Customer Reviews

Dungeon Delve: A 4th Edition D&D Supplement (D&D Adventure)

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The minute I heard about the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Delve product, I knew it was the product for me. While I have a nice weekly D&D game with five to six players and four hours of play time, a campaign where the PCs have just reached level 11, I always wanted something else too. I wanted a fast game, playable with fewer players in a shorter amount of time that focused on the most refined aspect of 4e, the combat system. I wanted something close to a D&D Miniatures skirmish game but with at least a little background story and a typical party of adventurers battling monsters of the depths.

I had the opportunity to play the Wizards and RPGA dungeon delves at the D&D Experience and at Gencon the past few years and I was hooked. It's like speed chess for D&D. This book turns those fun fast battles into a product and it does so very well.

Let me start by stating what this product is not. This product doesn't contain full length D&D adventures as we're used to seeing them. Given the high number of adventures published in print and on D&D Insider, there is no lack for full length adventures with all of the background, skill challenges, and roleplay opportunities we've come to expect from D&D. In Dungeon Delve, there are few skill challenges and few stories outside of the seed to get the party into a battle. If you're expecting a book full of full-length adventures, this isn't the place to look.

Each of the scenarios in Dungeon Delve takes up six pages, with three encounter areas, a story seed, some expansion opportunities, and flavor text. There's one delve for each level in the game, with encounters ranging from Kobolds to a red dragon and a pair of balors.

Each of the delves focuses on one or two sets of D&D dungeon tiles and clearly states which tiles you need. This is the first product I've seen from Wizards that directly uses the tiles as part of the adventure and it's about damn time. It's bothered me for years that the maps in the adventures published by Wizards of the Coast never fit their own dungeon tiles and often don't fit the minis they use.

The tile problem is fixed in Dungeon Delve but the miniature problem still exists. There are many scenarios that have monsters currently not released as D&D miniatures. In other delves, the encounter uses multiple rare minis in a single battle. Who would be willing to pay the $80 for a pair of huge red dragons? In future products like this, I would hope that Wizards keeps their own miniature line in consideration along with the rarity of the mini. No encounter should require more than one rare miniature.

So where exactly does the Dungeon Delve fit into your game? One way is to pull out a delve when your regular group goes off the beaten path. Perhaps they find an old abandoned wizard tower when they're exploring the big swamp. Perhaps you just want to step away from your massive campaign for a quick romp through a cursed sewer. Like the encounters found in Draconomicon and Open Grave, these quick three-room dungeons can fit into a regular campaign pretty easily.

Another way to use it is for one-shot adventures. With the Character Builder now online, its easy to whip up five quick pre-gen PCs and let your party try out some new classes. Maybe some of your old buddies are in town and want to roll some 20s without worrying about an entire adventure. Does your group want to try out those cool new Diva Avengers some night? Whip them up and run them through a delve!

A third way is to play the Delve a bit more competitively. This is how I've seen it at Gencon and D&D Experience. The DM isn't your enemy, but he or she isn't your friend either. This makes it a bit more like a D&D Miniatures skirmish game, but with a story line still intact.

Because the Delve is really a set of thirty mini-adventures, it lends itself very well to a PDF version. This way one can print out the six pages one needs rather than lugging the whole book around. Still, the quality of the print makes it hard to pass up the book itself.

For this reason, I'd very much like to see Delves as a standard for Dungeon magazine online. I'm not very likely to break up my campaign to play a full Dungeon-published adventure, but for a quick three-encounter delve? I'd download it and play it in a second. This style of adventure could really take D&D insider into the right direction.

Dungeon Delve fits a particular niche in Wizards Dungeons and Dragons 4e lineup. It isn't an adventure and it isn't a sourcebook. It is a toolbox of encounters designed to help dungeon masters quickly throw three rooms full of baddies at your friendly neighborhood players. For the amount of content you get, Dungeon Delve is worth every penny.

Hot

* 30 delves, one for each level, with 90 total encounters for $20 from Amazon.
* A tool box of mini-adventures to drop into your existing campaign.
* Uses D&D Dungeon Tiles for every map.
* Effective use of terrain in nearly every encounter.
* Table-friendly tips, flavor text, and seeds to get your PCs into the action.

Lame

* Overuse of rare D&D Miniatures.
* Often uses the out-of-print "Halls of the Giant Kings" D&D Dungeon Tile set.
* No competitive rules included - just general guidelines.
* No pre-gen or quick-gen character generation rules.

Final words

An excellent deep tool box of encounters and scenarios to fit into many places into your game. Buy it.

I'll preface this with the fact that I only ran one of the delves, the 14th level one. I read it only 10 minutes before I ran it with some friends. The book does a great job explaining the monster tactics. It reminds the DM of certain things like monster auras, and it points out quirky monster interrupts and other powers to remember. The book makes it very easy to just open the book and play spontaneously. Meaning that the next time your friend uses the excuse "DM'ing takes so much preparation and I didn't prepare anything" You can just hand him this book and say "Run this for me. It's your turn." Or if it's Saturday at 1 o'clock and you want to have some people over to play D&D you can jump right in without having to read and prepare a whole 30 pg. adventure.

I find it challenging to make "fun" encounters in 4th edition. You need to combine monster roles, think about terrain features, create a challenge, and eliminate "grindspace" as its called on EnWorld. This book gives you 3 encounters for each of the 30 levels. That's 90 examples of fun challenging encounters. They all seem play-tested and polished. All the classic monsters are covered, from kobolds to goblins to red dragons to beholders to mind flayers to balors, all done right. You can learn a lot from this book on how to set up fun fights.

In my opinion the best thing about the book is that the monsters have synergies with each other and their environment. They spell out the tactics and how the monsters complement each other and use terrain features to their advantage. /Spoiler:--- For example the drow will seek out a ranged party member and drop his globe of darkness hampering their ability to be effective. Then the eyeless grimlocks will charge in taking no penalty in the darkness. Then the drow will stun a player setting him up perfectly for the mindflayer who was hiding behind some pillars. ---:/Spoiler

The encounters are challenging. The book helped alleviate some of my concern that the encounters in paragon seemed too easy for my players. I play with some serious powergamers. They were starting to think the game was broken and you could never die in 4E. In the delve I ran; I had a TPK, the mindflayer was able to bore into the brain of a player that was carelessly left unconscious on the floor. The mind flayer turned him into a thrall and it quickly got worse after that.

The authors add suggestions to most, if not all of the delves, on how to turn each delve into a complete adventure. They give you a skill challenge, some extra random encounters, and a little story about what motivated the monsters into being there. We had a lot of fun with the book and I only opened it 10 minutes before the game. highly recommended!

Revisiting this review: This book is a masterpiece of encounter design. At first, when you skim over each delve you won't see the little things that make each encounter totally awesome. Only when you run them does the difficulty pop-out and the challenge that each one introduces show through. Every delve is full of surprises and they all force the players to re-evaluate the strategy they walked in with. If you studied this book and tried to capture some of the game elements that the delves introduce, it will probably make you a better game designer.

Endless hours of fun with almost zero prep time. The encounters are nicely designed, challenging, and playtested. A no-brainer for any DM who needs an adventure quickie every now and then that feels like the real thing. Even with years of experience you would still need to dig through the compendium, think about synergies, levels, terrain, traps, suspense to come up with such a concentrate of D&D fun. Highly recommended.

This is a great resource for DMs who are:

1. New to the game.
2. Strapped for time.
3. In desperate need of material to fill in that nearby keep which was only mentioned to add some flavor to the landscape but which the party felt they really needed to explore.

The encounters are short and good for one night of play. They are constructed around themes and could easily serve as launchpads for longer story arcs. I like to take them and customize them just a little bit and insert them as subquests in my own homebrew campaign.

I wasn't a huge fan of 4E but I really love the Dungeon Delve book. I'm running my players through a unique campaign but between a full-time job and university classes, the Dungeon Delve helps to supply my own storyline with fun and detailed battles without a whole lot of preparation. The Dungeon Delve includes several unique monsters and its encounters use a variety of terrain and trap elements as well - in fact, the encounters are so detailed that my players can't tell the difference between these "boxed" encounters and my own.

The Dungeon Delves offer some background information on each set of three encounters (there's a set of three encounters for each level), making it easy to expand upon the storyline yourself.

There is no loot given in the book which I quite enjoy - I can scale the monsters myself by involving loot and rituals. If you know your group, it's also easy to scale the encounters for their own power levels, although the Dungeon Delve does a pretty good job of keeping things challenging. I usually add a creature or two because I have six players, though.

All in all, it's an excellent value and a very interesting book. The best 4th Edition book I've encountered so far, in fact.

EDIT: Yes, the book includes recommendations for certain miniatures and dungeon tiles. I consider these a recommendation and not a requirement - I don't use them. I will describe my monsters for my players but we use generic markers for bad guys until they're fighting an important (storyline-wise) creature. Additionally, I draw my own maps. So the recommendations for miniatures and dungeon tiles didn't fit into my review at all - except for the fact that the maps they gives are GREAT and are usually to the monsters' advantage, which is nice.

I have been playing D&D since 2nd ed, and DM'ing since 3.0. My general style is to create my own adventures for players rather than running published adventures. I also prefer hack and slash play over in depth role play.

This collection of 30 dungeons is focused mostly on the hack and slash style of play which fits in well with my DM style. The dungeons are presented independent of each other so that little work is needed to dump them into a current campaign. As written each dungeon consists of three areas and provides ideas to expand further upon the dungeon to take it from a one shot adventure into a full fledged campaign.

The treasure awards are fair, though the magic items are left up to the DM to determine. It is also possible to string the dungeons together in a full campaign.

For someone looking for a mindless DM stle of preparation (ie. open a book, skim it, and run it), this book provides a lot of potential. It is also easily adapted to any campaign setting.

My only complaint on the book is the reliance on Dungeon Tiles. This is a minor compaint as one can just draw on a battle mat or come up with some other way of handling the tactical combat and exploration.

For most this will be a good addition to a D&D adventures reference library.

This book came with thirty dungeons, each with 3 encounters. The dungeons are well fleshed out with background, different ideas for adapting them to different levels and each with an accompanying story. This would be a fantasic supplement, the problem is that they rely heavily on having one or more copies of the dungeon tiles products. Out of the 30 delves, 10 of them use the fane of the forgotten gods set, (and several of them require two copies of it to boot.) If you were to actually use the miniatures that they recommend, it would cost you a small fortune. This could be a five star product, if only it didn't require so much in supplemental material to make it work. One thing that I have done, (albeit with a great deal of time consumption) was to take the maps and draw them out by hand. It was time-consuming, but the adventure was all ready to go with about less than half the prep time. It is a great resource if you're short on ideas, or if someone else wants to take a stab at being DM.

This type of book is superb for several types of DMs.

For the new DM this book is great. It has balanced encounters for every level of the game, and is very educational in explaining tactics, traps, and how to set the encounter up - all things that take time to learn on your own. It also saves you time in preparation, because encounters can be read in a little under 10 minutes. Every monster used in this book has its rules on the same (or next) page, so that you do not need to own every book published to run the encounter. What it doesn't do? Loot. You will need to read and understand how to give out balanced loot in the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG). They also assume that there are 5 players in the encounter, so if you have more or less you will need to understand how to scale encounters (see pg 56 of DMG).

For the Experienced DM this book is great if you have little to no time to prepare an encounter, or if your party insists on always straying away from anything you have planned. With this, your encounters will not seem so random or made up on the spot (which isn't always a bad thing). Each encounter will take you through 1-3 encounters per adventure, at various difficulties. More specifically, each delve is like the adventure in the back of the DMG, but at all level's instead of the first three. A bonus about this book is that it takes monsters from several sources outside of the monster manuals (1-3). A few sources they mention are Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead, Manual of the Planes, and Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons. They also provide a few new monsters that are not published in any other book. The only thing you will need to watch out for is if you are always relying on this book for adventures, and it takes more than 1 adventure to level to the next delve, you will need to have something prepared to get there (unless you like making them up on the spot).

For the DM that likes to use their own story only, but is running out of material/encounter types. This book is great because it covers many locations for encounters, ranging from sewers, to caves, to mountainsides, catacombs, castles and towers. Simply take a read through an encounter, grab the bits of scenery, tactics, or adventure seeding and run with it in your own way.

In short, this is one of the best books for a DM so far. It is well planned out, informative, and grabs the players attention the whole way. I highly recommend it.

I find that this book has useful, quick, and interesting scenarios to run on the spur of the moment. It only takes a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the material, and it generally doesn't require other books for reference. Dungeon Delve has good suggestions for amplifying the short adventures into more full-fledged, multi-session games, as well. For one-offs or interludes in a longer campaign, these are great. I find, especially, if your players want to "test drive" a new character class or race, these are great little scenarios.

In general, 4th edition is kind to time-starved DMs. This book just makes it easier. Here's one that, in my view, will really give you your money's worth, if you let it.

I got this book because I wanted some assistance with running my first campaign. I found it quite useful and varied across all the levels. It offers 3 encounters at each level. Definitely a great guide to run pick-up campaigns in 4E AD&D.

I would recommend it to anyone who is looking to DM a 4E campaign and doesn't want to get involved in the lengthier modules. I do plan, however, to jump into modules now that I have a better feel for how encounters should go.

I think you could also use this book to hook in and out of bigger adventures, or segue/interlude lengthier campaigns. These might also work to help get characters some missing experience before going into the next major campaign if they aren't quite high enough to begin the new adventure.