Best 1st level Adventures

[Qualidar]

Mad God's Key (from Dungeon) is usually toted as one of the best 1st level adventures. I'm not sure how good of a "campaign starter" it is, but worth checking out (and they're having a magazine sale over at Paizo, so it might be available cheep!)

 

[Dyson Logos]

I'm a big fan of B1 - B1 In Search of the Unknown – My module of choice « A character for every game

But as was brought up in the last modules thread, Harley Stroh hit the ball out of the park with both his level 0 module and his level 1 module for the DCC line.

For level 0 it's DCC 35A - Halls of the Minotaur (which feels in several ways like B1) and for levels 1-3 it's DCC 28 - Into the Wilds (which feels like B2)

 

[roguerouge]

I've had fantastic luck with Legends Are Made, Not Born (DCC for 0th level characters). I'm itching to do Hangman's Noose, a splatter horror mystery, if you can believe it! Also, there's tons of NPCs that the DM needs to RP for that one...

 

[Festivus]

I have always liked "A Dark and Stormy Knight" for a kickoff adventure. It gives a reason the group is all together, and can be run in a few hours, with lots of time for interaction between the party members.

 

[Sunderstone]

Mad God's Key - Jason Buhlman (Dungeon #114)
Whipering Cairn - Erik Mona (Dungeon #124)
Halls of the Minotaur - Harley Stroh (DCC 35a, also a zero level module)
Into the Wilds - Harley Stroh (DCC 28)
Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar - Mike Ferguson (DCC 44, an Underdark module to boot)
There is No Honor - James Jacobs (Dungeon #139, from the STAP but easily plug and play, very Urban)
Crucible of Freya - Clark Peterson, Bill Webb (with great free Prelude and Expansion PDFs available)

These would be my picks

 

[Dyson Logos]

Keep on the Borderlands. It's originally designed for Basic D&D, but as it uses all common, stock, normal monsters, it's very easy to use as is (except maybe for D&D4).

Total Bullgeek

While easy to use, I find it really tough for a level 1 party - the encounters rapidly spiral out of control if the party isn't exceptionally stealthy when engaging the outer guards of a lair. Far too often you end up with a party failing to disable the initial guards and then finding themselves being dogpiled by the majority of the inhabitants of the particular cave.

On the upside, it REALLY encourages parlaying with the various creatures you meet, hoping to turn at least one of the tribes of cave denizens into allies - particularly if it is one of the two orc tribes.

 

[Mistwell]

Gorgoldand's Gauntlet, by Johnathan M. Richards, originally published in Dungeon #87. What an amazing adventure that was. I dearly wish we would see more from Johnathan Richards, for 4e, such as another Challenge of Champions.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

I tended to use (C3) The Lost Island of Castanamir to teach roleplaying to newbies, but I'm weird like that...

 

[Betote]

Let's see. Paizo's done a couple of fantastic ones: "The Whispering Cairn" from The Age of Worms and "Howl of the Carrion King" are both excellent, and can be stripped from their Adventure Path context with minimal effort. Both were written by Erik Mona, incidentally--he should do that more often.

This. I'll add Burnt Offerings and Necromancer's Crucible of Freya. All of them have the advantage of being also mini-campaign settings, which you can use to start an Adventure Path (three of them have theirs already built, and I find Tomb of Abysthor as a perfect follow-up for CoF ), or as the players' base for your own sandbox.

 

[meomwt]

Adding to the love for NeMoren's Vault, The Whispering Cairn and Crucible of Freya - assuming you start with The Wizard's Amulet first.

That's the free download from the Necromancer Games site. It was updated to 3.5E a while ago.