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Rats of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.

My favorite brutal 80s D&D death is the 10% chance of plummeting to your death from a broken plank by walking across the Castle Ravenloft drawbridge.

Its hilarious every time.

You had me at giant rats

Not too long ago we did a random one shot adventure to tide us over while our regular DM was on holiday.  The temp DM did it at short notice and stated from the start that he was reading directly from his book, and that it was an older edition adventure.  So we went in with reasonable expectations, and him reading the near identical description for each room, became a running joke.  

I bring this up because at one point one of the clerics went off to explore on his own, walked into a room, and a spider dropped on his head and bit him.  He passed the con save and then flattened the spider without trouble.  The DM, continued reading from the book, and his eyes visibly widened in horror before he said "well it’s good thing you passed because you were dead if didn’t."

"Oh, does the poison do a lot of damage."

"No it literally kills you."

After some more disbelieving back and forth he showed us the description which stated that failing the save on the poison causes death in 1d4 rounds (or something like that).  After the surprise wore off we just rolled around laughing.  The player in question went "I wished I’d failed that now.  That would have been so funny.  No really, the rest of you would have come along, found my body and had no fucking clue what happened."

To this day it’s a recurring joke.

This was a great video! For those who might be curious, here's a glimpse behind our collective Game Design screen:

Part of the reason we left out the sneaky kobold ambush was because this cave also doubles as a tutorial. Because players might be learning other things, we didn't want the first encounter to be an auto-combat scenario! We included the narrow ledge around the pit trap for a similar reason—new players can overcome the pit without having to look up the jump rules unless they are masochists and want to.

Hilariously, when we first playtested this cave, the set still included average damage and parentheticals. The mom of a small family playtest group was playing a Wizard and fell into the pit, and the dad read 3(1d6) as 3 x 1d6 damage! I was equally mortified and tickled.

Pretty sure that some players are going to conclude the necklace means the rat is a transformed princess that just needs a kiss to restore her to her original form…

I like this type of video. Please do this again soon, Bob!

The galls on some plants, I tell ya...

12:44 They call him Mr. Boombastic…

I first played this module in 1981 with my high school buddies. One of the greatest TTRPG experiences of my life.

I got an ad as he said "so I say", and so I got "So I say Wawa has tacos now?" 😂

I ran the original kobold as a level 0 DCC adventure. It was absolute carnage.

Fun video, reminds me of the old combining dragon of icespire peak and lost mine of phandelver videos you did. I would watch more of these about more locations from the new starter set!

The addition of the copper wyrmling in the newer version also reminds me of the example adventure from the DMG meant for around level 3 parties- in this case, a buncha kobolds are being talked into raiding caravans by an uppity red wyrmling.

Watch out for Ticks Mr. Bob!!

Those thorny leaves give me the creeps. Great video Bob!

Kinda funny - Aside from playing it in the 80's as a sprog myself, about 10 years ago when I was getting my daughter into playing for the first time (Pathfinder 1e), I ended up using the Caves of Chaos map and the encounters as a rough guideline of what to face, but scaled appropriately for her single-person-plus-henchman party.  Had a blast then, and busted it out again for the 5e playtest material in 2014 (since that's what they distributed it with anyway!)

My favorite official Level 1 adventure is still 3e The Sunless Citadel. It's a dungeon with kobolds having a pet white dragon wyrmling. Having L2/L3 (by the end) characters find a dragon in their first adventure is a wonderful treat, even for the gamers who'd been playing D&D for decades.

Encounters like this is what makes me always wanna have arms of hadar at level one, even though it's superbad!