Failings of the Sunless Citadel: Details Please!

[VirgilCaine]

What problems have you found with the Sunless Citadel?

It might be nice to have an actual dungeon crawl I could use to start some level 1 PCs off with instead of the Burning Plague or the Wizards Amulet.

I have heard that the levels are too large, the beginning monsters are too repetitive, but what else is wrong with it, if anything?

Please give details.

Thank you.

 

[VorpalBunny]

My players really enjoyed it.


SPOILERS

Spoiler

Yeah, the first level is all kobolds and goblins but we didn't find it all that repetitive. Meepo's "quest" and the undead broke things up nicely. The two problem spots for my players were the water mephit and the troll "dragonpriest". The quasit was more of an annoyance than a threat, but we played the module using 3.0 rules. I think quasits have been beefed up in 3.5.

The goblins on the second level weren't that much of a threat, but I expanded the threat of the "twig blights" so that they were more of a problem to the town. Add in the fact that my wack-a-doo players followed the entrance to the underdark for like, *a day* and the adventure was definitely a challenge.

 

[El Ravager]

I ran Sunless Citadel and I liked it well enough. It's not brilliant, but it's a decent module and we had fun with it.

It was a bit tough, but that is mostly because of how my players did things. Because of how they handled things, the ended up fighting nearly all the kobolds in one encounter, and later, over half of the goblins in a single encounter. Miraculously, no PCs died.

I also thought it was too bad that I didn't get to use Meepo at all. One of the players ran up and killed the sleeping kobold with his pick before he could wake up. Too bad, I could have had fun with him.

 

[Remus Lupin]

I DMed "Sunless Citadel," and loved it. I'd run it again if I had a new group. It's a great dungeon crawl, with all that implies, good and bad. I think one of the things I liked about it was that you could do a good deal of roll play in addition to simply "dungeon clearing." There was an ecology and a politics to it that the players could affect.

 

[Enkhidu]

We enjoyed the heck out of it, and I'd recommend it for a number of reasons (spoilers included):

Spoiler

*PC's are notorious for missing large chunks of any given dungeon level.
*The overly "repetitive monsters" do a good job of giving theme in the adventure.
*Meepo can turn out to be a very good long term NPC.

In addition, I second the idea of making the twig blights a more omnipresent threat to the town, you'll have a more compelling hook that way.

You can always check some of the story hours in the SH forum, as many of them incorporate that adventure. One of them is in my sig.

 

[EricNoah]

This didn't make much sense to me: the key room that controls who can enter and exit the rest of the complex is guarded by ... Meepo the kobold.

 

[Storminator]

I ran it oddly, but it still worked out great.

I was running my evil Thayan party thru a homebrew module, with plans to have them find a portal to the Silver Marches. About that time I started a thread here asking about the classic modules of 3e, and Sunless Citadel came out on top. I figured I owed it to my newbies to run them thru it. So I had the portal come out in the middle of the SC.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

So my players started out in the middle, and immediately split, half going to fight the goblins, and half going off to kill Meepo. After a couple of nasty kobold battles, they defeated the entire kobold tribe.

I was reading Robin Laws GM guide at the time. One of his rules is "do what's the most fun at the moment." So when the half orc barbarian asked the kobold sorceress to marry him, and he out rolled me on a d20, she accepted. And we had a fabulous wedding party for a session. They even invited the goblins!

My PCs returned to Thay and came back a couple levels higher so I had to tweak a bunch of things, but it still went great.

PS

 

[DMScott]

What problems have you found with the Sunless Citadel?

As dungeon crawls go, it's pretty decent. You need to do a little work to give the PCs an incentive to do the crawling and ad lib the inhabitants' response to repeated incursions, but that's more of a feature than a bug. There's only two aspects about it that bug me:

1) The railroading in determining PC interaction with the factions - as written they can either work with the kobolds or fight everybody. That keeps things simple for a beginning party, but can kind of cramp a more experienced one - a machiavellian group that thinks "hey, manipulating those kobolds worked well, let's try it on the goblins" runs into the module author's "don't do anything I don't want you to do" stick.

2) The "dragonpriest" struck me as pretty goofy. The creature just doesn't mesh well with the story behind it, IMHO.

Both of those are pretty trivial to fix, so not a big deal.

 

[diaglo]

don't forget there is errata for this adventure on the WotC site.

the gnome for one is broken.

 

[Quasqueton]

I have heard that the levels are too large, the beginning monsters are too repetitive, but what else is wrong with it, if anything?

Someone explain what the bold text above means. Without double checking the adventure, I think there's only, what 20-30 each of kobolds and goblins?

People complain about something like the old Caves of Chaos because there's all these different monsters living in the same ravine. And then some people complain that there's not enough variety in the Sunless Citadel?

Quasqueton