Megadungeon Book Club 2: Under Xylarthen's Tower
I'm taking part in Studio 315b's Megadungeon Book Club! We're looking at Under Xylarthen's Tower this week, a megadungeon by Jeff Rients. I've heard the name and read some of Rient's blogposts in the past, but have to admit I've mostly experienced their work secondhand through publications they've influenced.
Check out last week's post here.
Initial Matter:
I love rumor tables that are all technically true. While its fun to get 2 rumors that directly contradict each other and try to figure out which one is right, I like the experience more when rumors are used as cryptic foreshadowing and post-fact realizations. Making rumors that are technically true fulfills that goal while still being mysterious enough that you're not directly telling PCs the answer for a portion of the dungeon, which is what I think most GMs are trying to avoid.
Level 1
Layout wise, this dungeon almost makes it easy to have room key on one side, map on the other. If you printed this out (as was the assumed authorial intent judging by the year of publication), you'd be able to shuffle the maps and notes in such a way as to make this easy. If I were to run this, I'd immediately pull all of the maps out and put them side by side with the notes.
Room keys are to the point, featuring adjectives somewhat uncommonly and leaving flowery descriptions to the GM to provide (a good thing). Rooms seem to be mainly 1-note and rarely just "empty."
The actual contents of the room seem to clearly be for an experienced dungeon-crawling audience. There are several "gotchas" in the rooms like an ogre who will only accept a password in a specific racial language (that isn't ogre) and a statue that reacts to the Hand of Vecna. Neither of these are egregious feelsbad moments at the table, but they're all not dungeon tricks that you pull on someone who's never played before. The HD and typing of monsters on the floor (wight, ogre, hordes of rats) also point towards expectations of an adventuring party with level 2-4 dungeoneers, a point supported by the generation tables at the end of the text.
The map features lots of small loops and places where groups would need to make a choice about where to explore next, which is great. Smaller details have been written directly on the map itself, making it easier for a GM to run using just the map itself.
Level 2
More "if you know, you know <wink>" style rooms on this floor. Openly visible treasure is used as bait to lure parties into ambushes or time-wastes for more encounters while simultaneously not being worth a lot. The treasure that is worth hauling is hidden inside seeming structural elements, like the large hoards of coins hidden within one of the pillars of an otherwise innocuous room or underneath a loose cobblestone in the floor. Monsters hide in closets to scare hirelings and henchmen. A door that only opens for a certain class.
The map continues at roughly the same quality as the one from level 1. The northern-most room marked "16" on the map doesn't correspond to the key and looks to be a mapping error of some kind. There are several loops and paths that you can see some groups would take to certain other parts of the dungeon (travelling deeper to level 5, taking the teleporter in room 16, etc). The interconnectivity of the floors continues to be good, with level 1 having access to floors 2, 3 and 4 and level 2 having access to floors 1, 3, 4, 5, and "7" (7 not actually included in book). The hobgoblins in level 2 along with the provided designer-commentary go a long way towards indicating them as the early-floor faction, rife for negotiation, bargaining and mercenary work.
Level 3
Here's the meat of the hobgoblin faction with their main headquarters. The actual placement and room structure of the hobgoblin area does not make a lot of sense -- why are the guards all split up into different rooms in the leadup to the throne room when they're all some combination of "they come running if they hear battle, they fight to the death, they're big and strong?" I'd have liked a little more focus on how GMs could run the hobgoblins as a potentially neutral faction (do they have goods they're willing to trade, for example?). I do like that the hallway structure points towards allowing PCs to walk through hobgoblin territory but not actually into their rooms.
I'm not impressed by the constant referral to floors that don't actually exist, especially ones that are guarded by seemingly important characters like Eragoth the Accursed. I know that the author described the rationale for their inclusion but I'd have rather they be excised from the text and the dungeon rearranged. If a GM wants to add something, it's trivial to knock down a wall or include a secret door, much harder to explain why Eragoth the Accursed is guarding a seemingly empty room that has mysteriously lost its stairs to floor 8.
Whats the obsession with having useful information in toilets and latrines? Including them at all is something I get if you're going for Gygaxian Naturalism, but I assume their inclusion leads dungeon designers to think that they need to "prove their worth" as an inclusion in the dungeon and so stick something important or valuable within instead of leaving it as an empty room. Why?
The rest of this floor is standard closet monsters and dungeon design. I do find it odd that so many enemies are so closely crammed together (surely Fumark's group would have into conflict with the gnolls down the hallway?). The design is serviceable if not super memorable.
Level 4
Shame that the white apes here aren't connected at all to the ones on level 3 (and are also separated by the hobgoblins, making any connection even less likely). The reference to the one mutant ape went over my head but at least its called out in the text that they might ally with the PCs. The mummies of this floor, excepting the Egyptian-influence, do not seem like an odd inclusion at all judging by the prevalence of other types of undead here. The author breaks his 2-floor lack of design context streak to to explain their presence though so perhaps this was necessary at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, the red dragon's lair apparently has no way for such a larger creature to enter it. Possibly Medora was an active swimmer and could escape through level 7, but given that we do not have the text for the level we will just need to assume. The dragons are surrounded by mummies as their nearest neighbors, perhaps these creatures are servants (or former servants) of Medora? I do find it funny that a group of particularly unlucky PCs might traipse through floor 1, find the stairs to floor 4 via floor 3 and end up with Medora's lair as their first actual encounter with a creature inside the dungeon.
Map-wise, we seem to be getting to the point where the author is placing down blocks of ideas they have surrounded by empty rooms. This is fine, but is a noticeable departure from the relative interconnectedness of floor 1 and the hobgoblin section of 2 and 3.
Level 5
Maintain the "points of light ideas in a sea of empty rooms" pattern, now with added minotaurs. Seems like they exist as a possible vestigial faction within the later floors of the dungeon?
The inclusion of the purple worms as explicitly having sex is an odd choice and one that reeks of Gygaxian Naturalism. It is funny, though I don't know players are supposed to interact with it as anything other than a spectacle before murdering / being murdered.
The inclusion of deeper floors continues here, with new, deeper floors continuing to be referenced. I'd remove all the ways to deeper floors near the purple worms and just replace them with an entrance to the Underworld, from which the purple worms obviously came.
The inclusion of an explicitly nude and sexualized humanoid specific to the author's sexual taste is not one I think we'd see if the work had been intended as a product to be sold. It feels a bit gross to include, especially looking at the potential pattern of sexualized dungeon denizens when combined with the "Amazonian" hobgoblin queen and Medusas on level 6. If I ran this, I'd replace the Medusa with a clothed version that maintained petrification powers similar to Medusa in other D&D settings.
Level 6
Standard fare by this point. The mini-area is a funny gimmick and reveals that in the author's setting, elves must be shorter than humans, though it's a shame that there isn't anything more interesting than a couple of closet monsters guarding coins in that section. The giantess and her hydras are a cool inclusion, with the fire trap in room 6 being a good inclusion for a party that had no other access to fire damage to defeat the hydras should the party choose to attack the giantess. The ogre neighborhood in one corner of the floor is just an excuse to throw 18 ogres at the party at once, with the ogres having seemingly no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
The purple worms, the mummies and the sexualized Medusa patterns continue here, making floor 6 feel very reminiscent of level 5.
Final Thoughts
This dungeon feels extremely of-its-time for dungeon crawlers. It's apparent that almost everything faced in the dungeon is intended to be looted, fought or ogled. Little concern is given for interactions with dungeon dressing within the text, though I expect that quite a bit would be done at the table. The most interesting non-fighty things in the dungeon were the various magical statues which we know from the Introduction section were generated using the Ready Ref Sheets from Judges Guild.
The pop-culture references and the alterations to standard D&D fare along with the twists on classic dungeon tropes (along with an explicit inclusion of sex objects for ogling) all point towards an experienced dungeon master designing a dungeon for players that had already seen the inside of many dungeons and played for many years already. Much as I whined about the inclusion of entrances to other floors, the author did note that this was pulled out of their existing notes and included as is, making the existence of later floors merely something not included, not non-existent. The room key is very usable, excusing the lack of ability to reference the maps and the key in the same PDF spread, which I'm chalking up to merely assumptions about media consumption at the time it was written.
I don't think I'd ever run this dungeon, but not because it's badly written or designed. The existence of it as a document that others have access to is a point towards more GMs needing to do the same, hand-made maps and personal references included. The value of this dungeon is more as an example of "You can do it too!" than as an actual dungeon, though it certainly serves its purpose for that far better than the average shlock you'd get from a dungeon generator or 5e adventure book.
The quality of the key and room descriptions does make me question why its so low on the megadungeon ranking list we're working off of, perhaps the inclusion of sexual content and lack of editing polish is tanking it's rating?