Castle Maure - Not All That

Numion · Sep 30, 2005

Hi

In order not to derail the golden age of D&D thread, I decided to borrow mearls comment and start a new thread. I think that Castle Maure is way overrated, probably due to nostalgia. Let's start with mearls comment on the subject:

mearls said:
I was thinking about nostalgia the other day while reading Gygax and Kuntz's excellent Castle Maure adventure in Dungeon. That adventure does a lot of things "wrong" by modern design standards - many of the encounters are simply X number of monster Y in a room, without detailed tactics or personalities, yet the vivid, imaginative background and concepts made me want to run the adventure.

Why I think that Maure is not all that is actually laid out in mearls opinion, but I reach quite different conclusion. The problem of the adventure is just what mearls says - it's got cool backgrounds, but it's still a X monster in room Y dungeonfest. Those background things and cool NPCs made me want to run the adventure too, and guess what, I did!

It has big maps, and some nice encounters with background, but the problem is that due to the big maps the interesting encounters are few and far between when the PCs are grinding against yet another group of run-of-the-mill gnolls. And when an encounter with a cool background does come up, it's usually in a way that the background never comes into play. It's like 80% of the cool designing effort is wasted on 10% of the encounters, and 80% of the background effort is wasted on encounters that are meant to be combat encounters where the background .. stays on the background.

The cool backgrounds do make for a nice read for the DM, and makes you want to run it, but in play they are absent, and this makes Maure boooring. We quit after 75% completion. I can't be sure, but I think that the rave reviews and high regard on this board are due to nostalgia.

amethal · Sep 30, 2005

The Castle doesn't appeal to me as a DM, since I'm not a fan of running big dungeons. Especially those that don't make much "sense".

Instead, I normally use the "five room dungeon" approach when designing my adventures.

As a player, however, I love the amazing backdrops, the unexpected monsters and the general air of mystery and excitement I get from adventuring in such a strange place.

Numion · Sep 30, 2005

amethal said:
As a player, however, I love the amazing backdrops, the unexpected monsters and the general air of mystery and excitement I get from adventuring in such a strange place.

Of course, as do I. But in Castle Maure the chance to get some of that sweet background lovin' off those NPCs is between the spot check and the roll for initiative, if you know what I mean. There is all that cool background info on the major NPCs, then they just sit in a room (or not, depending on your roll of dice) waiting to attack the PCs.

Rogal Dorn · Sep 30, 2005

I agree, it´s all nostalgia and no quality. No quality for my playing style that is.
Im more like amethal, I run a diffenent game where dungeons make sense.

I bought a few dungeon mags the other day a I was disappointed. All that "back to the dungeon" is just too much. Apart from the freeport series there are very few good adventures, neither from WoTC og dungeon for that matter....

So it seems that taking powerful characters through many many room with many many monsters is the thing nowadays.....sad, because 3 ed. really got me back in the game because of the great system, but actually I think that many of the later 2nd ed. adventures where better..or more varied..

But then again, 3ed. has no fluff only crunch, fine for experienced groups, but how are newbies supposed to run anything other than dungeon hack & slash...

I don´t run premade adventures, but I read a lot for inspiration, maps etc.. but lately, there is very little inspiration from modules.. we have to wait I guess, it will come, the pendulum will swing

Dorn

drowdude · Sep 30, 2005

I came to a similar conclusion when I started to consider working Castle Maure into one of my ongoing campaigns. While a "classic" dungeoncrawl can be fun, I usually like for things to make a bit more sense overall.

So I ended up just using the background material (modified to fit the campaign of course) and the maps of the castle; and just used the encounters as suggestions of what might be around and reworked the "ecology" of the place quite a bit.

Of course, the annoying bit is that the campaign I did all that work, and then the campaign took an odd turn and ended (mainly due to one of the players moving). Ah well... :\

Numion · Sep 30, 2005

I do run quite a lot of dungeon crawls for my players, so my beef is not with dungeons generally. I just like well designed dungeons - not perhaps ones that make sense, but that lend themselves to fun and exciting adventuring. My group has never had high requirements for suspensions of disbelief. It's just usually the obligatory [Dr.Evil] Riiiiiiight.. [/Dr.Evil] comment when the BBEG reveals his lacking or needlessly complicated plan for world domination.

I'd like to further illustrate my opinion by contrasting Maure with another adventure that also is mainly dungeoncrawling: The Banewarrens. Both have a lots of background material on the NPCs, the locale and the overarching plot. The make-or-break difference is that Maure presents this information only to the DM and is making it hard for the players to learn anything, which is cool if you just read and review the adventure. Banewarrens involves the players in the plot completely, and lets them learn the background gradually, making it a blast to play too.

Drkfathr1 · Sep 30, 2005

I haven't run this one myself (yet), but I can see the problem with the encounters vs. the background info. As a DM I love that kind of info, but I always want a way to share it with the PC's, and sometimes that's not easy.

I'll have to do a lot of pre-planning and maybe add some NPC's and tactic notes on the overall dungeon. As usual, I'll have to do a lot of my own work on it, rather than just running it as it is. After all, there's no reason I can't make the baddies a little more organized and proactive.

That's another thing I love as a DM.

MerricB · Sep 30, 2005

I am very ambivalent about Castle Maure.

I consider the first level of the adventure to be one of the absolute classic dungeon set-ups for any edition of D&D: the ghostly arena, the ogre-mage weaver and the iron golem with the petrifying whip are all wonderful, wonderful inventions.

Then there are the levels below. I find them nowhere near as evocative.

jokamachi · Sep 30, 2005

Dungeons making 'sense.' Monsters making 'sense.' LOL

You guys slay me.

wedgeski · Sep 30, 2005

Numion said:
I'd like to further illustrate my opinion by contrasting Maure with another adventure that also is mainly dungeoncrawling: The Banewarrens. Both have a lots of background material on the NPCs, the locale and the overarching plot. The make-or-break difference is that Maure presents this information only to the DM and is making it hard for the players to learn anything, which is cool if you just read and review the adventure. Banewarrens involves the players in the plot completely, and lets them learn the background gradually, making it a blast to play too.

I agree with this. Although Banewarrens can be difficult to run without a ton of prep, I think it will go down as one of the best adventures created for this Edition, if not any Edition, and is a good illustration of where adventure design has gone in the last 25 years.