Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set

For my first look back at awesome adventures from each edition of D&D, I'm going with the 1983 "red box" edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (I also have the 1981 edition with Keep on the Borderlands -- another gift from my Aunt Nedra) in lieu of an official First Edition adventure module. I own several First Edition books, but I didn't start playing D&D until around 1985 -- here I'll give another shout-out to Kevin and his brother Brian, who introduced me to the game -- and played Basic exclusively until Second Edition AD&D came out in 1989.

Opening that beautiful red box for the first time is a moment seared into my memory. I had played D&D a few times with Kevin, Brian, and their gaming group, but the red box was my first experience reading the rules and creating characters on my own. No game product I've ever seen -- save perhaps for the much later Pathfinder Beginner Box -- has provided so engaging an introduction to both the mechanical and narrative aspects of roleplaying games. The Basic Set begins with a solo adventure in which your hero meets and befriends a beautiful cleric named Aleena, who soon dies at the hands of the evil wizard Bargle. That was powerful stuff for a little kid. The solo adventure is followed by a full-party dungeon crawl in the ruins of castle Mistamere, wherein the heroes are tasked with tracking down and capturing Bargle. I played through that one as a solo adventure and also ran it for Scott and other lads in the early days of the Front Porch (as part of the Fantasy Quest campaign -- our first foray into D&D after a steady diet of superhero RPG action in Earth Commanders). Flipping through that bright red adventure booklet today, I get the distinct urge to resume my decades-old hunt for that elusive wizard...