Wednesday 6 December 2017

Megadungeons - My Stonehell Review

Megadungeons I own that I can recall are:

3e Castle Blackmoor
Greyhawk Ruins
Stonehell
Dwimmermount
I also have the 4e Undermountain book and some sub-mega dungeons like 3e Caverns of Thracia & Dyson's Delves, both of which I use in my Wilderlands, and Lost City of Barakus which I ran for a campaign ca 2004-2006.

Of the full megadungeons I would say Dwimmermount & Stonehell are by far the best presented and the two that strongly call me to use them. Dwimmermount is more professionally presented and reads very well IMO (I have the advantage of not having backed the Kickstater so no frustrations) but requires a lot of buy-in, you pretty much have to use its own world/setting, myths, history etc. It doesn't give quite as much freedom to innovate as I like. Stonehell by contrast was easy to drop into my Wilderlands Barbarian Altanis setting with minimal tweaking. The presentation took a bit of grokking, especially the way each section has 2 intro pages before the map - I like maps first - but I find in play it runs beautifully well, enough so that I bought both print & pdf copies separately. For monsters it uses Labyrinth Lord as a base but with many, many new monsters (which I convert to 5e D&D, the system I'm using). The prison theme is not inherently very attractive so to attract adventurers I have a rumour the Mad Vizier's treasure is buried there, plus dreams of the extra-dimensional entity infesting the place - the Nixthisis, who sends out dreams attracting violent types to the dungeon... a bit meta. :D

Overall so far after running it for a few weeks (3 sessions tabletop, about half a dozen online) I am enjoying it a lot. Significantly, at the end of a Stonehell session I feel energised & eager for more, whereas running WotC & Paizo stuff I tend to feel drained and eager to finish up. That's about the biggest compliment I can give.

From http://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=14988&p=239051#p239051

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