MDBC 18: Grande Temple of Jing (Second Floor)
Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to Grande Temple of Jing (2016).
See last week's post here.
The Training Grounds
This dungeon is the thinnest layer of diegesis stapled to mechanics. Several of the rooms are essentially platformers, the rest are rooms where level-appropriate contents are generated and then fed to the players. Some of the components are meant to provide access to a facsimile of the outside world to Pathfinder characters trapped in the megadungeon (like access to spells, or access to mentors), while some seem to be rooms that exist only to grant experience or to test your build.
Unless your table is focused entirely on pushing the buttons present in a system, I would skip this dungeon entirely. Just find another way to allow characters to gain access to spells and mentors, or worst case just let them leave the megadungeon.
Wolfbite Goblin Halls
Classic Goblin town dominates the north half of this level, unique closet monster encounters dominate the lower half. There's a graveyard here accessible to all the humanoid factions of the upper levels where they bury their dead, complete with graverobbing puzzle statue. The graveyard and the implications of possibly meeting other factions are cool.
Stealing individual room ideas is the name of the game here. The "find 10 identical rooms tied to a single risk-vs-reward save-or-die spell" room is funny, the paired riddling sphinx room and pretending-to-be-riddling womanticore rooms are a good inclusion, and the magic shop w/ blessed merchant is a good way to include a shop in a megadungeon, even if this one is a bit tropey. The rest of the rooms here are funhouse rooms and could be included in any similar dungeon, they're take 'em or leave 'em.
This is the dungeon here I really grew to resent the map resolution and presentation in the key. The text for the numbers on the map makes me miss the clean lines and barebones look of Triskelion or Palace of the Vampire Queen. The map was obviously smaller and then upscaled for the PDF, a lot of the objects are just indecipherable pixelated blobs. The text added after the fact is perfectly readable, but unfortunately the room numbers aren't. Sometimes sections of the map are cut out and pasted in room descriptions, but they aren't made any more readable and just as often aren't included at all!
Twinklestar Caverns
This level is mostly closet monsters and a few gimmick rooms. It's been upsold in past dungeon descriptions as a place for factions to come and battle while they gather water, but the dungeon doesn't really reflect that. It's a convenient smaller filler dungeon between other larger dungeons.
The Stinking Ziggurat
A small faction complex dungeon. Fairly linear, as just due to the information the PCs are likely to receive means they'll experience the rooms roughly in numbered order. Decent enough but totally barebones, the only things in many of the rooms are items or NPCs specifically interested in the troglodyte political battle.
Red Gauntlet
It's another straight-line hallway of rooms similar to the Green Gauntlet from last week. Obviously intended for con or tourney style gameplay.
Trial of Silver
This is actually just 1 large (physically) puzzle room. After activating the statue, the players need to cross the icy water and ring the bell. Following that, they need to cross the water again and give an easily acquired present from anywhere in the room to the statue. Combined with the threat of (fairly easy for the APL) combat, that's the entire room.
It's a pretty huge letdown after the great presentation of the Trial of Copper on the first floor. This level would make a great single setpiece encounter (as is, I believe, the intention) but I can't see how it would last even a single session, even for tables that play very slowly.
Floor 2 Conclusion
This floor is mostly a combination of funhouse rooms and boring traps oscillating between "sleep inducing" and "gotcha!" Pieces of it are salvageable, but its more a case of cutting out what you're going to save rather than cutting off the boring bits. If I were to run Jing, I'd cut Floor 2 entirely in favor of trying to keep some of the momentum of the funner parts of Floor 1.