Megadungeon Book Club 1: Palace of the Vampire Queen
I'm taking part in Studio 315b's Megadungeon Book Club! We're looking at Palace of the Vampire Queen first, a dungeon I've never read (or heard of).
Initial Matter:
This module is pretty thin on the ground and it lets you know this basically immediately. There's no random encounter tables included so GMs need to provide them on their end (and they absolutely will need to have some to pad out this dungeon). The background info is pretty sparse, though to be fair this is due to it also being very direct and not wasting time with information that the rest of the dungeon will make no use of. The background is definitely serviceable and written in such a way that GMs could just provide it as a handout for players to read for context.
The legend for the map not being included on the actual map is unfortunate -- luckily the maps are incredibly direct and use something similar to the standard symbols used throughout old-school dungeons now. One has to wonder if the symbols were as well-known as they are in modern times.
It's pretty unfortunate layout-wise that the key for the dungeon rooms are not on the same spread as the maps. The player maps take up the other half of the spread of the GM's maps, it seems like it would be easy to shuffle them to the back in an appendix to keep the pertinent information of the key closer to the map they're referring to.
The actual key for the dungeon is very sparse, especially on the upper floors. Some elements of the key do not make a lot of sense, especially the large amount of humanoid-type enemies like goblins, bandits, orcs and magic-users of various flavors. Why do they stay in a vampire palace, one where the vampires are explicitly draining at least some of them for blood? The GM would need to come up with some reasoning for them to be here if pressed by the players, especially for the magic-users encountered later that are seemingly not allied with the vampire queen.
Floor 1
The layout is fine, though it would have been nice to have a door between rooms 21 and 23 to allow for more paths into that block of rooms, especially for the bandits and their leader in the southeast block. I'd include a secret door there if I ran this dungeon. The relatively ease that a party can travel directly to floor 2 if they're familiar with the floor is a large plus.
Adding even 1-word room descriptions like "kitchen" or "barracks" for 'empty' rooms would do a lot to explain how these rooms fit together and why, plus give the GM the slightest prompt to build off of. Some of these types of description are included later but the first few floors suffer greatly for their exclusion.
Floor 2
Missing key for Room 32 but it's likely there'd be a room similar to room 5 there instead. The successive-hallway fights leading to a teleport trap that just brings you back to room 32 is a fun idea I suppose but I would have liked to see it teleport PCs to other parts of this floor or floors lower down. The teleport trap does clue the PCs into the idea that some rooms will be trapped in such a way, which is nice before the later traps that do take them to more dangerous locales.
The necromancer in Room 28 is a cool idea! It gives enough of a prompt that a GM could determine why they're not being drained of blood (perhaps they are supplying the queen with undead minions? perhaps they are learning from her and are currently worth more alive than dead?). I would have liked to see the previous humanoids on Floors 2 and 1 replaced with undead minions controlled by this necromancer to give more of a sense of purpose to these floors, though fighting so many skeletons and zombies may get stale.
Like Floor 1, Floor 2's layout is engineered in such a way that a party coming back after a restock would be able to delve deeper, which I appreciate.
Floor 3
Interesting room and hallway shapes from the added diagonals, but they don't add a ton. I'd just translate them into straight lines for ease of use if I were to run the game. They do make the dungeon map less boring to look at though.
Werewolf ghouls are a cool idea. This seems to be a specific inclusion to prevent Clerics from having too much power in this dungeon. Then again, this is the palace of a Vampire Queen, they were obviously going to be powerful! The ghouls in the form of dwarf children are a much more devious idea and gives GMs a good idea what kind of schemes the Vampire Queen might be up to.
The random teleport trap that takes parties to within 5 or 6 rooms of the end seems an odd inclusion, but I suppose a group savvy to this trap could use it to their advantage. I see it more as a possible explanation for how the servants of the Vampire Queen travel so quickly through the palace (and would have loved to see a return-teleporter here too).
Floor 4
There's a selection of random cool ideas that it would have been nice to get some additional context for. The garlic garden is cool, would have been nice to see holdout vampire hunters huddled here, scheming their next move. The gold coffins and stone lammasu are in similar situations, as well as the presence of the owlbears.
Floor 5
The chaos temple, the chef ogres and the throne room and royal complex are all very cool and definitely the most evocative parts of the dungeon. I wish the other floors got this much description, it could have been a very different dungeon! The endless monster closets in the royal complex and chaos temple look a little tedious but the forces of the Vampire Queen were foreshadowed in the very beginning, so their presence makes sense here.
Endmatter
The endmatter isn't worth writing home about, they're just copies of reference materials and character sheets.
Final Thoughts
Palace of the Vampire Queen reads like someone had good ideas for 1 floor of a dungeon and filled up 4 floors with random generation done by the book (which is very likely what it literally is). In that sense, it's useful as a product and time saver if that's all you were going to do anyway for a game. It's possible that this megadungeon may have been more impactful at the time of printing, especially as an example to show how its done to new GMs. As it stands now, I wouldn't recommend new GMs (or anybody outside the idly curious) pick up Palace of the Vampire Queen.