D&D General Best dungeons?

[LordEntrails]

As published, the book falls short on this. It's a great location, or series of locations. There are some suggested "missions" but they're paper thin. I realize it's an enormous book already, but a chapter devoted entirely to well-developed possible missions/quests/goals for entering Undermountain would have greatly enhanced that book. As it is, it is VERY reliant on the DM to breath life into it.

Yea. I don't see how a mainstream publication can do Undermountain justice. My version has 287 pages just for the first level. Add in 300 maps or so and yea, it's just huge. I don't know how many pages are dedicated to quests, rumors, factions and such, but yea, that's the key it. And accepting that UM needs to be done as a setting, not just an adventure location.

 

[Bill Zebub]

He's good but it's still mostly the same dungeon. He just ties so many NPCs into a series of overarching themes which tie into Waterdeep itself.

For example, everlasting night was created over waterdeep by something in this dungeon. It's going to slowly kill the city due to crop failure and such, unless we can find the Villain and artifact they are using, and destroy it or at least turn it off.

To achieve this, the mage's guild in Waterdeep is working with us, gave us some sending stones to communicate once a day, working with a temple to give us one divination a day.

We're slowly gathering information on what level this artifact might be located on, and one clue led us to part of that information is with some vampires on another level. We needed to find them, but eventually found their enemies, who led us to them in exchange for taking care of a minor problem of theirs.

And this is how the whole dungeon had gone. We're not just randomly exploring, but each level is tied to a larger mission of some sort. We have allies on some levels, enemies on others.

Xanathar will be trouble because we killed his goldfish in Waterdeep.

We set some mechanical beings free in Waterdeep and now they've taken over a level down here somewhere and the local residents are in a battle with them.

We accidentally set fire to a druid's trees on another level while chasing other baddies, and now she despises us though she has information we need for another quest and we need to find a way to persuade her to not want to kill us every time she spots us. Everything has more structure and meaning because our DM spent time tweaking things.

We're also trying to turn the miniature castle into a bastion with a teleportation circle to our other bastion, a bar, we own and renovated in Waterdeep.

Yeahhhhh....my experience as a player in DotMM wasn't anything like this.

I did DM Dragon Heist (for the same group) and after reading and re-reading it, I ended up finding a bunch of great resources on Dmsguild that I used to modify and augment it, and that all worked out really well.

So maybe the same could be true for DotMM: it's a starting point, but it takes a lot of work to make it great.

 

[Malmuria]

Perhaps an odd choice, but Winter's Daughter is fantastic at environmental storytelling

 

[LordEntrails]

So maybe the same could be true for DotMM: it's a starting point, but it takes a lot of work to make it great.

It at least takes the right DM. It can almost be run well as written, but IMO really needs a DM who understands how to bring all the hints and leads and factions together to make it something more than a bunch of unlinked encounters. It needs, IMO, a lot of out of combat role play and interaction with ways for the characters to learn things that are not otherwise readily apparent to the characters.