Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, one of the first “adventure modules” produced for Dungeons & Dragons, has many things that fascinate me. One of those elements is how it is presented: not as a scripted piece of action, but as an environment to explore and interact with.

This is the format of many of the early adventures, which make few assumptions about the actions of the players. Instead, they present the environment as it is at a particular point in time and then let the players and DM use it as they will.

That distinction of the particular point in time is important because Steading of the Hill Giant Chief makes one particular assumption: That the players arrive at the time of a great feast. As a result, the giants are distracted and easy prey for the adventurers.

Hand in hand with the idea of this presentation of the adventure is the idea that it is a reactive environment. That is, the inhabitants of the adventure move and react to the players’ actions. This is something that gave me trouble as a teenager. It was far easier to have the monsters as static, remaining in their rooms until the adventurers broke down the door. And honestly, I think that is how most adventures get written.

Static vs Reactive

Even if it is not intended, I am pretty sure most DMs run adventures in a basic fashion. When exploring a location, the PCs come to a location, deal with whatever is there, and move on to the next area.

And no other encounter pays attention to what they did in the previous location.

Steading has elements of that in play. The giants are distracted by the feast, so they are not paying attention to what happens in the outer rooms of the steading. But to play Steading well, it really wants to be a living environment. And that is challenging for the DM.

Gygax, in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, discusses how an adventure environment changes when the players leave and then come back. There is also some discussion of that in Steading.

If time permits, the giants will organise trap, ambushes, and last-ditch defenses against continuing forays into their stronghold. You must work up such cases and plans according to existing circumstances, but assuming clever advice to the giants.

One of the aspects that makes early adventures in any system difficult to run is that the designers do not really know what the DMs running them need. Gygax, by this time, had been running D&D for several years and had much experience with miniature wargaming beforehand. Reactive military encounters? That was his standard. For everyone else? Perhaps not so much.

And even so, Gygax’s discussion of reactive encounters is mostly limited to when the players leave and come back.

I call for help!

The exceptions to this come from areas where the text mentions the inhabitants call out for help – and under what circumstances. In one case, it even gives a percentage chance that someone might hear them! Without mentioning where that someone might be, of course. (It is a little unfortunate if everyone is already dead!)

At least this alerts the DM to the potential of having encounters react to each other.

But the truth is we are often very bad at designing adventures that make reactive environments work. I have seen three basic approaches towards covering this:

• Encounters that explicitly mention what other groups may react to a fight in one area,
• A list of the monsters living in each area in a single table or sidebar, and
• A detailed plan of monster reactions in case of an attack

Sometimes they are combined, generally not.

Part of the challenge is that there are so many moving parts. Not only do you have to keep track of each inhabitant of the complex, but also understand what they do when they become aware something is amiss. It is the sort of thing that computers are much better at – except, of course, they do not have the flexibility of reacting to unusual actions or circumstances.

Read all of G1 (it is only eight pages!), memorise the locations and motivations of the monsters, and go from there! Simple, right?

But although running an adventure environment perfectly is very challenging, we can manage good enough to get the illusion of a properly reactive environment. And that may be all you need.

Factions and Intrigues

One last element of Steading that is interesting is that it includes different groups with different aims.

In particular, you have the hill giants, and then their slaves, the orcs.

The possibility of gaining the aid of one group helps make this a living environment, rather than a predictable set of encounters. However, as you might expect, there is little in the text explaining how it might work.

Some DMs would be able to handle this well. Others, not so much. I note that in one of my favourite adventures, Tyranny of Dragons, you also have the chance to befriend slaves and gain their aid – with a lot more advice for the DM on what might happen – although, I suspect, still not enough.

This is the issue: It takes a lot of space to describe properly what might happen. And what “properly” means varies from person to person.

In this early stage, Gygax is trusting that the DM can take the hints and run the adventure in a proper, reactive fashion. Not all can manage it.

A Template for the Future?

So, does Steading provide the baseline for how future adventures would be released? In many ways it does. The location key is still with us.

However, the idea of a reactive adventure environment is something that is not always applied from here on. And a lot of that has to do with the difficulties of presenting such scenarios.

Later adventures would provide more scripting for event. Rather than an environment that the DM determined how it reacted but with a lot of ways the PCs could interact with it, the adventure would presume actions of the PCs and then give scripted actions for the monsters. It felt more reactive, but the ability of the players to choose their path was diminished.

You can still see adventure environments rather than more limited encounters or scripted paths, but they often remain as challenging as they ever have been to run, despite everything.