MDBC 24: Grande Temple of Jing (Eighth Floor)
Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to Grande Temple of Jing (2016).
See last week's post here.
The Magic Desert
This is a magic- and anti-magic themed desert exploration biome that is ruthlessly eviscerated by the exploration mechanics as written. The area is made up of different deserts stitched together by "wavewalls" that act as translucent barriers between the different areas. These "wavewalls" can be anywhere between 1 and 350 miles thick and their thickness is not known or discernible by the players until they enter the wall and start walking. Initial exploration is further hampered by the event that happens as soon as they enter the cavern: all of their magic is turned off and sucked up by the phoenix far to the north, over 100 miles away through the desert. Even if the PCs manage to figure out exactly where they need to go, they will then need to travel there in less than 48 hours or risk each of their magic items being permanently destroyed every subsequent 24 hour period after that.
The desert areas themselves are mediocre. They feature a handful of creatures from a generic "Monsters by Terrain: Desert or Mountain" table and an entire 20% of the "keyed" entries are literally described with "The group is not meant to encounter this desert during this adventure. If they do, wing it!"
This dungeon seems written to be tedious and boring. Steal the idea of an anti-magic phoenix living at an oasis, skip the rest of this.
Temple of the Beast
It's a generic cultist temple summoning a generic void entity. I'm not being reductionist here, the GM is encouraged to sub out superficial details about the cultists like their costumes and the name of their chosen entity whenever the players enter the temple. The rooms are all one-note and contain: A) cultists, who are friendly until attacked, B) furnishings necessary for the cult's survival, like beds or a kitchen.
There is exactly 1 interesting room and it is the temple, which contains the void entity that is being summoned. The void entity is a standard high level Pathfinder aberration-type monster, which is to say it attacks with tentacle slams, grappling, and excessive use of the Confusion spell.
Skip this, you don't need this.
The Halls of the Gods
This dungeon is made up of 33 rooms each containing a shrine where Jing pretends to be another deity. Each shrine has an entry for what type of ritual needs to be done to respect them, and what would be taken as insult. Several of the "insult" entries end in combat, which is why this floor was included in a Pathfinder dungeon.
This floor could be repurposed into a "generic deities" table quite easily and it would serve quite a bit of use that way. As is, skip this dungeon.
Gauntlet of Science
This is a dungeon themed like a pop-quiz where the players walk around to various puzzle rooms where they're meant to guess the underlying design of the room using science. The themes they're meant to guess are ones like "The water is breathable in this room", "The more treasure we take, the more each piece of treasure weighs", "These golems are all labelled with the short-names for chemical elements like Au for gold and Ag for Silver." Reading this dungeon feels incredibly elementary-science-teacher-coded, though not in a way that's necessarily bad (but is necessarily corny).
Some of the rooms could be taken and used in other dungeons fairly easily, but none are what I'd call extraordinary or exemplary.
Floor 8 Conclusion
Incredibly disappointed in this floor, I thought Grande Temple of Jing was getting better over time but this set my expectations waaaaaay back.