The Haunted Keep Cutaway

The first actual D&D book I purchased was the Moldvay Basic along with the Cook Expert Set (including the delightful Isle of Dread module).  The boxed Expert set even came with a set of dice that had to be colored in with a black crayon to see the numbers.  Old time stuff.  It was in a Walden Books in the spring of 1983.  I received the Monster Manual the previous Christmas, and had already tried my first crack at playing this game earlier that winter.  Since the Advanced and Expert books said advanced and expert, I figured the best thing to do was start at the beginning.  At the time I had no idea that they were supposed to be separate and competing versions of the same game.  All I knew was start with the Basics. 

There's much to say about the contents of those two books, and in retrospect I admire them more now than I did then.  Back in the day, foolish kid that I was, all I wanted was to get to the Advanced rules since that seemed so much more 'adult.'  

Still, even then, there were a few sections, a couple snippets of text, and some artwork that helped capture the spirit of the game in those hazy days of early computer graphics and video games imagery.  One of the best was the Haunted Keep.  The floorplan was fine enough, but it was that cutaway that caught the eye.  More picture than map. It was a real place.  An actual ruin.  Those towers could be located in southern Wales for all we knew.  And look what was beneath them!  Not very playable, but it sure captured a feel, and in those early days of the hobby, before the great Tech boom of the 90s, before the saturation of anything and everything at your fingertips, having a product of the imagination that actually captured the imagination was worth its weight in platinum pieces.  And nothing from the Basic rules did the job quite as effectively as the cutaway. 

The competition, c. 1982/1983