Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2011723" data-attributes="member: 172">World's Largest Dungeon World's Largest Dungeon is a huge dungeon crawl style adventure/setting, very much in the tradition of Ruins of Undermountain and Greyhawk Ruins. The setting is published by AEG, and headed up by jim pinto. Contributing authors include Michael Hammes, Chris Burns, jim pinto, Jeff Stolt, Richard Farrese, Robert J. Schwalb, Lee Hammock, Jennifer Baughman, Mark Carroll, Jeff Dohm, Patrick Kapera, Dana DeVries, Ari Marmell, and Jeff Ibach. This review is written with the benefit of having run some characters through some sections of the dungeon. A First Look World's Largest Dungeon is an 840-page hardcover book, with an additional pack of 16 poster maps. The package comes at a price of $100 US. All of the book's art is by William O'Connor. The cover has a depiction of a number of familiar D&D creatures (such as dragons and rust monsters) emerging from a arched gateway. The interior art is black-and-white. Interior artwork is somewhat sparse. There are some creature illustrations, but most interior illustrations are objects or architecture. The interior text is dense, which makes the size of this tome all the more impressive. The book does, however, include statistics blocks for all creatures (all of which are drawn from the SRD), which in the eyes of some is squandered space, but is a convenience in they eyes of others. However, many of the stat blocks are not generic, featuring many templated, classed, or advanced creatures. The book comes with a shrink wrapped package of 16 full color poster sized maps. The maps are by Chris Dornaus, who did many of Necromancer Games' maps. The maps have letter and number location keys; the letter defines the map region and the number defines the specific room description in that region. Except for one region which covers two maps, most regions cover a single map. The maps make sparse use of symbols. For a book this size, you might think that the publisher would pad with wide margins or large fonts. This is definitely not the case here. The text density is the highest I have seen in a third party product for some time. A Deeper Look The World's Largest Dungeon. Where to begin? Well, how about the back cover. It proclaims that there are over 1600 encounters herein, featuring collectively every creature in the SRD. That's the driving concept. A huge dungeon with every monster. Well every core monster they can legally put in. They fess up that they cheat by only including one or some creatures in some categories like dragons, but still, that's a pretty impressive goal. (Also, this excludes the epic and psionic creatures, which probably weren't in the SRD when the mission statement was laid down.)So what brings all these beasties together under one roof? Well, the backstory is that the dungeon was built by Celestials to contain evil. Over eons, the wards that held it fades, and earthquakes opened fissures through which other creatures slipped in. But many wards are still in place. But evil is trying to get out. It's only a matter of time... The dungeon is arranged into 15 regions. One region covers two of the packaged poster maps, the remainder of the regions cover one map each. Most of the maps are more or less drawn in blocks connected by hallways. This should make it easier to section off pieces of the dungeon and use them independently. This is fortunate, as even the existing 200+ page dungeons have a reputation for being two much of one thing. It seems quite likely that a dungeon crawl of this magnitude is even more likely to fall into this trap if you try to run it as one block. The maps are laid out in a 4 x 4 block. Which means, yes, the dungeon is (for the most part) on a single level. Play is presumed to start in section A, which lies in the bottom left corner of the level, and is designed for character levels 1-3. The final region, region O, is in the top right. As the characters proceed up and to the right on the map, the design levels that the regions that they find themselves in progressively increases. The final map is noted as being for levels 16 to 20. Supporting material in the opening section of the book includes ideas for player hooks (in a d20 table reminiscent of AEG's Toolbox), conditions in the dungeon, default structural statistics, and special rules. One of the neatest and most useful sections of the introductory material is a set of encounter conditions. These are definitions that can be called out in the room descriptions, each providing one of a variety of interesting complications to spice up encounters. Some can be called out with a number which further defines the mechanics to handle the condition. For example, for the condition hazardous footing X, the X is the DC of the reflex save that characters trying to move quickly through the area have to make. As part of the backstory of the dungeon, the walls of the dungeon are warded against extraplanar travel or teleportation. That makes sense. But the book recommends you ban monster summoning spells on the presumption that this restriction would trap any summoned creature in the dungeon. As summoned creatures under 3e are more or less projections of the real creatures, this makes little sense, as the creature never really left its home plane. I recommend that this guideline be judiciously ignored. Other that special conditions, there are a few recommendation the adventure provides. The most compelling is the recommendation to eschew the standard experience scale. This is pretty compelling if you plan to run the same party through the whole dungeon, as to use the standard experience scale given the number of encounters herein would have the PCs quickly exceeding the recommended levels. The book points out that it may be difficult to justify a wizard's free spells and recommends just giving the wizard a full spellbook or the ability to easily add scroll to their books. Reasonable, but nothing I would sweat. The book also recommends against allowing entangle and web, explaining that these spells are very potent in a dungeon; this I am not so sure about. The roughest recommendations that the book gives is basically to eschew the take 10 and take 20 rules, as if they make things too easy. This goes a bit far. Encounters can be used to regulate excessive search (as can rations), and even if you allow take 20 for search checks, you can't really get away with that for disable checks. I feel that this set of recommendations is unnecessary and the problems it purports are easily managed. Each of the dungeon sections are assigned a letter from A to O. V, W, X, Y, and Z are used to describe special locations (V is the singular area beneath the main floor of the dungeon, W is a miscellany of empty room descriptions that can be happen in any section, X is a lava flow flowing through the middle of the dungeon, Y describes the exits, and Z describes the entrance.) Each room description is given a number tacked on the letter of the area, such as A1, A2, etc. Each room has a standardized format, with a description, (mercifully brief) boxed text, initial attitude, encounter, encounter conditions, tactics, treasure, EL, and scaling (scaling notes are given for each encounter, allowing the GM to make it tougher or easier.) During my test run, this layout proved very convenient. It is very easy for the GM to absorb the information on the fly (which is fortunate, as absorbing every detail of a book of this size is out of the question.) Stat blocks are fully detailed in the text. The stat blocks are verbose and repeat information. This does consume a bit of space, but many of the stat blocks are for advanced, classed, or templated creatures that you can't just look in the MM for. While it does consume some space, it does make it so you don't have to take time out to flip through a different book. The creatures are not just sprinkled in totally randomly. Each region has a character and backstory, with multiple dominant creature types. For example, the first section features warring troglodytes and orcs as well as fiendish creatures like fiendish-template darkmantles and rats. Later sections feature an undead section, a goblin city, and celestials fighting a holding action against the evil of the dungeon. Though much of the dungeon is classical chambers and corridors, a large section is water and another is open to the sky. The appendix contains a variety of useful references, such as an attitude summary, condition summary, diseases, encounter conditions, poisons, and traps. A new monster type is presented here as well, the horde, which is similar to a swarm, but composed of larger creatures. Conclusions The most distinctive attribute of the World's Largest Dungeon is it's sheer scope. That alone made it the talk of the show at GenCon. But how does it fare, once you start to use it? From my experience, pretty good, actually. The presentation is very friendly for jumping right in and playing, which makes it great for an "off nite dungeon" or pickup games, and the inline scaling notes are likewise very convenient. The major stubling block of super-dungeons is addressed by the fact that it is designed to be fairly easy to tear apart, though more scenarios for supporting the section in a stand alone scenario would have been nice (though editor jim pinto has been adding notes for such to a thread here on ENWorld.) It's not quite the same feel as prior super-dungeons like Greyhawk Ruins and Ruins of Undermountain in that it doesn't feel as much like it is almost a setting in and of itself. But for what it is, a mega dungeon crawl, it does a great job. As mentioned, I have a few minor sticking points with the recommendations provided in the beginning, but for the most part, those are easily ignored. Some of the early section suffers from some redundancy as well.Perhaps the biggest drawback of the book is that for it's audacity, it's somewhat impractical. I find that being stuck in the same dungeon for consecutive weeks somewhat tedious. When I first wrote this review, I was thinking this is a somewhat personal nit and didn't mention it, but as time went by,  I saw many tales of groups giving up the course when it came to WLD. Unless you and your group are really determined, perhaps the best course of action with this book is to tear its peices apart. To this effect jim pinto was posting conversions to adapt the individual sections for stand-alone use, but as he has quit AEG, it is doubtful we will see more of these.Overall Grade: B+ -Alan D. Kohler (review and score edited 8-28)</blockquote>

Verification