D&D 5E Waterdeep - Dungeon of the Mad Mage

[Distracted DM]

It's bad. It's boring. It's incomplete.
In my group it's described as the "big, empty dungeon of nothing."
It's basically the equivalent of someone just drawing a bunch of rooms on graph paper with nothing to fill them.
Just download some free maps from Dyson Logos and populate them yourself.

I will say one other thing about DotMM - even if you don't run the campaign as its own thing, each individual level stands on its own as something to piecemeal out into other games as standalone dungeons.

These two descriptions seem at odds.

So some folk find it basically empty, others find it useful enough to take parts out for other games?

 

[TiQuinn]

These two descriptions seem at odds.

So some folk find it basically empty, others find it useful enough to take parts out for other games?

Having seen some of the dungeons after we played it, I don't know if I'd call it empty but I also come from an old school mindset of dungeons. There's space in dungeons. Not every room is a death trap. Sometimes a door just leads to a latrine. Sometimes it's a room with a bunch of old tapestries that are just for show. DotMM had a lot of that. It didn't always describe each and every room with detail. The DM is expected to make the dungeon levels dynamic and determine how NPCs move about the dungeon. Sometimes the module will say how monsters would patrol the area, other times it didn't.

But each level also had its own theme - it's own reason for being, and an objective to be had there that was either standalone and/or was part of the greater challenge of the campaign which is why I think you could easily pull them apart if you wanted. There's a through-line, but not every level caters to the through-line of the campaign. For instance, one level might be run by an apprentice of Halaster, and stuff that happens there may be important later on at deeper levels. But if you were to drop the Halaster tie completely, which is very easy, you still have a dungeon ruled by an evil wizard who's doing some bad stuff.

 

[Retreater]

These two descriptions seem at odds.

So some folk find it basically empty, others find it useful enough to take parts out for other games?

I'll give you one of my examples.

I was running it for my group. In a two-hour game, the group exploring the 1st level found an immense room that had as its solitary detail a single dwarven boot. Granted, the path they took was not especially interesting, but it ended up "empty room after empty room."

Without my copy handy, I'd say there's something like 1/5th of the rooms have something interesting in them: an encounter, a trap, a treasure, an interesting feature or lore. It's big for the sake of being big. And if you're like my group - busy adults with jobs, families, etc. - you don't want to spend 4/5th of your time with nothing happening.

OR you could populate it yourself and put in more work than you probably would've done creating something from scratch.

OR you could "wall off" the boring parts - maybe about 1/2 the dungeon, so you have a more reasonable 50% empty and 50% interesting of the remaining space. (This is what I did since I was running it on Roll20 during the pandemic.)

DotMM might be the best megadungeon created by WotC for 5E - but that's because it's the only megadungeon created by WotC for 5E. Basically anything I've seen created by a 3PP is superior. The stuff I make on my own is better - and I don't hold my design especially high.

 

[pukunui]

I was running it for my group. In a two-hour game, the group exploring the 1st level found an immense room that had as its solitary detail a single dwarven boot. Granted, the path they took was not especially interesting, but it ended up "empty room after empty room."

OK but the thing about the first floor is that it's the most heavily trodden floor in the entire dungeon. Most of the thrill-seeking Waterdhavians who descend into Undermountain won't go beyond this first floor. It's been picked clean over and over again.

The second floor is much less empty. There's even a goblin market on that floor!

 

[Retreater]

OK but the thing about the 1st floor is that it's the most heavily trodden floor in the entire dungeon. Most of the thrill-seeking Waterdhavians who descend into Undermountain won't go beyond this first floor. It's been picked clean over and over again.

The second floor is much less empty. There's even a goblin market on that floor!

Logic may agree with you. Fun, exciting gameplay to capture the imagination of your players does not.
Go big. Get them out of the gate.

I'll give you an example from a megadungeon that I run for my home games - which I was writing for publication before 3.5 ended and the 4E GSL derailed my career writing for D&D.

The megadungeon complex is modelled after the Mammoth Cave system located near where I live. It sprawls beneath a frontier community where the locals have legends about the caves, but they've never delved deeply enough to encounter the other humanoids who live down there. You have interactions such as the chimney of an old forge, which is poking out of the top of a knob. The teenagers from the village dare themselves to jump across it. One night someone falls in and the heroes have to go down there to recover the kid.

Or you have the haunted plateau where an elemental spirit keeps trying to cover an entrance to the dungeon with sand. This is just a simple unseen servant, but to the locals, it's a terrifying apparition.

The known entrances show graffiti from generations of spelunkers. There are dangerous chasms and ancient traps that have kept the other residents from getting farther.

Sure, this method is a slow burn, but at least there is something interesting going on. It takes a few rooms to begin to see something happened to the first level's civilization. With Dungeon of the Mad Mage, there isn't even anything clear about "should we explore deeper?" It's just nothing. No inspiration.

I'm not going to belittle the cartography, but the dungeon is too large physically for the scope of its ideas.

 

[Reynard]

I voted "Ran it and the group enjoyed it" but there are caveats: we played individual levels as isolated adventures, and focused on the higher level stuff because we had finished Out of the Abyss. It was fine for that. As a megadungeon, though, I don't think it is particularly good.

 

[Hussar]

I played this and have used various levels repurposed in other games.

I did not like it as a player but that had a lot more to do with not fitting well into the group. I was more mission focused and the group wanted to explore the entire level before moving on.

After the second level I was just so mind numbingly bored that I had to walk away. The other players were perfectly happy with pointless combat after pointless combat. Or to be fair, what I saw as pointless anyway.

I’d say that it depends a lot on the group and making sure everyone is on the same page is very important.

 

[Maxperson]

These two descriptions seem at odds.

So some folk find it basically empty, others find it useful enough to take parts out for other games?

I've used three of the levels so far as stand alone dungeons in my game and the players enjoyed each of them.

 

[TiQuinn]

I played this and have used various levels repurposed in other games.

I did not like it as a player but that had a lot more to do with not fitting well into the group. I was more mission focused and the group wanted to explore the entire level before moving on.

After the second level I was just so mind numbingly bored that I had to walk away. The other players were perfectly happy with pointless combat after pointless combat. Or to be fair, what I saw as pointless anyway.

I’d say that it depends a lot on the group and making sure everyone is on the same page is very important.

I'll say that we played the dungeon more along of the lines of what you wanted - each PC had a reason for being in the dungeon, and we all played in accordance with our goals, pursuing leads, etc. We ended up bypassing one entire level because we figured a a way around most of it, and already had a lead on something that was the level below. We definitely didn't treat it as something we had to explore every nook and cranny, and I think we were better off for it.

 

[Hussar]

I'll say that we played the dungeon more along of the lines of what you wanted - each PC had a reason for being in the dungeon, and we all played in accordance with our goals, pursuing leads, etc. We ended up bypassing one entire level because we figured a a way around most of it, and already had a lead on something that was the level below. We definitely didn't treat it as something we had to explore every nook and cranny, and I think we were better off for it.

I’m obviously going to agree here.

The other players were much more into completing the dungeon than I was. I was just a really poor fit for the group.

But, yeah, if I was going to run it myself, it absolutely would be mission based.