B1 (I recommend Version A). But: keep in mind! You could not tune into Critical Role, there was not a DND club at every major school, and the discipline of TTRPG design itself did not exist yet. This was a stab at teaching DND entirely via text, so we will see in time how good a stab they took at it.
Oh, and before I exit the intro blurb, let's say it explicitly: this is the first standalone Basic Dungeons and Dragons module. It was a pack-in with the Holmes basic set (which means you got the Tower of Zenopus AND B1, a pretty tidy bargain), alongside some depressing little dice chits, a little blue rulebook, and a coupon for some dice that are bad-in-a-highly-charming way. We are spoiled for dice now, back then you had to ink your own in CRAYON.
ANYHOW, let's begin.
Firstly, Carr begins with explaining some broad principles to an aspiring new GM, like the concept of keying, minions, xp, difficulty, GM arts, et c. He also recommends narrating the party as having already arrived at the dungeon, a conceit I think more GMs should entertain -- we all know that "we meet in a tavern" is a little played out, but I think it's played out mainly because it's done badly - meeting in the tavern served no purpose because the GM ultimately wanted to just hurry up to the dungeon.
The adventure proper starts with a quick blurb about two famous characters who in the wayback times built a stronghold, did some adventurin', fought some wars, but are now long gone. A separate account of this is included in the player-facing section (whatever happened to player-facing sections?).
We are given ol' reliable, a rumors table, where we learn very little of interest: The dungeon is called Quasaqueton -- a real place in Iowa, apparently the duo were slavers, and apparently the dungeon itself talks. It's generally wet and miserable here, and wandering about are a variety of very standard enemies (orcs, kobolds, trogs, rats). That's, basically all we get on the dungeon itself, so let's enter the highlights reel:
The very first thing that happens in the dungeon is simply adorable. Two magic mouths demand the party to defend their treasure-hunting ways, and then promptly tell them they're going to die oooOoOOOOooOoo! in a sufficiently melodramatic way. It also bugs you every time you revisit, which will turn it into a comedy on revisit. There is also the grisly remains of a previous party, as if to imply that these newbies are about to get HAZED. Given that this was likely the new GM and players' first go, I'd call even odds on it being a slaughter.
It is at about room V where I realize why roman numerals died off, as trying to figure out where room 5 is when there's many, many rooms with a V marking. Letters are preferable to roman numerals but truly it was a good day when we switched to circled Arabic numerals.
There is just something inherently funny about going into a wizard's closet and discovering that said wizard was a boring person with normal clothes and a bunch of mundane books about weather and plants. We also find out Zelligar has been absent for 30+ years from his closet-bookkeeping.
Teaching the kids early that wizards are assholes, in Zelligar's practice room there's a permanent illusion of treasure. It doesn't kill you like a Gary treasure would, it just makes you sad.
There is a weirdly elaborate table of jars? And one of the jars is a living black cat in suspended animation? The purpose of this room is, and I quote, "to surprise and/or mystify the adventurers, as well as to provide some fun for the DM". There is no treasure or monsters pre-stocked in most any of these rooms (as per the conceit) but I think it would be GM malpractice to not put SOME kind of fucked up jarred magic item here. That there is no potions in this room feels particularly odd?
There's a riddle in the wizard's lab that, isn't actually a riddle? It's just talking funny. Large swaths of this dungeon feel like they should be a funhouse and have loot pinatas scattered around, this is one such room. Instead, it's…just kind of a self-aggrandizing sign, like a weird motivational poster.
I know the conceit of the dungeon is that this is someone's home and stronghold but it kind of just feels like someone's Minecraft fort? I really feel like we're going to walk into a room full of chests contain 94 doors and 4,000 grass seeds any minute now. And I guess that food is 30 years old? The inscrutable letter codes make me long for a dAlphabet.
It feels kinda weird that fire beetles fell out of use. "Magic lightning bugs that infinitely fuel lanterns without igniting in swamp gas" is a super handy conceit.
We have a super classic portcullis trap with a elegant twist: because the lever to lift the trap is strength-based (sum of strength scores), it almost definitionally separates the squishies from the tanks. The downside is, unfortunately, that it's functionally a save or die trap despite not instantly killing you?
It's also really interesting how the fantasy of bending the bars went away. That used to be such a big thing in the superman tv show era. I have yet to have a modern player even consider it. Not surprising it stopped being in rulebooks though.
There is one of the regulation early DND troll traps, where a mapping party is to be intentionally tricked and given false descriptions because a doorway is also a teleporter. It is explained somewhat poorly, which is particularly unfortunate for a tutorial dungeon, but the jist is that once they pass through the doorway you should rotate your map and act like you haven't started describing rooms turned 90 degrees. Because early DND kind-of assumes the party moves as a blob while in dungeoncrawl mode, you can't get split up by this, despite the fact that "realistically" it would totally do that. A weird quirk of this description is that, I have no idea when they bold words. You think they're bolding for emphasis but it's acting like they're bolding keywords, but prior to this they only bold spell names and the bar-lifting. Afterward it's mostly spells and a sole keyword.
I'm getting mixed messages here. I get why it's here, but come on.
The coverart is a reference to a specific garden room which has overgrown in the wizard's absence. It is, ultimately, just a pretty room with a slight hazard if a random encounter happens there. "The room on the cover is inexplicable and unrelated to the rest of the dungeon" is funhouse-y behavior IMO, but the rest of the dungeon is a series of vaguely plausible rooms assembled in a maze-y way. Which is as good a segue as any to briefly talk about the overall layout.
This is a bad layout. This is a layout you come up with when you are just procgenning maze dungeons over and over again. As we have demonstrated in previous posts, this is just kind of how it was in the 70s.
This kind of works as a mapping challenge, but mostly it comes across as tedious for everyone involved. Who would make a living space like this? Even the most cooked adventurer on the planet would not install multiple maze corridors for…no reason? AND THE EXCESS OF SECRET DOORS. A friend described this as "a map you could almost make in Wolfenstein 3D", which is actually a great metric. If I can make your map in Wolf3D, it's bad.
There is a genre of dungeon room I like to call "gambler's traps", which is when the room contains like 10+ weird things that you can poke, and if you happen to poke the right ones you get some nice things, and if you poke the wrong ones you get pain. Invariably, you will have a player who tries to poke every one of them, offsetting the whole room. Pools of stuff are traditional, so we get pools.
Tragically, every pool with a conceivably fun effect magically stops working outside the pool (come ON Carr!) and many are just pointless A few of them are totally devastating (one of them silences your voice for d6 hours), a few of them are slightly good. In what is a complete dick move, there is an acidic pool with a key at the bottom that does absolutely nothing.
Sigh you find the guy who advised the building of Quasqueton's room, with documents about the construction of it, but explicitly no information that could possibly help adventurers. One of the few magic items in this dungeon is locked in a drawer, but odds are it's nothing interesting (pray for your +1 Ring of Protection)
So the big maze corridor has a regulation spring-loaded trapdoor, which dumps you downstairs sans inventory into freezing cold water. Kinda mean but, sure. Traps are kind of an underrated artform, I feel like GMs as a group have just given up on them. That being said, traps like this one…do not sell me on traps as a concept.
Finally, we go to the lower level, which is not worth talking about in detail. Essentially, these egotists made a museum to themselves down here (for who?), there's a magic rock that if you eat it (??) has a d20 table of permanent effects skewing positive, and another pit trap.
So, how to feel about B1 on the whole? It's not really remarkable. Really its most famous quality (you will key every single room) is its sole interesting quality. It's an early 70s dungeon that is starting to feel dated by 1979.
I think that 5e-ers would benefit from a B1-like paint-by-numbers module, really. B1 is no Tower of Zenopus. I think we will all be much happier come B2, that (while far from perfect) has a strong identity and a comparative cohesiveness.
