Megadungeon Book Club 6: Castle Triskelion 3
I'm taking part in Studio 315b's Megadungeon Book Club! We're looking at Castle Triskelion by Tim Stypinski for the next couple weeks. It's a much longer megadungeon than the last few so we're reading it in chunks, this week is the second floor (3rd floor for us Americans) and lower level of the Outer Ward.
Check out last week's post here.
Lower Level
To remind us all, the lower level is the level that's accessible from the ruined stables from the outside of the Outer Ward. I thought that it was clearly accessible from the outside on my first reading of the Introduction section. Looking at the description for the outer doors here though, the burned out stable blocks the doors and would need a week with a large crew to clear it. The PCs could still break the windows in some of the rooms to get in (and I wish these were marked on the map), but I'm disappointed to see that this is not actually the side entrance I thought it was.
The placement of the Lower Level does make me think it's intended primarily to be a bypass-level with some rooms for experienced parties to make a base camp here. There's easy access to the Outer Ward through two staircases and the complex could easily be gotten to from the outside once the outer doors were cleared. The secret passage past the evil temple leading right to the Upper Dungeons makes this a really convenient passageway for a party who's uninterested in walking past the previously cleared rooms of the Outer Ward and Inner Ward.
I like the pit puzzle room and the placement of the ghouls. I don't like the inclusion of the ogre of the Ground Floor of the Outer Ward included here on a separate level -- Sizemore (the ogre) should really be a roamer and have more of a presence on the Ground Floor so its frustrating that his description and statblock are on a different floor entirely. Sizemore's section of the Lower Level is entirely cut off from the rest of the Lower Level so it doesn't even maintain any thematic inclusion to the rest of the floor either.
If I were to run this floor, I'd cut the time necessary to clear the burned rubble to 1 day for a large crew and 2 days for a small one. I'd also have both Ambrogino (+ his ghouls) and Sizemore be more of a roaming presence on the Ground Floor, preying on goblins and adventurers.
Second Floor
These rooms are all mostly stand-alone rooms described in the same prose and manner of the Ground and First floors. They're competently written (they convey the ambience in each room effectively) but the rooms themselves are a bit boring. The wing that makes up the captain's rooms was interesting, I enjoyed the inclusion of a treasure map outside the dungeon in the captain's treasure room.
This floor is good and competently described, but none of the rooms are particularly memorable. As I read this dungeon further, I find myself wishing more and more that the long prose paragraphs describing each room were written in bullet points or had special formatting (bold, italics) to help me parse them quicker. Triskelion is definitely thematic and its descriptions would save me a lot of time writing rooms, but actually running them feels like it would be a pain.