This review has a little bit of everything from the Cincinnati D&D Group’s general consensus and opinions. It’s been cleaned up and such. Since I was the DM for it, certain parts of it will obviously be from me.
Let’s start with the general and obvious.
The World’s Largest Dungeon (WLD) was created by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) as the most ambitious dungeon, module, and gaming book created so far. It set about to include every monster from the System Resource Document (SRD) as it existed at the time this project began.
It consisted of an 840-page college-medical-school sized book and 16 glossy maps (22”x17”). And because I bought it the day it came out I received a bonus set of dice, 2 Reaper miniatures, and one of those 16-page character “books”.
And it was all created in a mere eleven months.
That was made possible by splitting up the dungeon into distinct regions and farming it out to a variety of authors with Jim Pinto, the fellow whose name is on the cover, being the project manager of it all. This had the benefit of having several different minds in the creation process without side-effect of “too many cooks”. Each region has its own personality and style, so with every region there would be something new to see and explore and new challenges to defeat.
The regions that my group explored were:
Region A: A barren area with your standard low-level humanoids fighting it out for domination. This region is designed to shock the PCs into life in the WLD. It’s a life full of challenges and virtually no contact with the world outside of the WLD.
Region E (The Celestial Garrison): Long ago, when the prison was new, this area was probably the headquarters of the prison. Now it is nothing but shell of its former self. A skeleton crew of angelic forces holds evil at bay while fighting a battle for control from within.
Region I (The Halls of Flesh): Once a fountain of pristine positive energy, the halls of this region of have been warped by the chaotic magic unleashed by a troupe of careless drow and driders. Now even the walls have skin and give birth to hungry abominations. Cthulu would feel at home here.
Region J (The Pyrefaust): A river of lava cuts through this burnt land. Long ago a great and evil red dragon was imprisoned with his fiery followers. Now they see him as a god and seek to free him.
Region N: This double-sized region has stood as a prison for five millennia. Inside are hordes of undead whose sins have been lost to time. In the center rests a beast so great and foul that it seeks to consume the world.
But as with everything, there are some snags. The developers had come up with reasons why each region existed and why these particular creatures were in it.
They came up with the concept that the whole dungeon was originally designed as a prison by the celestial forces of good, but things went downhill from there. Earthquakes hit the area, dark forces broke free, other forces broke in, and other random chaos occurred. And in time the dungeon was forgotten.
Why wouldn’t the monsters just teleport out? Well teleporting does not work in here, or it is severely handicapped.
What would happen if the monsters summoned their friends in? Then that friend would be in prison as well. You can get in, but not out.
All of these issues affected the PCs as well. This hurt several PC abilities. Without access to the outside world, crafting regular and magical items was limited. Without access to arcane libraries, wizards could not scribe new scrolls into their spellbooks when they gained a level. Nor could they scribe a spell from a scroll into their book without access to that ink that costs them 100gp per level. And summoning was not an option without a price; something that made druids very unhappy.
Now the module does give you advice on ways work around these issues, but I frankly wasn’t happy with them. Taking basic options away from players is not a popular route to take, no matter how experienced they might be.
But this advice was more than just saying “Don’t play a druid.” It was quite helpful in guiding the players with the right decisions with character creation by pointing out which skills and feats would be useful or useless. So it wasn’t all bad, it just suggested some things I wouldn’t have.
Something that probably could not have easily been corrected, but we feel like it should be included in this review because it is an extension of limiting PC abilities, is that each region had a lot of similar creature groupings. A purely undead region or mostly construct region effectively removes the usefulness of a rogue’s sneak attack and a fighter’s critical hits.
Also, if a type of creature can be effectively neutralized with a single spell or action, and there are many of those creatures, then region gets boring fast. Region N is a good example of this. My group, with its two clerics, was able to walk around much of region N with no real danger to themselves thanks to the Death Ward spell. They cast it on everyone in the group and had backups, even quickened backups, just in case it was dispelled. But had they not used the spell, the sheer danger of the region may have guaranteed their deaths.
And is if removing class abilities was not bad enough, some class abilities were made all but useless by the near impossibility of their use. Areas with strong undead and all of region N had enough negative energy to make turning nearly impossible if not 100% impossible. Now I don’t like the way turning works as a game mechanic, but I felt that something better could have been thought up.
And dungeon was quite full of traps. That’s perfectly fine with me. Lots of evil crammed together means lots of dirty little tricks. But the DC required to find and remove many of these traps was simply over the top. One instance I can think of is a Wail of the Banshee trap on a door in region N. The search DC required was 45, and the same to remove it. Now at level 18 a rogue with the maximum ranks in search and disable device and a dexterity score of 18 will have a +25 to those rolls. This means that a natural 20 is required to both find the trap and remove it. And if he fails, the whole party would have to make a saving throw or die. Granted, the area this trap is in is a pretty nasty, high-level area, but there are several traps similar to this all spread around. In order to survive, a party will basically have to “Take 20” almost all of the time, something the module suggests not allowing without a penalty. I’d say the penalty for not doing it would be worse.
Another thing we would have liked some closer attention to: magic item distribution. It was relatively uneven and that kind of problem hurts. My group found a variety of interesting weapons, but very little in the way of armor for a long time. Without some good armor to protect you, that nice big sword you have is a tad less useful if the party’s cleric has to heal you every round.
And this gripe of mine is something that drove me crazy while running the game; the mapping did not line up with the graph. Now granted it’s not realistic to have every dungeon agree to a 5’x5’ per square convention, but it got to be very annoying when drawing maps by hand and trying to convert it to 5’x5’ for ease of use. It would cause a bit of a drift over time as I would incorrectly round up or round down the number of squares to use. So as the party explored the region more and I filled in more of the maps, the maps didn’t always meet up in the right spots. The result was some hallways that were suddenly slanted and an irritated DM.
And our final gripe is the something that has plagued creators and designers since beginning of time; deadlines and double-checking. The WLD was cranked out in 11 months with multiple people involved and several revisions going back and forth. But with the amounts of everything being worked on, some areas paid the price. The price is the occasional missing room description, rooms not matching the map, or your standard typographical error. I feel that a lot of these could have been cleared up had the design crew been given a little more time to do some double-checking, or possibly the hiring of others to find the faults. Think about it, Star Trek geeks notice every little error that show has made, give them a copy of the WLD and let them go to town. But as always companies have deadlines, and every project magically ends up taking all the time it has to be completed by the deadline. That’s true throughout the business world.
Now you probably think we hated our game of the WLD. Come on, I have written one good thing about it. Well that’s because I felt I had to expose all of its flaws to better show off its assets.
First off they wrote the WLD loose enough so that a DM can modify it to his or her liking and it would not hurt the module as a whole. This means that almost every negative thing that I wrote in the above paragraphs can be fixed to your liking.
If you want your party to be able to summon and teleport, then there is not problem with that, just give them a magic pendant that excuses them from those problems or remove those rules entirely.
Don’t like a particular room, or you’ve found one of those rooms that mysteriously lost its description, then you can make something up on the fly. And if you don’t want to do that, well then they have conveniently created several dozen spare rooms that you can drop in just about anywhere.
If you don’t like the hugeness of the WLD and you would rather just run a region or two of it. That is not a problem in the slightest. The entire WLD was written as several separate modules that have their own story. With a few modifications you have given yourself a module that is independent of the WLD.
You don’t like the order that the WLD regions are set up in? Once again the modularity of the regions allows you to mix and match regions to your liking.
Your party wants to craft some items but don’t have a place to do it, well then drop in a little something for them to work with. I gave our group limited access to the outside world in order to make up for their lack of needed equipment.
Is your party sick of fighting fiendish darkmantles in region A? That’s ok, give them a new fiendish creature to fight, perhaps a fiendish dire weasel?
Is your party ripping through the dungeon and they aren’t being challenged? Well each encounter in the book has a suggestion for scaling the encounter to make it more or less of a challenge.
The entire dungeon has a good flavor and a “first edition feel” to it. In my opinion, the era of second edition AD&D was horrible. They threw away the idea of the dungeon in favor of new settings and more role-playing. Now I’m all for role-playing and new settings, but they took it too far. Removing dungeon-delving and the fun of “killing a monster and taking its treasure” was criminal. The WLD brought this back.
It brought back the fun of trashing the Temple of Elemental Evil that I had been part of way back in the mid 1980’s.
Several of the stories we loved. The stories and backgrounds of regions E & I made for perhaps the most memorable sessions we had of the WLD. When I asked my group for their favorite regions I, J, and the conclusion of E were their responses.
As a DM, I have to give my utter appreciation for the layout of the book itself. Every room on the map had a room description for it. If there was an encounter with anything, monster or ally, the stat block was placed right there in the book with the room, not in the back of the book or in a separate and easily losable booklet. And there are many regions that the DM doesn’t even have to read ahead of time. Yes it helps, but it is not always needed. (I would not suggest that with region E though.)
Now this one I know people will disagree with me, but I’m used to that by now. Of the 840 pages of this book, if you took out the artwork you would probably have lost only 10 pages total. Now how is that a good thing? It’s a good thing because the money you shelled out for the WLD was put towards the module itself, not an artist’s rendering of a particular encounter. In other words, this book was not padded with frivolous artwork.
Now I’m not saying art is worthless in a D&D book. It can serve as the ideal aid to spur the imagination. It’s just used a little too often for my tastes.
One thing you see a little more of lately, but is still relatively rare, is the ability to talk with someone who designed the book or module you’ve bought. But both Jim Pinto (the WLD’s “project manager”) and Jim Hague (designer of regions I & M) both made regular appearances in various forums to offer aid the best they could. Jim Pinto even released the 16 maps in electronic format that allowed me to modify them and place them on the blog for all to see. We were even supplied with the design of region E.
Heck, when asked what music would be good for running in the background while the WLD was being played, Jim Pinto had already thought it through and had a list of suggested music for each region.
And Jim Hague even posted a couple of comments on the blog.
You just don’t see that kind of help and enthusiasm from game designers, ever!
In conclusion, if you like dungeon-crawls, this is a dungeon you have to go through at least once in your life. No other module to date has done what the WLD has done. We spent sixteen months of our gaming lives with this one module. How many other D&D modules can give you the opportunity to say that?
Even one fellow in our group said he would be ready to play The World’s Largest Dungeon 2 if it were to be released.
If that is not high praise, I don’t know what is.
And if you’re wondering about the regions I left out, I did that intentionally. Those regions still have use. I could use them in another game, or better yet, maybe someone could run me through them?