D&D General Thoughts on running Rappan Athuk (and deadly megadungeons in general) [SPOILERS]

[MNblockhead]

Longtime fan of Necromancer/Frog God Games (and Rappan Athuk) here. I spent a lot of time on their boards (probably before I came over here). They published my first adventure, which I submitted through a fan open-submission call on their board.

Is the adventure still available from FGG? What is the name?

Talking to Bill Webb (who was editing my book) over the phone is how I first learned how to pronounce the dungeon's name correctly.

Hmm. I didn't think to ask him when I played in a (non-Rappan Athuk) game run by him. How does he pronounce it? I've always pronounced it RAH-pahn Ath-ook.

I had the first three softcover volumes for 3.0, got the 3.5 Rappan Athuk Reloaded (RARE), but never actually tried to run it until I got the 5e volume.
...
With Rappan Athuk, I ran it solo for her. Of course we could play it in person. She had a few characters (probably a fighter and rogue) and I played two casters (a healbot cleric and a blaster) as NPCs.
She had a great time. It wasn't tied to a real world, and retreating to "town" for supplies and healing was handled off screen. It was a little more like playing a Dungeoncrawling Board Game like Descent more than a typical RPG session. We got to the illusory ambush by Scramge the Raksasha before we hit a TPK. That ended the game. She'd probably go back to it, but we're honestly playing enough games with other groups (in person and online) that we don't have time for solo adventures.

My players didn't encounter Scramge until we were a couple years into the game and they were fairly high level. It was still a challenge. I like encounters that provide a challenge beyond hitpoints and damage output. It is one of the better encounters in RA, though it takes a some prep for the DM to read, understand, and run well.

 

[MNblockhead]

My general thought on mega-dungeons: The story tends to be less of an emphasis, and that results in a campaign that gets repetitive and boring. The dungeon needs to be the location where a great story is told if you want a great game ... not just a place where a lot of combats take place.

Exactly.

My best megadungeon is a manor house on a large island. The PCs explore the ruined surrounding village, then the manor house. They discover connections to the Shadowfell, Feywild, Ethereal and pocket dimensions inside the place which allow for me to use four different maps of the island that have very different features. As they explore, the PCs discover the history of the island, a long dormant threat to the world that is arising, and dozens of shorter storylines that require them to solve puzzles, outsmart enemies that are more powerful than them, and eventually beat the giant big bad. There are twelve shorter storylines, three longer storylines, and one overarching storyline. The interdependence of the megadungeon's structure and the storylines is what makes this dungeon work really well for me. The PCs can approach the dungeon like a sandbox and visit areas in different orders - sometimes needing to find ways to avoid powerful enemies until they are strong enough to fight them. I've run it twice and am setting it up to run again in a year or two.

That sounds awesome! Is it a purchased adventure/setting or homebrew?

 

[MNblockhead]

I am not very fond of megadungeons... but I think a big dungeon can be great. (the kilodungeon?)

We did about 2 levels of undermoutain back in the 2e days and... we grew bored of it. So we moved on to other adventures. In the 3e era we did the return to the temple of elemental evil and it was a HUGE slog and we just gave up following a semi-TPK (1/3 of the party dead, 1/3 captured, 1/3 evaded but no easy way to free the others so... screw it).

What I have found that did work was when a large dungeon had a solid sense of story but also was "completable" - ie didn't go on forever. I can personally recommend the Gates of Firestorm peak - it has 125 rooms but more importantly, there is variety (different "sectors" of the dungeon with different challenges/environment), it has "factions" (it's not kill everything all the time, diplomacy is possible) and the story is pretty solid. I've run it twice in 5e and would do it again.

I don't know RA and maybe it doesn't have the same flaws. Variety is important I think, and dungeons can be limited in that sense.

You raise some great points. As other have said in this thread, tying to a larger environment helps. Variety helps and RA has that in spades. But also factions, history to uncover, and goals are all important.

The only thing I disagree with is that I don't think a megadungeon needs to be "completable" any more than a large city setting book or regional setting book needs to be completable. The sense of "done" needs to be set by the DM and the PC goals. Maybe it is just a place the go back to on occasion to get treasure. Maybe there is some evil cult or other threat that they need to defeat. Even after four or five years of play, we are not going to have covered every single location and room in Rappan Athuk. That's part of the charm.

 

[MNblockhead]

A specific question on Rappan Athuk - I had a hard time figuring out all the interconnections between the levels. There is a map in the tome - but it wasn't great for my brain. To the OP - did you have any suggestions or tips on how to keep all the connections between the levels straight?

Yeah, the level-connector map looks like a circuit board schematic.

I put the image into RealmWorks (initially) and then Foundry. That allows me to link to maps. Mostly, I never need to reference it. For all my maps in Foundry I have it set up that when there is place that leads to another area in the dungeon I have a tile that links to a tile on the linked-to map. I just click and the PC token(s) are automatically move the correct location on the other map. I find this much easier than flipping to the other map and finding the correct entry point. Even with the map book, the page flipping can be annoying, especially for areas like the Bloodways that have a LOT of movement among multiple maps.

Also, one complaint I have about the Rappan Athuk book, and many of FGG's books in general (don't get me started about Tegel Manor), the editing isn't great. There are too many mistakes or unclear references in the maps or discrepancies between the maps and the text. Not a terrible amount of mistakes for a book this size, but enough to be confusing and annoying. FGG puts so much thought into the quality of the physical books. They are durable and expense. So it is disappointing to see some of the mistakes caused by lack of solid editing. I think they prioritize hitting their Kickstarter deadlines too much and don't take the time to properly edit. Kobold Press does a much better job with editing in my opinion.

Anyway, back on point. Prepping the maps in a VTT makes a huge difference but is a big investment in time. Now that RA is available in Fantasy Grounds, I would highly recommend it. If you already have FG, it is a no brainer to spend the $50 for RA. Even if you don't have FG, I think it is worth it to buy the software and prepped RA material given how much play time you are going to get out of it and the convenience and prepped time saved. Just having all the custom monsters and magic items stated up in the VTT would be a game changer.

With a VTT, and really, even when running from the book/PDF, I don't think the level-connector is going to be referenced that often. About the only time I reference it is when the party is doing intel. Questioning/interrogating NPCs, using divination, etc. to find a path to an area or information about nearby areas. Then the level connector map helps. It isn't the most intuitive map, but I'm not sure how else they would do it.

 

[jgsugden]

...That sounds awesome! Is it a purchased adventure/setting or homebrew?

Homebrew. The first time I ran it was in the 1990s. The PCs explored the manor house, but they'd kind of botched the job and missed a bunch of the story elements. They were about to just walk away from it - when the Ravenloft Boxed set came out. That inspired me, so I had the Big Bad (which they had not discovered) get sucked into a new Ravenloft Domain (pulling the PCs with them), which they then had to escape. That led them to uncovering a lot of the story elements they missed, which then allowed me to pull them back to the prime, but they discovered they were in the far future after a calamity took place and they had to travel back and forth in time without leaving the manor house to solve it.

The next time I ran it was in the very late 3.5E era and I modified the setting to incorporate many of the ideas of 4E that were leaking out, like the Feywild, as well as my ideas on how to do the ideas behind Ravenloft and Ghostwalk better. Rather than throwing themn into the Shadowfell/Ravenloft as a response to the PCs not finding things that I'd expected they'd find, I built it, the Feywild, the Ethereal, and other pocket dimensions into the storyline more cohesively.

I am doing my rebuild of it for my Dungeon23. The easier part is that the 'reuse' of locations across the various Mirror Planes allows me to keep my total map at less than 120 areas overall - while describing each location 2, 3 or 4 ways.

I'm trying to figure out what it would take to actually build the manor house itself using terrain .... but I doubt I'll go that far. Ignoring the rest of the island, just building the manor house, the towers, and the dungeon beneath it would be 6 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 12 feet tall from the bottom of the dungeon to the peaks of the two towers.

 

[Retreater]

Is the adventure still available from FGG? What is the name?

DriveThruRPG.com

Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.

www.drivethrurpg.com

I had a few others in development with them but haven't heard anything for a while.

How does he pronounce it? I've always pronounced it RAH-pahn Ath-ook.

RAP-pan ath-ACK
(I think I have the stresses in the right spot. The pronunciation is definitely right though.)

 

[MNblockhead]

DriveThruRPG.com

Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.

www.drivethrurpg.com

I had a few others in development with them but haven't heard anything for a while.

Cool, will definitely picking it up. Looking for more Set-focused material for my Lost Lands campaign.

RAP-pan ath-ACK
(I think I have the stresses in the right spot. The pronunciation is definitely right though.)

Huh. Would never have guessed "ath-ACK" from "Athuk."

 

[DragonBelow]

It's one of my favorite megadungeons. I made the party the spearhead of some religious coalition, that way the party had an easy way to get replacement characters and some resources available. I ran it for PF1e. It was tough. Only one character death, but we didn't get too deep, only to purple worm level.

 

[Enrico Poli1]

Rappan Athuk is one of my two favourite Megadungeons, the other being Eyes of the Stone Thief. (I usually do NOT like Megadungeons)
I love these two because of 1) the brilliant set pieces and 2) a clear overarching story (in RA's case, to kill Orcus).
Indeed RA truly has a first-edition feeling, and that is a big plus for me.

By the way, I DMed the first published version, under the 3.0 ruleset, and the party managed to get to Orcus, who TPKed them mercilessly. Overall, it was a great experience.

 

[Nightfly]

Speaking of brilliant set pieces and overarching story...

When people are compiling lists of the best mega-dungeons, I rarely see Castle Whiterock mentioned, which is a shame. It might be because that adventure was only ever published with 3e rules, which is anathema to most of the OSR community who tend to be the main people interested in mega-dungeons.

Whatever the reason, Whiterock deserves more love. Each level has its own theme and internal logic, but all the levels compose a cohesive whole that also has logic. It begins with your typical humanoid enemies for low-level characters, but then gets really gonzo at higher levels. Many of the levels are absolutely crazy (in a good way) but it never feels random or nonsensical.

The absurdly huge pdf sells for $60 but occasionally goes on sale for dirt cheap. I've seen it for five bucks.