From the author's introduction: Creatures & Caverns is a version of the game I initially designed in 1982 after seeing two neighborhood kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. Since I didn’t own the D&D box set myself, I created my own dungeon-crawling game based on my observations. It’s little more than wizards and knights wandering through a subterranean labyrinth, killing monsters, and taking their gold, but it embodied for me (at the time) what I thought D&D was all about, and provided quite a few sessions of enjoyable play with friends before I truly embarked on my journey into the world of professionally published roleplaying games.