MDBC 26: Grande Temple of Jing (Tenth Floor and Conclusion)
Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to Grande Temple of Jing (2016).
See last week's post here.
10.0 Road's End
The conclusion of the Grande Jing Highway and the Elevator, end of the line. Not much to interact with, mostly just a nexus to access the final dungeons. No reason to skip if you're running Jing as is, but no reason to run if you're not.
10.1 The Madhouse
This is a "funhouse" style dungeon where the entire conceit is that the players must guess their way through undetectable traps and fight monsters that explicitly are described and detect as another monster. Several pieces are directly described to the GM as "this area/creature is supposed to be annoying, play it up." Most traps/interactible objects have no written method of interaction other than to just experience the negative effect, such as a classic prismatic wall that can only be dispelled by triggering each effect in a row.
There are ways to write funhouse dungeons but this isn't it, even for a game like Pathfinder 1e and for a game culture that was PF in the mid 2010s. The only salvageable part of this dungeon is the included art of a group of PCs chasing living d20s on a Moebius strip in space, dump the rest.
MPLO
It's a 5-room dungeon centered around a maker-god and his creations, it feels very "back door into the bureaucracy of heaven" with the inclusion of the norns and the time elemental. The floor is centered around an approval system based on how the party deals with the various problems existing on the floor. If they behave altruistically, they are rewarded when they meet the god at the end and get to leave the temple of Jing. If they attack the various creatures and fight their way through the dungeon, they anger the captured god and are forced to fight him to the death.
Take the dungeon and remix it for inclusion in a larger high-level-adventure megadungeon. It's not large enough or complex enough to stand on its own but it could easily be one wing in a god's palace or something similar.
Gauntlet of Grim
This is literally a trap from Grimtooth. It's 3 successive timed escape rooms enclosed in an anti-magic field, with the penalty for failure being killed via lava or liquid mercury. If you're a fan of Grimtooth, this dungeon fits the style quite well. The dungeon has no connections to the Grande Temple of Jing other than its in the same book as the rest of it and some boxed text near the beginning, it would be easy to yoink it and put it anywhere else.
The Master's Arena
It's another arena, extremely similar to the last few. The intention is that the players fight 2 set piece encounters before ending up fighting "Jing's Champion" (an Ancient half-Fiend Red Dragon). The provided scenarios meet what you'd expect from high-level Pathfinder: Underwater battlefield, Space battlefield, Wild Magic battlefield, etc.
I'd skip this arena. Even if you're looking for setpiece Pathfinder encounters, none of the included scenarios are anything more groundbreaking than "pick something high level out of the bestiary and then stick it in its natural environment." I suspect most GMs could do better.
Floor 10 Conclusion
There's basically nothing here. The PCs get to the end of the road / megadungeon and are met with a glimpse into the backstage of the dungeon, but nothing really matching what you'd expect from the end of such a large space. The PCs have definitely seen more impressive locales before, and any of the previous floors would have been better served as the last floor.
Final Thoughts on Grande Temple of Jing
I was there on the Paizo forums in the mid 2010s, I'm very well-versed in that culture and spent a lot of my first years as a GM entirely immersed in it. Making builds, discussing "player agency" in the face of another extremely linear AP, talking "table troubles" when the "trouble" is "my players keep killing all of my bad guys before they can use their cool spells." I know who the audience of this product is and was at the time it was written. Even for that audience, I don't think Grande Temple of Jing is a good product.
GToJ's nature is that of a collection of dungeons that are (theoretically) connected together via an overarching narrative, writing style, and megastructure. In practice, the dungeons are written in a wide variety of styles and methodologies and connect only loosely through nebulous doorways at the edge of each map. The book reads like a collection of 50 or so one-page dungeons, not a megadungeon. The contents of each dungeon are written in the antagonistic, cynical voice of a GM who's been running 3.5 too long and has grown tired of the tricks of the trade of experienced adventurers. The NPCs exist to either completely ignore the players and follow their simplistic script or subvert their actions and attempts to make sense of the place. The place as a whole reads like it resents anyone being here and trying to play through the damn thing, much less read it and understand what's going on.
The meta-adventures written at the beginning of GToJ are all essentially just fetch quests. "The Language of Birds" is the best fetch quest, but only because it provides ready access to NPCs that want to speak to the PCs specifically and a reason to explore all the nooks and crannies of the structure.
The maps and keys for each floor are of fairly poor quality. The maps are low resolution but often feature non-outlined text placed directly over rooms, making it difficult to read or parse what the room is. The room keys are often several pages away from the actual map, making it necessary to page back and forth to determine the relationship between rooms. The fact that map excerpts are sometimes provided alongside the room descriptions is maddening, demonstrating that there was an acknowledgement of the problem but that the majority of the dungeon's text could simply do without the added clarifying information (wrong).
I don't recommend anyone play or run GToJ. It very offers a few good ideas for encounters and dungeons, but the majority of it is mediocre featureless rooms with just the listing of a statblock from the bestiary expecting the GM to provide the rest of the content. There are other ensemble-cast megadungeons for Pathfinder 1e (like Emerald Spire), and better megadungeons that could be converted quite easily (Castle Triskelion is looking fantastic by comparison). Even for the group of players expecting an extremely linear Pathfinder experience, I still wouldn't recommend it due to how much of the writing is devoted to specifically attacking that style of play.