MDBC 25: Grande Temple of Jing (Ninth Floor)
Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to Grande Temple of Jing (2016).
See last week's post here.
9.0 The Undersea
Another large exploration zone, this time made up of a vampiric ocean that grants negative levels to living creatures submerged in it and that corrodes wood or metal dipped in it. There's also an omnipresent magical effect (a "Jingx") preventing magical flight and teleportation. This combines to form a truly difficult biome to traverse in, the only real way to do it would be if a PC managed to make a water vessel out of ceramic or glass.
The areas to explore are 8 identical elemental temples (literally as written, identical save for the element they correspond to) and a central island housing a 9.1 Tomb of the Sea God and the resting place of a ghost ship, 9.2 The Grim Fandango. Even if the players managed to figure out a way to explore the cursed sea, they still wouldn't be able to find much of anything in its depths.
The idea of a cursed sea preventing normal travel is fine and workable, but the onus is on GMs here to add content. It would be cool to have a collection of crafty survivors who have made a living scrabbling together whatever vessels they can manage, floating around the Undersea in some sort of underworld version of Water World. As is, the Undersea exists merely as a painted-on backdrop to set the mood and provide convenient excuses for GMs to disallow "problematic" high-level Pathfinder abilities like flight and teleportation.
9.1 Tomb of the Sea God
This underwater cavern dungeon is surprisingly good. The rooms contain high level enemies as to be expected for a high level Pathfinder module, but all are posed as a problem or challenge that can be solved with leverage, as opposed to just a combat encounter. The marilith guarding the treasure, the "petrified" locathah assassins, the aboleth who needs the PCs to help it become a lich; these are all good rooms. The dungeon itself doesn't overstay its welcome and offers resources to players to avoid the presence of the cursed Undersea water in the middle of the cavern. This dungeon is downright enjoyable.
9.2 The Grim Fandango
It's a ghost pirate ship that's been crudely shoved into the form of a dungeon. As written, the crew of the ship is somewhere else in the Undersea (their exact location left as an exercise to the GM) and needs to be brought back somehow (combat? emotional plea from a stranger?) so the ship can sail. Theoretically the ship can be crawled through like a dungeon if the players can convince the captain to let them do so (its otherwise completely incorporeal to them). The contents of the ship are merely diaramas of pirate ship life, I don't recommend playing through unless the players insist.
Just use the Grim Fandango and its crew + captain as a roaming faction on the Undersea.
9.3 The Corrupted Water Temple
A generic temple (religious) dedicated to water elementals. Fire elementals have taken it over and set fire to all of the water features using clear flammable gel. The dungeon is serviceable (having a few different types of encounters) but fairly one-note (the solution to every room is "kill the fire elementals, clean out the water feature, move on"). The dungeon's non-linear enough with a strong enough theme and history that I'd be willing to run it as is, but I'm not going out of my way to run it any time soon. Yoinkable as is.
Floor 9 Conclusion
This floor could easily have been fleshed out with way more content, and it really felt like that was the intention going off the larger-than-life description of the Undersea. The Tomb of the Sea God was good, though I'm inclined to skip the Grim Fandango and Corrupted Water Temple. The level is on the high side of mediocre and could traverse that line with a little more effort. Unfortunately, that's more what I'd expect from a middle floor like Floor 4 or Floor 5, not the penultimate floor of the megadungeon.