When our gaming group finished up its home-brewed epic campaign, we were looking for an alternate campaign that could fill some of the time while our regular DM worked out his sequel. After a little scouting I offered to run "The World's Largest Dungeon" by Alderac Entertainment Games (AEG), a massive 800+ page phonebook of an adventure that certainly lives up to its name. This hernia-inducing ginormous release includes 16 large full color maps and thousands of rooms, including a menagerie of literally every basic type of monster in the Monster Manual.
Ok, so the WLD doesn't lack in quantity. What about quality?
Overall, the quality of the campaign is solid, though not perfect (more on that later). The dungeon is carefully designed in multiple segments that allow the DM to guide the players through sections balanced toward his party, or even theoretically split the dungeon into multiple smaller dungeons. Every encounter block is laid out in full detail, including all the vital statistics for all monsters and traps. The encounters also include specific help on scaling difficulty up or down to make things as challenging as desired every single combat. As a whole the campaign spans from level 1 to 20 and beyond, so there's something for everyone and everything can be tailored to your liking.
The WLD also has its share of background and story involved. The dungeon as a whole has an overarching premise that shapes the encounters and explains its origins, and the individual sections each have their own unique problems, politics and personas. It is, in many ways, more like a small underground city than a simple dungeon.
So overall this is a solid series of adventures tied together in one underground campaign, and includes plenty of information for the DM to keep things running smoothly. It does suffer from some flaws, however, that would keep it from being a true classic.
First, on the production side, the adventure has some glaring typos. Not a huge, huge number, but enough that you notice them and wonder if AEG should have spent a little more time editing the product before release. Nothing major, but with no official errata and a second printing seeming unlikely in the near future, it leaves the DM with the task of cleaning up a few errors.
There's also some loose ends in the way the dungeon works that the DM has to decide on. How exactly do creatures survive in this enclosed environment? If you run the WLD as a single campaign, with the party essentially trapped inside for a really long period of time, how will you handle training and supplies? There's also the question of how to handle doling out experience, because the somewhat combat-heavy environment of the dungeon means that if you gave the players the normal experience per kill they would level up too quickly if you run the adventure as a single campaign. Unfortunately, it fails to have a detailed method of handling this, leaving it up to the individual DM to construct a method he likes. (In my case, I use a formula that takes into account how much of the dungeon the players have explored and the encounter levels of monsters and obstacles they have overcome.)
Another area the DM needs to inspect is how and when to restrict access, if desired, to various sections, lest players wander too far and get into something well over their head without warning. There's also a question of scale, as the designers have left open for the DM whether to use five foot or ten foot squares on the maps. They designed the maps originally with five foot squares in mind, but in retrospect have recommended using 10 foot squares instead (which is what I use; 20 foot wide hallways makes more sense given the size of some of the inhabitants and the amount of traffic the dungeon had in its heyday). This difference of scale makes for a REALLY big dungeon, which is nifty, but it does lend itself at times to minor oddities here and there in some of the encounters.
Finally, while the dungeon has a lot of interesting areas and a fair amount of political infighting (or outright warfare) between inhabitants, the initial sections the players encounter are mainly dungeon crawling through an abandoned, ruined area filled with nasty critters. Unfortunately, as our group has found in playing it out, the combats in that initial area tend to drag out a bit over time since the players tend to encounter the same sorts of creepy crawlies over and over. Yes, there's some variety, but over the course of time it's overshadowed somewhat by the fact that the majority of encounters are with a handful of particular monster types that have infested that area. So in the first group of sessions you end up with fairly similar fights, which gets a little repetitive. Fortunately, the problem is relatively short-lived in the scale of things, as moving to the next section of the dungeon completely changes the enemy makeup.
So overall this is a solid, ambitious product that's an interesting read and, at the very least, provides a slew of adventures to try for all levels of play, and for the more enthusiastic gaming groups is an epic adventure that can last for years bringing players from level 1 to 20 in the process. The technical flaws in the product keep me from putting it in "instant classic must-have" status, and the high price tag means you might want to take a closer look at it before purchase to see if it's something you really want to do. After all, it would be a shame to spend $70 on a phonebook only to decide you're not going to run it after all.
Bottom line, the World's Largest Dungeon is worth a look, especially if you're a fan of classic dungeon crawling. Minor flaws aside, an opus of this magnitude certainly stands out from the crowd. And any player group capable of completing it deserves a hats off. This aint your grandpa's dungeon crawl!
