A few years ago I was cleaning out my basement when I came across an old box filled with my AD&D books and modules. Opening that box pulled me straight back to the early days of my gaming life, somewhere around 1982. I could almost feel that big, dark wooden table again, the one always covered in loose papers, scribbled maps, and handfuls of dice. I could hear the laughter of my friends, the arguments over rules, and the quiet dread of opening the next door in whatever dungeon we were crawling through. I even remember the smell of the woodstove burning and the snow falling outside. It had been a snow day, and that session was my very first AD&D adventure. It felt like magic.
Mostly because it is the town where almost all of my early AD&D adventures began. It was our home base. So many sessions opened with that familiar line, “You are all sitting at a table in Falco’s Tavern…” That routine shaped how I understood fantasy towns and what a starting point should feel like. Years later, after our group drifted apart, my old DM handed me an old worn briefcase with all the old modules and campaign notes inside. That was the moment I rediscovered L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. Reading it again as an adult, with more experience, I understood why he used it so often. Restenford was an open sandbox with enormous potential. At the time, I was running a Forgotten Realms campaign in college and never had the chance to use L1 myself. It stayed in the back of my mind as an adventure I always wanted to run, but never got around to. Until now.
Len Lakofka’s module is a natural starting point for almost any campaign. It is full of hooks and quiet mysteries, structured enough to guide new players without overwhelming them. Restenford fits naturally into the Lake Et Skymorin region and serves as an ideal starting point for the campaign. It is big enough to feel alive, but small enough that new players can get their bearings within a session or two. It also fits my idea of a town experiencing sudden growth and new political pressure, making it easy to weave in new faction tensions without losing the module’s original charm. Some of my choice to begin here is intentional, but nostalgia definitely plays a part too.
There is no need to rewrite the original L1 module. There is already so much here for a low-level party to discover. A dungeon hidden right inside town at the burned guardhouse. A ruined stronghold on the hill. The strange and humorous Church of the Big Gamble nearby. A troubled Abbot at the Abbey. A subtle power struggle between the Baron and Peltar. Bandits in the hills. Humanoids prowling the wilds. Promises of lake and sea adventures beyond the town’s edge. Restenford was where my earliest adventures began, and bringing it into Aeldrath feels like bringing an old friend into a new world.
Now, decades later, I finally have the chance to run the adventure I never got to use back then. When my kids saw those old books on the shelf and asked if we could play, that was the spark that brought all of this back to life. Bringing Restenford into Aeldrath feels like picking up a thread I set down a long time ago and finally weaving it into something new. Some of this is practical, but most of it is simply the joy of returning to the place where my adventures began and seeing what new life it can take on with fresh players and a different world. Sharing these moments on Hive is my way of keeping that old magic alive, setting it down where others can follow along as this small lakeside town grows into the opening chapter of something much larger.
Original artwork generated for the Aeldrath campaign using ChatGPT (OpenAI).
