There are some wonderful areas described here: a Wizard Workroom, a storeroom with many casks and barrels to investigate, and the “Room of Pools” which contains 14 different pools of various magical sorts: acid, healing, wine, green slime… As part of living quarters… it doesn’t make all that much sense, especially not for where it is located. (The passages around are gently sloped you can continue to circle “deeper and deeper” if you don’t pay attention).Īs a DM, I find this intensely amusing – especially when it caught the group I was running through the adventure. For instance, the recreation room can only be accessed by traversing a maze! The maze contains one of those tricks that delighted the early D&D designers: a set of stairs that stay on the same level, but that fool explorers into believing they’re going deeper into the dungeon.
It seems that the builders of the complex wanted to confuse anyone who entered the place rather than making it a good place to live. The map doesn’t always make the most sense. Interestingly, there is a Wandering Monsters table included. The descriptions of each of the areas are quite verbose and are definitely a highlight of the adventure. The upper level contains the living quarters of the two adventurers: a total of 37 encounter areas over 13 pages. The Caverns of Quasqueton are divided into two levels. After that, the dungeon descriptions begin. The first four pages of the 32-page adventure booklet give advice on being a Dungeon Master then we get 2 pages of background and rumours about the dungeon. Now, brave adventurers (the player characters) can enter their lair to discover what treasures they left behind! Both have been reported to have perished a few years ago in the barbarian lands. The premise of the adventure, such that it is, is simple: Two famous adventurers built a base of operations where they stored the possessions they’d acquired during their adventuring days. He gave a list of sample enemies and treasures, and there are a lot of blank spaces in the adventure for the DM to write in the contents. Mike Carr decided to fully detail the setting of the adventure, but left placement of monsters and treasure mainly up to the individual DM. 1978 was the very first year that TSR produced adventure products for D&D, and there were only six published in 1978 (and only three came out in 1979), so there wasn’t a lot of previous work to be guided by. In Search of the Unknown is the only Basic D&D adventure ever to be printed with a monochrome cover, although the later printings gave it a colour cover. Later on, it was replaced in that boxed set by Keep on the Borderlands, but it was still available as a stand-alone product. Mike Carr was the author, and the adventure was included in the first printings of the Basic Dungeons & Dragons game. This makes it one of the earliest adventures for Dungeons & Dragons. B1: In Search of the Unknown was written in 1978.
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