D&D 5E Your First Module

[Jester David]

Just getting some nostalgia/ discussion going.

What was the first module that you purchased? What was the first module that you ran? Was it for D&D or another game system? Was it official?

 

[JonnyP71]

X1 Isle of Dread - 1st one I bought, 1st one I ran

I was 11, I was a shockingly bad DM.

 

[Zardnaar]

Not 100% sure.

1st one I played was Keep on the Borderlands. 1st one I run in 1993 or 1994 was either B3: Palace of the Silver Princess or B4 The Lost City. X1 Isle of read was another early one.

1st one I bought is also hard to remember as I did not tend to use prepublished back them. Might have been a dungeon magazine otherwise it would be a 2E adventure either Labyrinth of Madness or The Night Below.

Our early books were what we could find buried in a closet or steal off older brothers/friends of friends.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

It was either Night Below or one of the other adventures that could be gotten in boxed-set form in the mid '90s.

I hadn't been in on the D&D thing all that long, and those boxes were the things on the shelf that seemed like a good buy-in after I'd run a few campaigns using nothing but the core books, and I bought and ran a few in pretty rapid order so I can't remember which was first. I think it was Night Below because that is the one that has stuck with me, so it was either the first or just the first that went well.

 

[ccs]

The first module I ran was B2: Keep on the Borderlands.
Because it came packed in the Basic set that I got for Christmas '80. So that's what we started with. A few days after unwrapping the best Christmas present ever, a party of 2 elves, a 1/2ling, & a fighter found themselves trudging up the road to the Keep. And shortly after that, armed with a few rumors (& all the weapons they could afford/carry), they began exploring the Caves of Chaos.
They picked a cave at random & brought death & destruction to the Goblin lair. And the ogre. And the Hobgoblins. And the....
We spent most of '81 playing through B2. We were kids though, so sometimes we'd play a lot, sometimes a little, and game sessions could be spaced out anywhere from several days to a month or so in-between.
The party also changed frequently as the players tried out all the classes. But every few sessions the players would come back to running those initial characters.

The first module I bought would be X1: The Isle of Dread.
Because it came packed in the Expert set that I bought in the spring of '82.
By this time I was getting better at adding story to the game, so when the players beat the undead temple in B2 I had them find a "Treasure Map" as part of the loot. The evil priests had found the fabled "Isle of Dread"....
Pick your characters, level them up to 4th lv using this new book I got, & next time we'll be off to The Isle of Dread!
Several weeks later 2 elves, 1 Halfling, & 1 fighter set sail.

After that I have no idea what order we bought/played stuff, except that summer during Isle of Dread we started adding 1e stuff. Eventually the game switched to 1e using a combination of BECmi modules, AD&D modules, Judges Guild & Dragon stuff, & stuff of our own. Mid-'82 - '89 we played alot & often.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It was probably B1.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Also ran Keep on the Borderlands first, because it came with the red box. (That was the earlier, Moldvay set.)

I had zero idea what I was doing. I just gave the map to my player (yes, singular) as a prop, and read the room descriptions in numerical order.

I don't recall what the first module I bought individually was, and I rarely ran or played in modules after that point. I think the first one I played in was White Plume Mountain, which went about as well as my attempt to run Keep did.

 

[Rhenny]

Wow...It's hard to remember. Probably around '78-'80....hummm..

Could be: T1 - Village of Hommlet, or S1 - Tomb of Horrors, or S2 White Plume Mountain, or S3 Expedition to Barrier Peaks.

In the beginning, I was just a player, and then I started collecting and dabbling as a DM.

My formative years DMing were mostly using Dungeon magazines for bits and pieces of ideas and plug and play adventures in addition to homebrew.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I suspect I got the Red Box and the Blue Box as gifts, so that means the first one I probably bought for myself was the BSOLO adventure 'Ghost of Lion Castle'. Mainly because I had no one to play with, so the solo choose-your-own-adventure style mod was the only thing I could use to play the game with at the time.

I couldn't tell you the first module I ran, as my first few attempts at running a game for my best friend were basically drawing a map and then putting monsters in the rooms. So it might not have been until 3E when I actually ran a semi-perm campaign for a while that I probably used a published mod... but which one it was I couldn't tell you.

 

[vpuigdoller]

Expedition to Barrier Peaks have a very fond memory of it.