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

The framing of the adventure is simple: Giants have attacked the lands of men, and 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 are all gathered together, and many fireball spells 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, nowhere on the cover of the adventure does it mention what levels the adventure is for. You can only find that in the interior text, which suggests nine characters of various classes, with an average level of 9!

The Last Feast of the Giants

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 is little “exploration” as we typically associate with D&D dungeon play. Except, there are just a few areas where we find items of interest. Especially hidden scrolls from a certain “Eclavdra”.

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

Discoveries the characters find now pay off in later adventures. This series does not 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.

The Dungeon and the Underdark

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, and
• Forbidden cults lost to the world.

This is where the mundane nature of the giant steading pays off. It is no different than you would imagine in a human settlement, except with bigger things. (Scale rarely translates that well in a TTRPG, as it is primarily a visual element. When Doctor Who does it, you can see the results. In a TTRPG, you have to imagine it, and not everyone is good at that.). So, when you find the weird things, they stand out in comparison.

You can find this juxtaposition between the mundane and the fantastic in other adventures by Gary Gygax. Keep on the Borderlands is a good example – with the Priests of Chaos feeling more unearthly compared to the rest of the Caves of Chaos.

Opportunities for Adventure

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

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

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 handholding 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 have 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.