Giant Slayer

I ran this adventure as an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons (the basic/expert edition rules, or "B/X") for my two kids, each of whom ran two characters, maybe three (I don't remember).  I didn't really bother with setting or world building but later on the ongoing campaign would be placed in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy by Judge's Guild.

As I've been running B/X (which has slowly slid over to running Labyrinth Lord), an underlying motive has been to provide certain touchstones in the RPG experience that I myself never got to experience, many due to rather unimaginative DMs and co-players, and also due to being a stupid teenager.  My personal D&D experience was limited to everyone making fifth- or sixth-level characters and the "DM" then rolling on the random encounter tables in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide and just having at it.  You earned money and treasure but there was never any real multi-room dungeons and no real campaign with named locales or anything.  To put it another way, my personal experience is what I wanted my kids to not experience, so that they know how fun, engaging, and multi-dimensional a RPG can be.

Giant Slayer was certainly a good first-run for first-time players (please note this review includes spoilers).  A village is terrorized by a hill giant who will return in a week's time and if he is not given what he wants (treasure? People to eat? I forget) he will destroy the village or something.  Villagers tell the party that the titular retired heroine lives in the nearby woods and maybe she can help.  The party then ventures into the woods, which is a sort of splitting-then-rejoining adventure path with different encounters set upon it (go left and fight giant crabs, go right and fight some satyrs, but both paths eventually rejoin at a rock promontory where there's a harpy [see Note]).  After that it’s a straight shot to the giant slayer's cottage where she joins the group. 

Returning to the village, the party and the villagers set up some seven samurai type tactical defenses (the hunters will shoot arrows at the giant! The farmers can dig a big tiger trap!).  Bulk damage is assigned for these two events once the giant shows up, so he ends up loosing over half his hit points in narrative effect (he falls in the tiger trap! 15 damage! The hunters shoot arrows! 15 damage!), such that he will basically get one attack on the retired heroine before falling before the combined melee attacks of the party and the heroine.  If this sounds a little "rail road"-y, it is, but again, as a starter adventure to get mechanics down its perhaps not so bad.

I ran this adventure without miniatures or a combat map, and used "theater of the mind" (as it were) to handle combat instead.

The Adventurers in this session were:

Zamor, a cleric

Parry, a thief
Solyssa, a fighter
Garfield, a magic user
Jatton, a fighter
Edric, a fighter

[Note]  I substituted a lot of the monsters so I could say "I used a harpy!"  This review may not accurately reflect the complete contents of the actual adventure.  A downside to my pre-teen DM's reliance on random encounters and mid-level characters was that I never got to combat with a lot of the classic monsters.  I also gifted the party a wand of cure light wounds (as a item found on one of the slain satyrs), usable on every party member once a day, as a way to "punch up" the party a bit.