In Search of the Unknown

So years ago, the phone rang. It was my sister. Her young son had seen an episode of Freaks and Geeks and decided that he wanted to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. So she immediately, and correctly, called me. 

I told her "I knew this day would come." 

My sister's family was coming to visit that very weekend, and I had no time to plan. I was not running any games at the time. I had nothing, really, except some old modules (and when I say "old" I'm not kidding. We're talking 30-40 year old stuff in a trunk in the attic, from when I was running Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. System isn't even compatible to 5E) I was actually in the process of learning 5e, because I was playing in Trey's Azurth campaign. 

So I go up the attic and drag out the first module I played in when I learned Advanced D&D, a TSR module called In Search of the Unknown. 

I didn't even own a current Monster Manual. I went online and found the 5e versions of most of the monsters in the module and just went with it. Old modules had to be manually keyed by the dungeon master, so I was using penciled-in keys my high school age self had written decades ago and converting the stuff on the fly with notebook full of notes in my lap. 

Didn't matter. I winged most of it and we had a blast! 

We played the classic way, with paper tokens on a good old fashioned battle mat. The group consisted of my nephew, my daughter (the kids are less than a year in age apart), and my husband. 

In Search of the Unknown was a classic dungeon-crawl type module that was written by Mike Carr in 1979 and published by TSR, Inc. It wasn't a bad module to start some kids on to get them used to combat, ability checks, and map keeping. I definitely wanted to teach them 5e instead of earlier editions, as I thought it important for them to be as updated as possible if they chose to play with their friends later on down the line. But the content was simple and fun, and had some fun stuff in it. It's got one layer of ruins, and a lower level of cavern, and some opportunity for a little role play. 

So maybe not the most compelling module by today's standards, but it definitely was many hours of fun and learning for us!