The Ruins of Undermountain - your experiences?

[satori01]

I bought it when it came out, looked it over and said Meh. Expensive graph paper sums up my feelings very well. The product is rife with hints, glimmers, tales of Greenwoods own campaign, and yet the product itself does not conjure up any of that majesty.

Instead it is a hallway or room with a clever trap, followed by empty rooms of fill in the blank.

Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure (which is basically 3 levels of Castle Greyhawk, now known in Dungeon as Castle Maure), and Monte Cook's the Banewarrens do it better than Undermountain ever did. Mord's Fant Adv and Banewarrens both bring a style, a flavor, and a guarantee of memorable encounters and memories that will linger with players and DM's that play the products.

There are no guaranteed memories in Undermountain. The Hype is greater than the product.

 

[Psion]

There are no guaranteed memories in Undermountain.

I find that flexibility in an adventure product enhances the chance that it will be a successful, memorable adventure, not subtracts.

 

[satori01]

Which is fine, the original Ravenloft module was considered flexible.
I also guarantee that anyone that walked through the front doors to Castle Ravenloft remembers it.

Good DMs can make anything good, and good DMs can make anything flexible if they are willing to put the effort into it.
Great D&D products have built in hooks, built in cinematic moments that good DMs can make great, great DMs can make wonderful, and the rest of us can feel decent we did not screw up a good thing

I just never felt there were those type of moments in Undermountain as written.

 

[Roadkill101]

My biggest wow factor to UM are the maps and the dressing cards. I still use both to this day. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of using bits and pieces of those maps as seperate locations. I've never been through it as a player.

Granted the marketing pitch kinda soured the whole experience when I found out how little of the dungeon was detailed. It's a great product for those with the time and preference for doing their own encounters, but I still expected more room and encounter descriptions than what was, given the size of UM.

I've owned various modules over the years, but I've never actually used any of them (other than the maps, usually only in part), because I prefered to use the creations coming from my imagination. UM is the only module type product where I actually used any of the room descriptions as given, but I used my own encounters in place of those given.

It's always been stuck in my mind that Ed, designed a majority of UM on the fly using the Random Dungeon Generation Tables from the 1E DMG. I tried using those tables myself once, and seemed to constantly end up with massively large rooms and long corridors. Too often without resorting to using multiple sheets of connecting graph paper (8.5"x11" 1/4" or 1/5" scale). I already owned UM by this time and viewing my results alongside what UM presented only reinforced this thought.

 

[Mark Hope]

I got a whole lotta mileage out of this one. I populated a number of the empty areas on all three levels of the dungeon (as well as adding in extra content from Dragon magazine, iirc). I also tacked on other modules as sub-levels (both White Plume Mountain and the Hall of the Fire Giant King have seen service as Undermountain sublevels) and placed the dungeon beneath a major city in my homebrew (a magocracy largely inspired by Glantri from Mystara).

A couple of players took a real liking to the dungeon, and would get me to DM side-quests whenever we all had time. One got really familiar with the dungeon, made an excellent set of maps, and so was very sought-after as a companion by other players seeking to explore the place. This went really well, with the Undermountain-expert bringing great success to every group he joined. Until, that is, he was killed by a bulette at an unfortunate moment and nobody could make head or tails of his maps (he knew the dungeon so well that he never bothered to mark the entrance...)

Like others I found the cards of dressing, traps, details etc to be of great use. I could also have done with less empty areas on the map and more detail (I made good use of the maps, but could have done with more value). Not a big issue. Some of the sequel stuff was good too - I seem to remember running a very cool session with a vampire...

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I used the original Ruins of Undermountain boxed set, RoUII and a couple of Dragon articles (on Skullport & Eilistrae's Promenade) in my FR campaign. The difference was I moved the dungeons to Unther where they became the Undercity of Unthalass. We had a lot of fun -- the most memorable bits were Willowwood and Trobriand's Graveyard, with my wife feeling quite sorry for the constructs! I wrote my own encounters for the blank bits I needed.

Thanks for all the reminders about the Dungeon Dressing cards! I used to use these a lot in other dungeons. I think I could use these in the Banewarrens!

Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure (which is basically 3 levels of Castle Greyhawk, now known in Dungeon as Castle Maure)

I think it was always Maure Castle, wasn't it?

Cheers


Richard

 

[Henry]

I think it was always Maure Castle, wasn't it?

TO my knowledge, that's correct -- One of Gary's earliest D&D articles talked about Mordenkainen's adventures and mishaps in that very dungeon, courtesy of Rob Kuntz!

 

[Nerfboy692]

Has anyone here finished filling in all the empty rooms? Im hopefully gonna start a campaign with it, but dont want any empty rooms.

 

[Nerfboy692]

Has anyone here created all the empty rooms. I'm hopefully gonna use the campaign and don't want empty rooms.