The following was inspired by a post on James Maliszewski’s wonderful blog over at Grognardia. Thanks, James!

I first started playing D&D in 1983. I never DMed the game, though, until three years later.

The first adventure that I ran was B4: The Lost City.

One of the two best adventures ever written, in my opinion.

And a perfect adventure for a newbie DM.

I was in middle school. At the time, I was a painfully shy, scrawny, socially awkward, nerdy kid, just about one rung up the evolutionary ladder from Waldo in the Van Halen “Hot For Teacher” video … but not by much.

You couldn’t get me to speak in public if you put a gun to my head. I did my best to be little more than a shadow in the corner in every class, saying nothing and trying not to be noticed. The very idea of performing in front of others – which is exactly what a DM must do – was a frightening thought indeed. I was still a few years away from the point in high school where I basically snapped one day, decided that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought of me, and went from being a shy, skinny little nerd to … well, a skinny little in-your-face punk who, deep down, was still kind of a nerd.

But I really liked D&D.

And I wanted to try running the game as a DM.

Somehow, I overcame my inhibitions and convinced a few kids I knew to try playing D&D with me. We all assembled after school in our English teacher’s classroom – she usually stayed late after school, and agreed that we could use the classroom for gaming for an hour or so after school let out. So all that year, once a week, I led my new group of gamers through the wonders of “The Lost City”.

And in the process, I learned a lot about gaming.

“The Lost City”, written by the wonderful Tom Moldvay, kicks off as a standard dungeon crawl. The characters, traveling through a desert, seek refuge in some ruins while caught in a sandstorm, and find themselves descending into the remains of a pyramid, down into the darkness of a vast, ancient, depraved civilization called Cynidicea. Most of the various factions of this civilization are ruled and controlled by a beast of great power simply known as Zargon.

On the one hand, the adventure is very straightforward. In the early stages of the module, adventurers go from room to room in the pyramid, kill monsters, take treasure, and explore a lot of rooms. And that’s exactly what I did as a newbie DM. “Roll Initiative!” was a phrase uttered often, and hack-and-slash ruled the day. However …

Anyone familiar with Tom Moldvay’s modules knows that the man could pack more solid ideas for campaign background and additional adventures in four pages of a module than most 256-page campaign sourcebooks do today. He very elegantly laid out how the various tribes and factions found in the Lost City beneath the pyramid interacted. He managed to fill the module with a dark, moody atmosphere, chock full of pulp fantasy. A lot of “The Lost City” is quite reminiscent of the best works of Robert E. Howard.

While it wasn’t necessary to use any of this information – the player characters could simply fight everyone, take their treasure, and move on – it added a new dimension to the game that I’d never used before – roleplaying. As in, social interaction between player characters and NPCs.

Go figure.

So as the game progressed, the player characters wound up making alliances with one of the Cynidicean factions, which thereby automatically made them sworn enemies of another. The heroes couldn’t just walk into a room and wantonly slaughter everything in sight anymore – they needed to be savvier than that, and do a little sleuthing. Battle preparations become more carefully planned affairs, rather than “draw swords, throw magic missiles, and hope for the best”. The game wasn’t the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it slowly evolved to something far beyond a mere hackfest and into something more well-rounded, featuring combat alongside diplomacy, explorations, and investigation, which proved to be much more interesting to the players.

Additionally, Moldvay put in a lot of areas in the module that weren’t detailed on the maps. Rather, there would be a corridor leading off the map, and the module would state “this corridor leads to the Temple of Despair”, or something like that, and a sentence or two about what might be found there. Towards the end of my “Lost City” adventure/campaign, I began writing up the details for things like the “Temple of Despair” on my own. This sandbox approach by Tom Moldvay allowed enough tools and guidance for newbie DMs to start creating their own adventures, and he managed to do so with a remarkable economy of words.

“The Lost City” was my first attempt at running a campaign, and after all these years, I still think it’s one of my best.

I’ve had the opportunity to write several modules of my own over the past few years. In all of them, I’ve done my best to try and emulate that sandbox approach of “The Lost City”. While I’m not nearly as succinct as Tom Moldvay, my goal has always been to provide additional, optional campaign ideas in an adventure in case the DM feels like expanding things, and potential opportunities for a lot of roleplaying, even in the middle of an adventure that is meant more as a dungeon crawl. If a gaming group reads one of my modules and doesn’t care about any of that extra stuff, they should be able to skip past it and go straight for the meat of the hack-and-slash dungeoneering. But hopefully, in case a DM is looking for more, there’s at least some ideas to grab, and to develop, and to make his or her own.

“The Lost City” has had a tremendous an influence on me as a game writer and designer. Sadly, Wizards of the Coast lost their damn minds (again) and have stopped all PDF sales of their out-of-print products, so it’s no longer easy to get of copy of this module. But if you’re a game writer, and you can find a copy on eBay or elsewhere, by all means do so. It’s worth your time.

I’d really like to run “The Lost City” again someday. It remains a true classic to me.