Customer Reviews

World's Largest Dungeon (Dungeon & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is no disputing the fact that this one is a bigee...sixteen dungeon levels, 1600 rooms. Yes. It is a very very large dungeon.

However, there are some serious flaws in the way this hugest of all dungeons was made. However, if you are willing to fix some of these, it could be a lot of fun. Here is what I would change:

1) Add more monsters. Each level has about 3 or 4 different types of monsters. A floor with a hundred rooms should have a little more variety.

2) Give the players a means of selling and purchasing items (hopefully magic items, since the dungeon seems to have almost none of them. Treasure is almost nonexistant, and much of it is laughable (like enormous tapestries which are impossible for a party to carry through the larger-than-life dungeon for months or perhaps even years before they get out).

3) Add more of a story line. No group is going to want to traverse this dungeon for the next year or so just "to get out." There is a plot to the entire dungeon...it is an enormous prison for demons which is run by celestials. However, several sections of the dungeon have been damaged and the demons are escaping. However, your party won't run into any of these creatures for a long time because there are none in the first two sections of the dungeon. Each section takes about 8-16 hours of game time to get through.

For the money, it is a pretty good deal if you compair it with typical, smaller adventures. It is many times their size. Much of the text is devoted to monster stats and abilities. Several bosses' stats take up an entire page! I also agree with the reviewers who pointed out the numerous typographical errors in the text. It is almost comical.

Basically, each level has three or four types of monsters, which are found in groups throughout the level. Each level has a couple of sub-bosses and one big boss. Some of which are easy and some of which are extremely tough. The first section, for example, has kobolds, orcs, troglodytes and fiendish darkmantles. A few rooms have swarms of fiendish rats or stirges. Our dungeonmaster threw in a trio of 4th level ogre barbarians on this level, which made it much more challenging and exciting.

If you want to take a party from first to say, thirty sixth level or so in the same dungeon, this is it. The makers of the dungeon recommend that you limit the leveling to 4 per dungeon level, which is about half normal progression. This slow progression rate may be much too slow for some players, which means you have to use normal progression. If you use normal progression, the monsters become not much of a challenge, so you have to either level them up or change them entirely.

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!

This book (more of a module really) requires more unpacking and understanding than any other I have ever bought. Well worth the price it contains so many rooms, features, monsters and other accoutraments to make your average adventurer (read: my gaming groups) drool with envy. I am very pleased with this purchase, and I highly recommend it. A note of warning though is that you should be very ready to sit down and tdo a lot of reading should you wish to FULLY utilize this module in your gameworld. An 800+ page book is nothing to laugh at, even should you be a fast reader. The only downside I can consider to exist, is that AEG doesn't also sell a poster-stle huge map of the dungeon. Not wishing to reveal too much about this module, I will not say much more. Simply put then I bought it, loved it, and recommend it to everyone who enjoys a good ole dungeon crawl... for if you enter this one it may never really end ;)

While this product is incredibly large, the title of it is a bit of a misnomer. It is not exactly a "dungeon" in-as-much as a prison located over various planes. There are numerous areas, or planes if you will, that are shaped as a dungeon level, so the feel is mostly there. However, a few are less dungeony than others. For instance, one area is outdoorsy filled with unicorns and elves; another is based on a fiery plane, and a deep, dark watery plane just to mention three.

The writing is surprisingly good, considering the vastness that the authors and editors had to deal with. The encounters are well described with each "room" listing various elements, outlined in separate paragraphs, such as treasure, initial reactions, monster stats (not at the back of the book), Encounter level, and even suggestions on how to scale the room to make it easier or more difficult. I am quite impressed with this level of detail.

I only have two quibbles, and both are significant enough for me that I knocked the rating down a star for each. My first is that I prefer a product that is designed to cover a lot of different aspects of play, and by drafting this "dungeon" as a planar escapade, the entry level characters are essentially forced to be prisoners as well. They are forced to travel plane-to-plane to escape; no opportunities to go back-to-town with bags of loot; no roleplay opportunities with town adventures. It is strictly a dungeon experience, period. Even though it is mentioned in the first chapter that a DM can decide to have the "dungeon" be an in-and-out experience, the writing doesn't easily support it as the progression is designed to be an "Escape the Prison" idea.

The second quibble is the product cost. I would prefer a variation on adventures that can be purchased separately but be more fulfilling over the course of twenty levels. Not every player will want to be locked into a dungeon setting at every session. If the DM figures out a way for the players to exit the dungeon from time to time in order to accomplish some other goal, then the value of a self-contained 1-20 level adventure lessens as the DM has had to resort to other routes anyhow.

In summary, it is a fine product. But be certain to understand its limitations before deciding to invest in the hefty sum required to purchase it.

Given the option I would have given the WLD 3.5 stars. It is ambitious, and the writing is surprisingly strong throughout. The premise is intriguing, and supports the environment well. But if the WLD has all this potential, why did my group play a couple of times, and then ask to play something else?

Well, sometimes size matters for the wrong reasons, and the WLD loses a full star for being too big for its own good. Without spoiling anything, the WLD is divided into "sectors," each with a thematic link. But given the designers' desire to make sure they held the undisputed claim to the title "largest," they traded bulk for pacing. No matter what the backstory, there are only so many dire darkmantles that any group is interested in facing, for instance. And if the fights lose their tension, they become repetitive. Then the game slows and the players lose interest.

So fine, the DM can change the encounters to perk them up. Well, now you (the purchaser) have the chore of reworking the thematic element of the sector or choosing to ignore it. If you choose to ignore it, the dungeon suffers, and becomes a "fight club" venue where random monsters wait in random rooms with no regard to the overall ecology of the sector. You don't need to drop a large wad of your cash on this book to get that. On the other hand, if you simply remove the redundant encounters, the already large amounts of empty space become even more empty. I don't know too many groups that are thrilled by mapping an endless variety of rectangular rooms.

Another 1/2 star comes off for the maps. They are big, and there are a lot of them, but they aren't very interesting. No stairs, no tunnels, no balconies, no towers, no height variations, nada. To be fair, it's not all bare rectangular rooms, but enough of it is to get tedious (again, the size issue.)

Dungeon crawling is fun, and it has a fine tradition in D&D. But the most beloved dungeon crawls (Tomb of Horrors springs to mind, or Hidden Shrine of the Tomoachan) always had a little something extra that piqued the imagination; good descriptions and details that made the environment come to life and a sure hand on the pacing between combat encounters, traps, puzzles, and down time. In the end, I feel that the WLD lacks that sure hand in its attempt to fill space. Sure, there are interesting encounters and great ideas, as well as opportunities for role-playing and even some interesting tactical situations. Unfortunately, they are spread over too much time and area to keep the players interested.

Do I feel cheated? No. Would I buy it again? Well, as I see it frequently offered here at 60% off its cover price, the answer is yes. But I must confess that it will likely sit on my shelf more as an interesting curio than get much use.

The book is hardbound and is very sturdy. It is bound in such a way that it will lay flat pretty much wherever you open it to. The layout is two column with pretty small text (I'd venture a guess and say around 6 - 8 pt.). Illustrations are grayscale and sparse. That is to say, you get an AWFUL lot of content in this book. The maps are very nice, color and are folded in such a way that each quarter of the map is 8-1/2" x 11"; perfect for scanning or copying.

The introduction spends a few columns going over the real-world whys and wherefores of the WLD. It then launches into a game-related backstory for the WLD. The backstory is important if you want to use it as a cohesive whole. The designers include notes at the beginning on alternate ways of introducing the dungeon. It gives well over 20 reasons/hooks.

After all the introductory stuff is out of the way, a mere 12 pages, we get into descriptions of things that aren't on the map. These include empty rooms for when the DM doesn't want to use what's in the region, or when they want an extra room to customize the experience. There are also some above ground encounters describe that lead to the first room of Region A.

The room descriptions is where the WLD really shines. They include grey-box text for the DM to read aloud, information on encounter conditions, tactics (including stat blocks for every creature/NPC in the room), and scaling info for DMs who want to make the encounter more or less difficult.

The storylines of the 16 regions are all interconnected, but it is done so in such a way that you can take one region out and run it on its own. I think this is a very cool way to handle an adventure this large. DMs won't have to run the whole thing straight through if their campaign won't support such an undertaking; they can pick and choose parts of it.

In addition to areas controlled by monsters, there are also "safe" rooms buit in where the PCs can recuperate in relative safety. All of these are in the dungeon in a way that fits in with the logic of the location.

The 16 maps all connect and can be laid out and one giant, wall-sized map. The "outside" of the dungeon has passageways that lead off to areas not detailed, allowing creative DMs room to customize their WLD experience, or allowing them ways to get higher-level characters into regions built for more powerful characters, thus avoiding the regions for lower level characters (e.g. Region A, designed for levels 1 - 3). That's pretty good foresight on the part of the designers.

The WLD is a huge undertaking for any group. I did notice a few errors, particularly in some room descriptions where they've been written as though the PCs enter from one direction, but there are multiple entrances to the room. But, these errors don't detract much from the enjoyment factor of this product. As I've mentioned, it's mind-bogglingly huge, and I can only imagine the amount of effort editing this monster was. I've seen more errors in TSR products (during the lean years of the mid-90's) that are half the size of but one region. A lot of people will balk at the $100 price, but astute shoppers can get this at substantial savings from online vendors. If you look at it from the prospective of 16 different dungeons (since each region can be run as a stand-alone adventure), then $100 breaks down to a reasonable $6.25 per region. If you want to challenge your players with a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, the The World's Largest Dungeon is a good investment and will keep you busy for several years.

My group and I have only played through the first zone, and we've had fun doing it, but the game is seriously lacking in some respects. First of all the traps in the dungeon have unrealistic expectations for the level of characters it was built for. When traps, secret doors, and locks require a rogue to roll an 18 to a 20 to deal with it, that is an unrealistic expectations. The party rogue in our game has died twice now and we lost our party cleric at the last session (granted his death was bad tactics not bad design).

Also my characters and I have been frustrated with the structure of treasure in the dungeon. Some rooms are chalk full of treasure and all you have to do is stumble on the room. Other times you'll fight a CR 5 encounter (for a party of levels 1-2 thats really tough) and they'll get next to no treasure. Also a lot of the treasure is pointless for the game, there needs to be more equipment treasure (weapons, armor, useful eqipment, common expensive spell components, and so forth), all the gold and jewels don't matter if the party reaches it's carrying capacity and has no where to spend it.

The Wererat Sorcerer that is the "boss" of Region A was a disapointment. The party had very little difficulty with him.

Also a lot of the material, and I mean A LOT is still written for v3.0 and not up to current 3.5 rules like the advertisments claim. This hasn't been a huge issue thus far because my group and I know the rules well enough to know what is stupid and messed up.

All that being said the book provides a decent frame work for someone who know's what they're doing. But that's all it is a frame work. The Dm really needs to craft most of it himself which is self defeating to the product.

840 Pages...16 full color maps...1600 rooms...yeah..ok that is big. Very Big. Guesstimates are anyone's...uh...guess as to how long it might take a party to get through this massive adventure but based on average play I'm going to say 1 to 2 years. You could conceivably raise a party from first level to, oh gosh, I don't know...the mid teens if not higher. Level 20 certainly would not seem out of the question I would hazzard to guess. Each of the maps represents one section of the book, which then is obviously broken down into 16 sections. The maps also connect to each other. Each section has it's own background to it with its unique encounters. It will be up to the DM to maybe establish a room as a safe haven. Why? Because once you get into this thing, you're basically not getting out until you're finished. EAch section has it's hierarcy of monsters with a boss.

Now, this presents a major challenge to both players and DMs. is the commitment going to be there to play this thing through. For the DM who is investing the money (and at Amazon's discount of $40.00 it really isn't that bad) he's probably not going to be to happy if his players want to opt out after awhile. That's going to be up to the DM to allow an escape clause or not which I don't see as a problem. There are other issues too...you found the treasure? Gems, Jewels, golden idols? Guess what..there's no way of getting out to sell the stuff for Gold and buying better equipment. So as a fair DM, you'll have to maybe compomise and have the players find better armor or weapons or take them off monsters or whatever. Delving into this huge crawl your players could, if they wanted, really hand around the beginning levels and rack up experience through exploring the entire map and random encounters. As the DM you'll need to find a way to move them along after they've achieved sufficient level.

There have been complaints from other reviewers that the Dungeon is boring and that many rooms are empty. So guess what..the good DM comes up with a way of making it more exciting. Maybe you had some more encounters and populate some of those empty rooms. Who says this has to be played straight forward as written? I think the designers did an admirable job of describing the dungeon and making it unique but still, with over 1600 rooms how unique can you be?

At it's core, the World's Largest Dungeon is old-school, roleplaying...the early 80's, stay up all night eating pizza and doritos kind of hack-n-slash adventure that many RPG veterans will remember from the good ol' days when we used to say, "Plot? What plot?"

With a little tinkering you can overcome some of the book's minor flaws and really have a great gaming experience.

Yeah, it's got some editting issues. Yeah, it tells you that wizards get hosed and you should ban druids. And while you're at it, ban summoning spells. And what do you eat? Who knows.

It is still the finest dungeon crawl I've ever read. It has monsters, rooms, and treasure galore. It has traps, puzzles, and red herrings. It has a kind of dungeon ecology, in that it has many societies who stake out portions of the dungeon.

And lest you forgot it, it's huge. Massive. 840 pages. Well worth it, even if you break it into 15 chunks and run them as seperate adventures instead of one very long one.

While there are some glitches that could have been resolved with some better editing, this is easily the best DnD module I've bought. I have been running it as an adventure online since April and it makse my job a pleasure. The company supports the product. There are multiple story lines. The writing is well done. There is a huge variety of monsters. There are scaling hints through out. The stat blocks for every monster are included - no need to look them up elsewhere. They include open ended areas to expand the dungeon/prison. All you need is this book and the free SRD and you can have thousands of hours of fun. Note that I haven't read the entire book. I'm on page 355.