Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition has two levels of play. This post focuses on the one most of you are familiar with, and that is the smaller scope and scale of the individual character pursuing their individual adventuring.
What do you need?
A copy of the three rules manuals, but you’ll be using the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual for this.
A notepad, digital or physical.
A blank hex map.
A blank grid map.
Dice or a digital randomizer.
What you are going to do is generate that initial settlement and a nearby place to delve.
Generating Your Starting Town
This is a straightforward process. Get out your randomizer and your DMG. Have that notepad and dice handy.
Starting Hex: The adventure begins with a simple hex, the foundational block of your world. This is an area of 24-30 miles. Open the DMG to pg. 173 where Appendix B is. Write down all results on the notepad.
Terrain Type: Roll a d8 and d20 on the Terrain Type Table. The d8 determines the initial type (the top row), and the d20 specifies further details (the side column).
Population: Roll on the Type of Settlement table, rerolling populations under 80 people. Determine leader and settlement type here.
Dungeon Type: Refer to the Type of Settlement table. Go to the Ruins entry. Roll on that sub-table to determine the type of ruins. This is the surface for the nearby dungeon.
City/Town Encounters: Refer to Appendix C on pg. 191. Roll a d2 to determine if you roll on the Daytime or Nighttime table. Then a d4+1 to generate the usual inhabitants in the settlement.
Generate Your Starting Area
Wilderness Encounters: Refer again to Appendix C. Roll on the Terrain Type Wilderness Encounter table four times to determine what dangerous animals or monsters are in the immediate area. Write down the results.
For each result, consult the Monster Manual entry. If they are found In Lair, note that. Generate treasure. If the entry is a NPC party, consult the Player’s Handbook for details as required. Note lairs on the hex map, and the dungeon’s surface entrance can be used as such.
Generate Your Starting Dungeon
The Dungeon: Turn to pg. 169. Get a blank grid map page. Refer to the five starting rooms and corridors therein. Roll 1d6, rerolling 6s. Put that sample in the center of the grid map. Go no further until someone delves the place.
Brainstorm Results
Take a look at what you generated and start weaving together how they interact. Don’t overthink it. Just use what’s there and go with obvious conclusions because that’s most likely to work.
Let’s say that you have a small shell keep for your settlement, built up Motte & Bailey style, with a few hundred people therein led by a Fighter. They report that there is a hobgoblin camp nearby, some zombies wandering around, and there’s a ruined shrine nearby.
That scenario writes itself. The hobgoblins are after whatever is in the ruins, the zombies are somehow connected to those ruins, and the answers (and treasure) are to be found in those ruins but there are too many hobgoblins to leave the keep weakly defended.
That dungeon gets revealed as it gets delved, surprising everyone (including the Referee) when the dice turn up an unexpected major monster or an equally unexpected boon. Getting to its bottom, and no one knows where that is, is a thrill to itself.
It won’t take long before a big blowout battle goes down over who gets to control that dungeon access. Players who show some ambition and savvy can guarantee that they are the winners, forcing a change in the campaign environment that can have major consequences down the road.
When that initial set of conditions gets played out, players will take their mans off the map edge and thus prompt the Referee to generate what the next hex is and what lies there waiting to be found.
This initial set-up can be done in the time it takes between ordering your pizza and its arrival at your door, and it can yield entertaining and exciting campaign play for months after the fact. But that’s just what is easily discerned.
What If I Told You That This Can Go Bigger?
There’s nothing stopping every player in the campaign from doing this, and then tying all of these starting towns together over time through play. When the action in one place gets too much, or someone can’t run that week, rotate who sits in the Referee’s chair and play at another location for a while.
This will, without prompting, get players thinking “What if I go from (here) to (there)?” Maybe they want more, or different opportunities? Maybe they want to play the merchant game? Maybe they have a man whose Class natural inclines them to think this way? Why doesn’t matter. What matters is that it happens.
Letting this happen generates a bespoke campaign environment over time as player actions start linking up areas of the map together, creating conflicts without trying and conflicts create gameplay.
Player-created factions arise emergently. Player-defined gods create the feeling of authentic pre-Christian religion with all its messy mythologies and belief-driven performance. Player-originated economics fuel ambitions great and small, fair and foul.
And all of this is fractal.
But there is the other way to start a campaign. You can start from the top down, and that is Part Two of this two-parter on practical application at the starting line.
I should have noted that another player can take control of the Hobgoblins and run them as a hostile faction, while a second player can do similarly for the keep as a friendly one, while everyone else's mans as free agents deciding how to negotiate the situation. You can go straight to a big Fistful of Dollars scenario if you have someone wanting to manipulate both factions in that manner.