Retrospective: T1 The Village of Hommlet

I recently lucked into the opportunity to start a new campaign with a group of (relatively) new players who have little prior experience with tabletop RPGs. I love starting campaigns with inexperienced players. Their enthusiasm, creativity, and sheer excitement for the game make them a joy to play with. The things that might be seen as an “old hat” by experienced players are new to them, as they’re seeing everything for the first time.

As I prepared to GM this campaign, I faced the choice of which setting to provide the players with. I decided on the Duchy of Aerik from Greg Gillespie’s Barrowmaze, as I think the setting does a great job of evoking the nostalgic “old-school” feel that makes me love tabletop RPGs.

However, I did not simply want to dump a bunch of inexperienced players into Barrowmaze or the town of Helix and tell them to “have at it.” For one, I feel like the size and scope of Barrowmaze might intimidate them for a first session. Secondly, the players at the moment aren’t committed to continuing. Our first session will be a “test” session, and very well might wind up being a one-shot. If that is the case, then I would rather not go through the trouble of all the prep-work I would need for Barrowmaze if it won’t pay off.

So, I needed a self-contained adventure I could use as an introduction to Barrowmaze. I thumbed through my mental file of all the adventures I have access to, and eventually my mind settled on one: the first one. T1, the Village of Hommlet.

I think the best word to describe T1 is “prototypical.” As one of the original modules published by TSR, T1 provided many icons for early D&D. Hommlet is the iconic D&D village. Its Welcome Wench is the iconic D&D tavern. Its moathouse is the iconic D&D dungeon. Creighton Broadhurst from the Raging Swan, whose work I admire greatly, devoted several articles venerating both the village of Hommlet and its accompanying moathouse. James Maliszewski from Grognardia also “adores” Hommlet.

This road leading to Hommlet has been the first sight of many newly-created D&D characters.

So what makes Hommlet hold such prestige in the hearts and minds of D&D players? Some of it, certainly, comes from nostalgia. Aside from that, I think Hommlet earned its “classic” status because it introduced several ideas that became staples of D&D. High-level adventurers in the village let rookies deal with problems beneath their purview. Members of an undercover cult and spy on the villagers. The moathouse’s vermin-infested surface hides a more sinister plot underneath. In essence, T1 provided themes and tropes replicated time and again in published modules and the homebrew adventures of GMs.

The legacy of T1 invites many present-day GMs to run it - including myself. However, as I sat down to prepare the module for players at my table, I felt stymied. Though I think the overall core or foundation of T1 remains compelling, some parts of it - particularly its presentation - don’t seem to have aged well. At the risk of sounding irreverent or stepping on some folks’ rose-tinted spectacles, I think there’s some ways a GM could supplement T1 to improve the experience for their players.

Considering T1’s original release came in 1979, this year marks its 40th anniversary. Both players and the game have changed substantially since then. Take, for example, how T1 lists the location and quantity of the villagers’ life savings alongside descriptions of their homes. However, it fails to provide names for many of them and much description of their personality or appearance. I think most players today talk to villagers more than they steal from them, though your players might be different. The beginning of T1 suggests this was intentional so the GM could detail the NPCs themselves - but why not provide detail and allow me to change it, if I like? For today’s game, I think something like Ggnore’s Religious Flowchart for T1 provides much more interest than the pocket change of villagers (though, if you plan on using that flowchart, I might add a few steps between “grafitti” and “vengeance” - things seem to escalate very quickly to murder).

Besides the village itself, Hommlet also leaves out important information about its dungeon. For example, in its description of area #10 beneath the moathouse, T1 provides a paragraph of detail about the bugbears there and their tactics, but nothing of the room itself. What exactly is the oddly-shaped room #10? A barracks? A shrine? A restroom? T1 leaves it for you to figure out.

When T1 does provide the information a GM needs, the module hides it in Gygax’s flourishing prose. For example, the tidbit that the traders sell regular water as holy water is buried in the section on the church of St. Cuthbert, not in the section on the traders. 

Some GMs might view Hommlet’s “unfinished” nature as a feature, rather than a flaw. They might think its lack of detail provides more room for GM creativity. If that’s the case, then good for you. I’m glad you like it. For me, I find it means I have to do more work to make it work, which is the antithesis of why I run modules. I’d prefer a module to provide me with more content and allow me to change it, rather than give me less and force me to generate it.

My hope is that I can make this module easier and more enjoyable for a GM to run. There’s a lot of good things about Hommlet and a lot of reasons to bring it to your table. I hope to eliminate some of the obstacles GMs face in doing so.

Speaking of Ggnore, in their review of T1, the they identified two issues with Hommlet: one of user interface and another that I will call “monster condo.”

The user interface problem stems from the fact that T1, being one of the first modules, came as an experiment in how to present information for GM’s. As a result, T1 hides important information in dense paragraphs. Gygax, in his signature way, writes with loquaciousness. Ggnore did some work annotating maps of the moathouse and the church of St. Cuthbert, but these amount to little more than stat blocks connected to the rooms of occupant monsters. We can take this a step further by including room descriptions and other relevant information on an annotated map. In other words, we can try to convert T1 into a few one page dungeons.

The second problem, which I have dubbed “monster condo,” refers to the disconnected and somewhat implausible inhabitants of the moathouse and its dungeon level. Consider that the surface of the moathouse contains six giant frogs, a huge spider, a giant snake, a giant lizard, a giant tick, thirteen giant rats, and nine bandits living within its confines. How exactly do those bandits co-exist with those dangerous denizens living less than a hundred feet from them? T1 mentions how the giant snake ate a bandit already, but provides little further evidence of how these creatures interact with each other. It’s hard to imagine those giant rats surviving very long with both a giant snake and a giant lizard next door.

The lower level is even more cramped, with two green slimes, twelve zombies, an ogre, six bugbears, nine gnolls, four ghouls, twenty-one brigands, an evil cleric, and a giant crayfish (which I love, but find hard to explain). T1 makes little mention of how the bandits upstairs have interacted with Lolth and his crowd down below, beyond the fact that they’re unaware of the secret door leading downstairs. T1 also describes how the gnolls and ogre were hired and the green slimes “placed and fed” on the stairs, but little explanation of what the zombies are doing locked in cells or what on Oerth the giant crayfish is doing, besides being “held at bay” by the brigands.

To help fix this “monster condo” problem, I think we can apply an idea called “Gygaxian naturalism.” Gygaxian naturalism refers to the ecology of monsters outside the sphere of the player characters. In other words, it means the inhabitants of a dungeon have routines, ecologies, and habits that exist even when the player characters aren’t there. Monsters don’t stand around in rooms and wait for the PCs to come and beat them up. They go about their monstrous lives until the PCs come and beat them up.

Although Gygax himself developed T1, it seems to have come before Gygaxian naturalism had fully developed coherency. I think we can attribute this to the fact that Gygax allegedly tested the random tables from the DMG to stock it. The result is that the moathouse, rather than feeling grounded and “real,” strains verisimilitude when the players encounter incongruous monsters from room to room with little reason for being there or evidence that they do much beyond stand around.

We now have a second goal to improve T1: apply some logic to the inhabitants of the moathouse and strengthen their relationships with one another. The challenge lies in retaining the character and “classic” feel of T1 while still making modifications to (hopefully) improve its experience.

As I prepare to post my notes for this module, I feel the need to disclose that I will change some aspects of T1 to fit my personal preferences. Particularly, I’ll try to connect T1 and the splendorous Barrowmaze by Greg Gillespie. When I publish my notes on T1, they will not be completely faithful reproductions of T1 as written. Instead, I intend to “riff” off the source material - which I think was intended, anyway. All that being said, I just wanted to tell you (the reader) to change absolutely anything about my notes you don’t like (as if you needed my permission).

I say this because, when I first started running modules as a new GM, I sometimes felt constrained to run the module as-written because that was the “way it was supposed to be.” But it’s your table, so run it your way. I will do my best to provide an overview of the changes I made with each document, so you can get an idea of where my content my diverge from that of the original.

Oh - and if you’re a player in my campaign or in one that will feature The Village of Hommlet, you probably shouldn’t read the next few posts.