To return to what we do about the D series: D1-2 overall reeks of Intertextual Strain. The first part of this selfsame booklet offers EILSERVS in CAPS, the second part Everhaite in bold. Now let us consider D1 as a standalone...
(And, in the meantime, I'm deleting that W22/W27 post I did 22 November. If you linked that post then today I'm superceding it. If you liked that post then I'm sorry: I didn't.)
D1 came with two maps: a Caverns map, and the overall series map. The latter added two entrances not on the published Caverns map. Oof!
Next, there's the illithid encounter, which antiAristotelian sidepiece D1 sets at hex M12. Gygax himself may have had second thoughts about that; hence the bypasses around it. Which bypasses, Gygax stocked with that first D&D gremlin, also not a plot-point but at least compatible. These "jermlaine" were probably mooted at some other game Gygax was running far from the tournament. (I got my eye on the Gnome Vale of 1975-78 Tsojcanth.)
More such strain is that the famed Noble House structure of the Drow Vault has no effect on module D1's side of the narrative. D1 drops names - Despana, Aleval, Eilservs - but not their significance. D1's "The Drow" are monolithic - not the case for D2, even if we meet only one in the flesh! Hex M12's probably-doomed drow merchant wears a silver circle. There is no silver-circle merchant clan in D1's introduction; there is however a silver crescent.
With module D1, clearly, we have a half-baked expansion of a series of encounters to make it all less linear and to include a wider ecology. When this one was first published, Gygax had already finished playing or at least designing D2-3 and maybe Q1 beyond that. So the noble houses were fixed, and with it the overall arc of that series. This is what left, as outliers, D1's illithid encounter and its all-Lolthian Drow.
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