MDBC 30: Complete Roslof Keep Campaign (Folio 3)
After a week to wrap up Grande Temple of Jing, Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to The Complete Roslof Keep Campaign!
We're gonna break up each week into each of the 6 Folios that make up the text. This week is all of Folio 3.
Folio 3
Intro and Background
We get some basic DMing tips and some notes about running the dungeon that makes the rooms feel even more like lootboxes. You're rerolling treasure and monsters every time a door closes at all? Restocking is good, but this is wild.
We get even more information about "The Corruption" that reiterates its a CURSE by a 20TH-LEVEL caster, not some piddly DISEASE that every cleric down at the dollar store can cure with a simple Cure Disease spell. In the same breath, we get told that those afflicted with the Corruption begin to resemble mindless spore-zombies, but that the PCs should absolutely be guilt-tripped if they are killed like zombies because they can ultimately be cured (how do the PCs know that? Especially if Cure Disease doesn't do anything.). The guidance is especially damning when the intro goes on to push running this part of the book like "The Walking Dead!" I'm all for pushing players into hard decisions like this but feel that it would be a difficult sell without some level of proving that the Corruption can be cured, either through lower barriers to Remove Curse or providing a notable NPC with the power to cure a few people per day or something similar.
I find the focus on ways for DMs to diegetically "skip" the focus on opening every room a bit wishy-washy as well. If its a focus of your dungeon, and it has been for the last two floors, why suddenly give that up now by suggesting the players adventure with their patron who's been all the way to Level 5 or other similar experienced adventurers? I certainly don't agree with the decision to force clearing every room, but introducing methods to get around this requirement in part 3 when you've enforced it the previous 2 months feels a bit hollow.
Dungeon Floor 3
It's all monster closets again. I liked the reveal that the Gilded Lancers had been replaced by doppelgangers and that the party could figure that out by finding their banner, I also liked the inclusion of specific points where the hypothetical "NPC Alliance" could show up. The rest of the rooms are just lootboxes.
Bonus Adventure: Dire Run to House Fleetwood
It's an OK urban adventure / zombie apocalypse type one-shot module that mostly ends up taking place in one manor-type building at the end. The module's purpose is to foreshadow the Warrior of Chaos (who possesses their own Mithel Standard) for future parts of the scenario, but ultimately getting the PCs to do this module at this point in the campaign walking away from the safety of their own Mithel Standard is going to be entirely up to the GM running the game with not a lot of help from the text. If the PCs are aware that the Corruption comes from the Dungeon (they should by the end or middle of part 3, definitely) and that the "zombies" are people that can be saved, I can't see selling a party on this as an easy sell.
Folio 3 Conclusion
Better than Folio 2 but that's not saying a lot. The dungeon design is lackluster and boring, the background text either repeats things already stated or provides nebulous GMing tips, and the included bonus adventure looks to be tough sell for a mediocre module. I'm still liking the old-school style art.