MDBC 14.5: Final Review on Castle Triskelion
I've been reading Castle Triskelion for Studio315b's Megadungeon Book Club for almost 12 weeks now and we've covered everything except the dungeons of the castle. I'm tired of reading it and think I have a pretty good idea of the author's style (despite a bit of inconsistency).
The Good
I really like Stypinski's description of setting detail. Not much is left up to interpretation in room description, making it easy to picture the castle in its fading beauty and wealth. You'll very rarely need to come up with room contents on the spot, even for the "empty" rooms which make up a large portion of this megadungeon.
The location itself has a lot of room for player creativity. A large portion of it is an above-ground palace/mansion complex, making it easy for players to climb in through windows or dig up through floors or down through ceilings. Players can visually see interesting or landmark rooms from the outside just through window configurations ("big bank of windows there? oh probably a grand hall", etc) and the entire Grounds area is all visible from the west side of the Castle.
It's free!
There's a lot of room for faction dynamics because crucially, the majority of the Triskelions and former inhabitants of the manse are still alive. You don't get that in many megadungeons! It's all long-forgotten ruins and rusty trinkets that you couldn't identify even if you wanted to. I've complained that many of the factions are essentially homebodies and closet monsters, meaning: not interacting with PCs unless they step into 1 of 6 rooms, but that could easily be tweaked at the table by an enterprising GM.
The Bad
Any GM trying to run this is going to have to do a lot of compilation and editing. You're going to need to comb through blogposts, old documents, piece together room descriptions to the fairly scant maps, and weave faction dynamics and activity out of a few sentences. This is on top of the normal improvisionational rulings you'll need to make at the table for play. There's a lot of good in Triskelion, but it's not collected in a way that's easy to see that.
The Outer Ward sucks in comparison to the Inner Ward. The majority of the rooms are empty and the inhabitants gone, making it feel the closest to a normal "ruined castle" dungeon crawl. There are spots of interest in the Outer Ward but its interspersed between 20-30 room crawls through narrow hallways trying to piece together history and happenings from what color the room is painted and the state of the leatherworking tools inside. An argument could be made that its meant to be a low level area to gain experience and loot before heading into the more dangerous Inner Ward, but there's a huge lack of treasure in the Outer Ward as well, making it read as potentially boring and tedious experience before parties get to the "good stuff." Luckily, PCs can be directed through the Outer Ward directly to the Inner Ward by several NPCs and I recommend any GM who does run Triskelion to do just that.
Conclusion
Grab the dungeons from the Grounds region and use them in your own games. If you're enterprising, maybe take the Inner Ward and edit out some of the more tedious sections. Make use of the Sewers, Cellar and Rat Warrens, they make great in-between sections and all have factions that have high numbers of "roaming agents," making it easy for them to interact with the PCs.
Castle Triskelion is much better than a lot of megadungeons I've read (and likely will reread for MDBC) but its inaccessibility makes it a tough sell for most. If you're into the theming of a dark late-medieval-palace-crawl with lots of room for creative traversal, highly recommend.