Greetings...
TerraDave said:
Actually reading this, I am really struck by the reaction to this compared to Undermountain. Both seemed to have a similar format and premise and yet...and yet it just isn't me
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Well, I don't want this to derail the thread, but... since you brought it up...
In my opinion, Expedition to Undermountain fails in nearly every way that Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk succeeds.
Considering the four names that are on the cover, it is obviously not a situation where the Undermountain authors did not know what they were talking about or did not know how to write a cool adventure. It's hard to imagine a better line-up of Realms heavy-hitters to work on that book. I can only assume that everybody who was involved with Expedition to Undermountain was also working on other, more important, things at the same time and they had to snatch whatever spare moments they could find in order to throw together their portions of this book with little or no time spent in development and editing. Certainly it reads that way.
Even the layout feels like it was artificially stretched in order to fill the page count (there is a *ton* of wasted white space, for one thing). I bet Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk has 10,000 more words in it than Expedition to Undermountain does. And the Undermountain maps... well, the battle maps are mostly OK, but on the large maps... oh dear Lord, what were they thinking? Those are some incredibly ugly (and, in many cases, completely useless) maps.
Interestingly, for all my railing about how much I dislike the Delve format, Undermountain doesn't really dedicate that much more of the page count to it than Greyhawk (about 100 pages vs. about 80). And yet Greyhawk just uses the format so much better that you feel like most of those 80 pages are cool and interesting whereas many of Undermountain's combats are bland, boring, and (worst of all) repetitive. (At least half of them have no business being laid out in a two-page spread because they are so simple ... they would have taken up maybe a couple of paragraphs each in the old, pre-Delve format. And in many cases you are fighting essentially the same monsters, back-to-back-to-back. Check out pages 166-173 for one of the worst offenders. I mean, come on guys, I understand it's a lair, but those four combats are not worth burning 8 pages on! Within those 8 pages, one of the same stat blocks appears 4 times, another appears twice, and we get an entire page wasted on the rules for grappling and drowning. I'm sorry, but that is just not a good use of precious adventure space.)
I will grant that Undermountain (as a product) seems to have had a somewhat different design goal than Greyhawk (as a product) does. This should be taken into account when comparing the two works.
Undermountain is a series of essentially disconnected explorations -- separate forays into the dungeon, with no real overarching plot (the whole cataclysmic event that sets the entire adventure in motion isn't even defined although there is a hint that this might be fleshed out in a later sourcebook). You could dip in or dip out at practically any point in the book and it wouldn't matter much (although there are a few links between levels and ultimately the final area requires having been through most of the preceding areas to collect items and information). From that standpoint, Undermountain has utility in a wider variety of campaigns because it requires less of a commitment. I doubt most groups would play through it from start to finish (even with the DM inventing intermediate adventures, which is certainly easy and encouraged).
On the other hand, Greyhawk features a specific, highly detailed plot that unfolds basically from beginning to end over the course of the book, with the GM given a lot of opportunity to customize things and to add intermediate adventures. However, you're pretty much expected to begin at the beginning (as it were) and work your way through to the conclusion. You can go off on some side quests, but you're eventually coming back to the main plot. I guess it *could* be used as filler for a different ongoing campaign, but it isn't really written that way. It's written to be a campaign (or at least a campaign arc) unto itself.
So it's not entirely fair to judge the two books against one another on the basis of whether or not they succeed on a particular goal as it seems unlikely that they shared many goals from a design standpoint (other than "be fun" ... and playing D&D is almost always fun even if some adventures are better than others).
I happen to like epic plot-heavy campaign-style adventures and be less thrilled by collections of semi-random encounters that don't really have anything to tie them together other than the location and some vague objectives. I don't mind "weird stuff is happening, so get in there and find out what's going on" as a plot hook. However, when you actually get in there, I do prefer for there to be something actually going on, giving the players a sense that they have just stumbled onto a mystery that is much larger than anybody realized. Undermountain doesn't really have that; Greyhawk does. Others might prefer exactly the opposite because they like to be able to layer their own stories on top of the dungeon encounters.
I do think that Undermountain might be somewhat easier for a DM to use because it isn't such a huge commitment to bring it into your campaign. Me, I really like adventures with a lot of plot because that is the type of game I like to run. So I have to consider that I probably have some bias against Undermountain on that basis. I have been running games for a really long time and Greyhawk is exactly the kind of product that appeals to me, whereas Undermountain (mostly) feels like a collection of the sort of random combat encounters I could have made up for myself on the spot when the PCs decided to go left instead of right.
I guess I would just say that when reading Undermountain, I didn't really feel like I was being inspired. Reading Greyhawk, I did. Your mileage may vary.
Talk to you later --
Sean
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M. Sean Molley | sean [at] basementsoftware [dot] com
