The Beginners Cave (Williams)
The Beginners Cave is a table-top RPG adventure by Huw Williams, adapted from the classic Eamon adventure The Beginners Cave by Donald Brown. Williams created the adventure for use with Dungeons & Dragons and released it in October 2026 as part of The Adventurer's Guide to Eamon.
Background
The Adventurer's Guide to Eamon is a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons that Williams began working on in the early 2020s and first started publishing online in 2024. Though he intended from the start for the Guide to include adventure modules that players could use with the setting, much of the early work on the Guide involved writing topic-specific articles, fleshing out the map of Eamon, and coding various supporting features. It wasn't until mid-2026 that the setting was sufficiently complete for work to begin on the first adventure, and Williams decided it should be an adaptation of Donald Brown's classic Beginners Cave.
The plot and the individual steps of the story were charted out in the summer of 2026, with the writing mostly done through the autumn. As research Williams read several D&D adventure anthologies and guides to adventure-writing, and aimed to structure the adventure in a way that would be recognizable to experienced DMs but also accessible to starting ones. He created accompanying freehand artwork using Adobe Fresco and an iPad Pro.
The adventure was published in late October 2026.
Premise
The adventure gives the following short summary:
What starts off as a routine training exercise becomes a more dangerous mission when the fledgling party suspects that mysterious figures have entered the guild's training area. Clues point to something dangerously amiss in the cave, and by the time the party grasps the true situation they will have left the expected training course and entered their first real adventure.
Features
The adventure is presented in three sections: an introduction that gives a plot summary and background information; a step-by-step guide to running the adventure; and a reference section containing stat blocks and maps. Author's notes are included at the end. The maps were created using Dungeon Scrawl and are compatible with Roll20.