pukunui
Legend
"Well, we knocked the bastard off."
- Sir Edmund Hillary (1919–2008)
We did it! It only took us three years, but we managed to complete Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage!
Session 0: 1 August 2021
Session 72:* 31 August 2024
Backstory
At the start of 2020, we were all excited to play Odyssey of the Dragonlords. At first it was fun, but then COVID arrived in NZ. We bravely soldiered on, switching to online play, but eventually the fatigue got to us and we gave up. I tried a few other adventures after that, including Dragon Heist. My players were excited by the prospect of owning property for once, but we got sick of the egregious railroading in that adventure and gave up on it too. So then I tried the Acquisitions Incorporated adventure, "Orrery of the Wanderer". I think it's a great little adventure, and the franchise rules are fantastic, but again, mostly due to COVID, my players' hearts just weren't in it. We needed something we could play without having to be all that invested in metaplot and business-oriented mini-games and such.
Enter Dungeon of the Mad Mage. I billed it as an old school, beer and pretzels, kick in the door, kill the monsters and take their stuff kind of game. There's no real plot. The adventure is what you make of it. I told the guys I'd keep running it until either we reached the end or we all got bored of it. We got close to the latter a few times, but we stayed the course and saw it through to the end!
Campaign Post-Mortem
We had an inauspicious start, with the brand new guy leaving partway through because his "ride came early". (Yeah, none of us saw you calling an Uber on your phone, my guy.) We had a few other players come and go over the course of the campaign, but the core four stayed solid.
I initially was running with the "game show" theme from the Dungeon of the Mad Mage Companion, but the party wiped against the drow in the temple on floor 3.** A new party formed to seek revenge / rescue their missing family members, and so instead I decided that Halaster would employ them to "clean house" so he could restock and reset the dungeon for the next series.
This new party managed to make it all the way down to Halaster's lair. The conquering heroes were:
Undermountain has 23 floors. I'm estimating that they explored roughly 75% of the dungeon. They skipped most of floor 9 (the wizard school) and all of floor 11 (the drow battleground). They also completely skipped Skullport, which was fine since as written there's not a lot going on there.
Halaster tasked the new party with "cleaning house" by wiping out the drow on floors 10 and 12 and also ending the war between the githyanki and mindflayers further down. They succeeded in wiping out the drow on floor 10, gaining revenge for their fallen comrades from the previous party, but they balked at killing the heavily pregnant drow priestess on floor 12. (Halaster ended up getting Rex the Hammer to do that -- see below.) They also succeeded in wiping out the mindflayers on floor 17, but they could not for the life of them get rid of the githyanki or their red dragons in the asteroid after multiple attempts. (I made this section harder by using the githyanki from Monsters of the Multiverse. Again, Rex got the "kill steal" here, rubbing it in their faces by bringing them the red dragon mama's head.) Rex also got the kill steal with Muiral the Misshapen, whom the party had been unable to defeat in their first fight with him.
After the original party rescued Rex the Hammer on floor 2, he adventured with them for a short time until one of Halaster's elder runes paralyzed him for a day. They didn't see him again after that, but Rex survived and quickly became the replacement party's primary rival. Unlike them, Rex had no scruples, so Halaster used him and his ever-changing group of minions to mop up after the PCs. They got to fight Rex a few times, but every time it looked like they were going to beat him, Halaster whisked him away, telling them Rex was too useful to kill. They finally got to put an end to their nemesis just outside Halaster's tower, although it was a close thing. This time he had a Thayan red wizard, a shadar-kai gloom weaver, and a tortle death cleric as his minions. And he'd found himself a dwarven thrower!
Halaster had told the group that if they did everything he asked of them and then made it down to his lair on floor 23, he'd give them a wish. Of course, they thought he meant he'd give each of them a wish, but when they got there, he pointed out that he can only cast wish once per day (and possibly once only) so they'd just get one between them. At first, Dwarian wanted to use their wish to return the lost spelljammer and its orog crew from floor 19 to space so they could go on their merry way (the PCs had befriended the orogs and killed the crazy peg-legged mindflayer captain), but then Drogul suddenly remembered that Dwarian and he had entered Undermountain in order to find and rescue their brother/cousin, Duergal! Since they had not found him anywhere in Undermountain, they presumed he was dead (which he was), so they wished for Halaster to restore him to life. This Halaster graciously did.
Drogul also asked for Rex the Hammer's loot (because Halaster had whisked Rex's body away before the party could loot it in an effort to get the party to come see him faster [read: in an effort to avoid having to extend the campaign for another session]), which he got. Dwarian asked Halaster what had happened to the Melairkyn dwarves who had built much of Undermountain. Fizzy asked Halaster who her patron was (he told her it was Tearulai, much to Fizzy's bemusement). Jane asked for more wizard spells and was offered an apprenticeship.
So Jane remained behind with Halaster, rubbing her hands with glee at the prospect of having access to his magic and the thought of carving out a lair for herself on an Undermountain floor of her choosing, while her three companions (plus the bewildered Duergal) stepped through Halaster's one-way magic portal leading to a cornfield on the outskirts of Triboar. From there, Fizzy would journey to Myth Drannor to take Tearulai home at long last, and the Stoneshield dwarves agreed to accompany her.
I've asked my players the following questions:
• Which dungeon floor was your favorite?
• Which dungeon floor was your least favorite?
• Which NPC was your favorite (either to interact with or to fight)?
• Which NPC was your least favorite?
• What was your biggest highlight from the campaign?
• What is one other thing you remember from the campaign?
I'll post their responses in the comments below.
Next up is The Wild Beyond the Witchlight! We will stick with the 2014 rules for this campaign, as it is short enough that we should be finished not too long after the full 2024 rules have been released and any errata / sage advice has been published so we can make an informed decision about fully switching or hybridizing or whatever.
*That's the FB group event count. I feel like there may have been one or two sessions for which I forgot to create a FB event, but I can't remember for sure.
**D&D uses 'level' for too many different things, so I decided to refer to the different levels of Undermountain as 'floors' instead.
- Sir Edmund Hillary (1919–2008)
We did it! It only took us three years, but we managed to complete Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage!
Session 0: 1 August 2021
Session 72:* 31 August 2024
Backstory
At the start of 2020, we were all excited to play Odyssey of the Dragonlords. At first it was fun, but then COVID arrived in NZ. We bravely soldiered on, switching to online play, but eventually the fatigue got to us and we gave up. I tried a few other adventures after that, including Dragon Heist. My players were excited by the prospect of owning property for once, but we got sick of the egregious railroading in that adventure and gave up on it too. So then I tried the Acquisitions Incorporated adventure, "Orrery of the Wanderer". I think it's a great little adventure, and the franchise rules are fantastic, but again, mostly due to COVID, my players' hearts just weren't in it. We needed something we could play without having to be all that invested in metaplot and business-oriented mini-games and such.
Enter Dungeon of the Mad Mage. I billed it as an old school, beer and pretzels, kick in the door, kill the monsters and take their stuff kind of game. There's no real plot. The adventure is what you make of it. I told the guys I'd keep running it until either we reached the end or we all got bored of it. We got close to the latter a few times, but we stayed the course and saw it through to the end!
Campaign Post-Mortem
We had an inauspicious start, with the brand new guy leaving partway through because his "ride came early". (Yeah, none of us saw you calling an Uber on your phone, my guy.) We had a few other players come and go over the course of the campaign, but the core four stayed solid.
I initially was running with the "game show" theme from the Dungeon of the Mad Mage Companion, but the party wiped against the drow in the temple on floor 3.** A new party formed to seek revenge / rescue their missing family members, and so instead I decided that Halaster would employ them to "clean house" so he could restock and reset the dungeon for the next series.
This new party managed to make it all the way down to Halaster's lair. The conquering heroes were:
- Drogul Stoneshield - A gold dwarf forge cleric / watcher paladin who took one level of storm sorcerer after getting fried by a lightning bolt. He was searching for his lost brother, Duergal. You may recall me complaining about him being an unkillable one trick pony. Despite Halaster's (and my) best efforts, he survived to the end of the campaign!
- Dwarian Stoneshield - A gold dwarf berserker barbarian and cousin of Drogul. He was badly burned after falling into a lake of lava, but also became blessed by both Tyr and Torm over the course of the campaign.
- Fizzy Bladesemmer - A cocky half-elf noblewoman swashbuckler rogue / hexblade warlock. She acquired the sentient elven blade Tearulai on floor 5 and used its truesight to great effect throughout the remainder of the campaign.
- Jane Vanilla - A studious evoker wizard whose champion fighter brother, John Vanilla, had been lost in Undermountain. She later found him 'volunteering' his services to an ulitharid running a virtual reality simulation of Waterdeep on floor 17.
Undermountain has 23 floors. I'm estimating that they explored roughly 75% of the dungeon. They skipped most of floor 9 (the wizard school) and all of floor 11 (the drow battleground). They also completely skipped Skullport, which was fine since as written there's not a lot going on there.
Halaster tasked the new party with "cleaning house" by wiping out the drow on floors 10 and 12 and also ending the war between the githyanki and mindflayers further down. They succeeded in wiping out the drow on floor 10, gaining revenge for their fallen comrades from the previous party, but they balked at killing the heavily pregnant drow priestess on floor 12. (Halaster ended up getting Rex the Hammer to do that -- see below.) They also succeeded in wiping out the mindflayers on floor 17, but they could not for the life of them get rid of the githyanki or their red dragons in the asteroid after multiple attempts. (I made this section harder by using the githyanki from Monsters of the Multiverse. Again, Rex got the "kill steal" here, rubbing it in their faces by bringing them the red dragon mama's head.) Rex also got the kill steal with Muiral the Misshapen, whom the party had been unable to defeat in their first fight with him.
After the original party rescued Rex the Hammer on floor 2, he adventured with them for a short time until one of Halaster's elder runes paralyzed him for a day. They didn't see him again after that, but Rex survived and quickly became the replacement party's primary rival. Unlike them, Rex had no scruples, so Halaster used him and his ever-changing group of minions to mop up after the PCs. They got to fight Rex a few times, but every time it looked like they were going to beat him, Halaster whisked him away, telling them Rex was too useful to kill. They finally got to put an end to their nemesis just outside Halaster's tower, although it was a close thing. This time he had a Thayan red wizard, a shadar-kai gloom weaver, and a tortle death cleric as his minions. And he'd found himself a dwarven thrower!
Halaster had told the group that if they did everything he asked of them and then made it down to his lair on floor 23, he'd give them a wish. Of course, they thought he meant he'd give each of them a wish, but when they got there, he pointed out that he can only cast wish once per day (and possibly once only) so they'd just get one between them. At first, Dwarian wanted to use their wish to return the lost spelljammer and its orog crew from floor 19 to space so they could go on their merry way (the PCs had befriended the orogs and killed the crazy peg-legged mindflayer captain), but then Drogul suddenly remembered that Dwarian and he had entered Undermountain in order to find and rescue their brother/cousin, Duergal! Since they had not found him anywhere in Undermountain, they presumed he was dead (which he was), so they wished for Halaster to restore him to life. This Halaster graciously did.
Drogul also asked for Rex the Hammer's loot (because Halaster had whisked Rex's body away before the party could loot it in an effort to get the party to come see him faster [read: in an effort to avoid having to extend the campaign for another session]), which he got. Dwarian asked Halaster what had happened to the Melairkyn dwarves who had built much of Undermountain. Fizzy asked Halaster who her patron was (he told her it was Tearulai, much to Fizzy's bemusement). Jane asked for more wizard spells and was offered an apprenticeship.
So Jane remained behind with Halaster, rubbing her hands with glee at the prospect of having access to his magic and the thought of carving out a lair for herself on an Undermountain floor of her choosing, while her three companions (plus the bewildered Duergal) stepped through Halaster's one-way magic portal leading to a cornfield on the outskirts of Triboar. From there, Fizzy would journey to Myth Drannor to take Tearulai home at long last, and the Stoneshield dwarves agreed to accompany her.
I've asked my players the following questions:
• Which dungeon floor was your favorite?
• Which dungeon floor was your least favorite?
• Which NPC was your favorite (either to interact with or to fight)?
• Which NPC was your least favorite?
• What was your biggest highlight from the campaign?
• What is one other thing you remember from the campaign?
I'll post their responses in the comments below.
Next up is The Wild Beyond the Witchlight! We will stick with the 2014 rules for this campaign, as it is short enough that we should be finished not too long after the full 2024 rules have been released and any errata / sage advice has been published so we can make an informed decision about fully switching or hybridizing or whatever.
*That's the FB group event count. I feel like there may have been one or two sessions for which I forgot to create a FB event, but I can't remember for sure.
**D&D uses 'level' for too many different things, so I decided to refer to the different levels of Undermountain as 'floors' instead.
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). Muiral and Trobriand were two especially difficult enemies for us, who we ended up fighting multiple times, with Trobriand ending up being our arch-enemy for the campaign.
