MDBC 21: Grande Temple of Jing (Fifth Floor)
Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to Grande Temple of Jing (2016).
See last week's post here.
Great Central Forest
This is a giant exploration area that the dungeons of Floor 5 are placed on. The magical effects in place ensuring that players must stay on the path at all times, cannot fly, and cannot domesticate animals are quite odd (you don't want players interacting with the wilderness?) but not out of the ordinary for the megadungeon at this point. The many dungeons in the forest are connected via a central plotline called "The Great Forest War" that lead the PCs around to the various dungeons in classic Paizo AP fashion. The quest is fairly bare bones but could be expanded upon pretty easily, the area as a whole would be great to transplant out of the dungeon entirely.
(Faded) Temple of the Serpent
It's a snake temple dungeon in the shape of a large linear loop. The main gimmick here is that the temple transforms those who walk through a certain section into snake-people, and forces them to roll a save every hour or go crazy and attack everyone around them. The majority of the inhabitants of the temple are all enclosed in the first (large) room of the dungeon and they're all aware of the transformation, making this a faction conflict possibly 'resolved' before the dungeon is even explored.
The rest of the dungeon beyond the initial transformation and possible conflict is nothing noteworthy. There's a room to reverse the transformation (as well as a secret passage to avoid it in the first place) and several dungeon dressing interactions that are desired by other inhabitants of the Fifth Floor. The dungeon resembles nothing more than a Skyrim-esque linear dungeon with a handy escape hatch at the end, but the contents of it could be reused.
The Forest Below
This is a plant- and fey- themed non-linear dungeon that's literally packed full of hostile creatures. An enterprising GM could come in and convert some of the attack-on-sight Pathfinder encounters to fit into factions fairly easily to get something like a nature-themed royal court of the green dragon Agarchius. As is, the rooms are mostly all fights with nothing else to interact with in each room.
Kiss of the Fey Queen
A corrupted fey palace complex filled with interesting creatures to talk to and interact with, negotiations to follow through on, and strange objects to poke and prod. The dungeon does pre-suppose that there are A) fey and B) eldritch space creatures, but could be ported elsewhere very easily (it was ripped out of it's original position by Jing too after all). The fey angle could be replaced by any creatures with forest-elf tropesets and the aliens by any ancient, unknowable masters of magic and/or technology.
The quality of this dungeon was quite surprising to me. Outside of the necessary conversion to other systems, I'd happily run this dungeon with few changes.
The Living Labyrinth
This is a combat-filled "maze" filled with were-creatures. The majority of the rooms consist of "here's the statblock and number appearing, get going." Feels very similar to the Gauntlet dungeons of previous floors.
Way of the Wyrm
It's a cold-themed pointcrawl. While these nodes are a little bit more interesting than the combat-filled rooms of the other dungeons on this floor, ultimately they're going to be combat in Grande Temple of Jing just due to the framing of the floor itself. The PCs have no reason to go up onto the glacier except to steal remorhaz eggs, and if by some miracle they figure out how to ally with the remorhaz, they still need to deal with the white dragon and the winterwights that also live on top of the glacier. This pointcrawl could be yoinked for some cool winter-themed rooms and nodes, so long as you're OK with them being combat or needing a conversion.
The Snow Tunnels of Bor
A yeti-themed dungeon featuring a "puzzle" given to the PCs at the beginning of the dungeon. Shockingly, if the PCs simply walk from room to room and kill everything inside, they solve the puzzle! Even more surprising, the original puzzle is a sham and the puzzle-giver really just wants the PCs to kill everyone inside! The non-combat portions of the rooms feature such exciting features as "the floor tiles are numbered and prime-numbered tiles are safe from the floor traps" and "A Sokoban-esque block pushing puzzle, except you can just destroy the obstacles."
I recommend yoinking the NPCs (a gameshow-obsessed devil that craves "sets" of objects to fulfill some mysterious purpose, a yeti tribe ruled by a queen with her heartbeat pulsing in tune with a pendant around her neck), but not the dungeon itself.
Cloud Caves
The caves are better-than-average non-linear dungeon fare with the added gimmick that the floors, walls and ceiling are all made from cloudstuff. There's some inter-room activity and enough interesting rooms that I'd be fine running the dungeon as-is.
The main draw to Cloud Caves however is Harpytown. It's a massive floating town filled with harpies that want to trade for goods, secrets and magic. Monster towns in the midst of megadungeons are a major weakness of mine and Harpytown is no exception. I'm going to steal this literal hive of scum and villainy for my next megadungeon guaranteed.
The Forge
It's a dungeon shop and smithy run by Erinyes with an expansive living space attached. I think the dungeon makes a good fire-themed addition to any megadungeon in need of a neutral space for shopping, but it's nothing particularly special. It's purpose in Jing is explicitly to give the PCs access to special Pathfinder treasures that weren't included in the book, and it works for that.
Floor 5 Conclusion
Floor 5 varies wildly in quality but in generally tends downward as the mechanical weight of the level 10-20 range of Pathfinder begins to warp the megadungeon. Much of Floor 5 could be made more interesting or useful to other GMs via conversion, but the dungeons as written seem interested only in keeping PCs on the railroad and visiting all the rides in the theme park. The neutral/friendly monster settlements present adjacent to Floor 5 (Harpytown, The Forge) help to balance it out, but the vast majority of the rest is just moving between combat encounters with little to no change in scenery in between.