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Switch to Forum Live View Halls of Undermountain
5 months ago  ::  Jan 07, 2013 - 12:37AM #21
LiamJ
Date Joined: Jan 5, 2013
Posts: 5

Jan 7, 2013 -- 12:34AM, WhisperMagellan wrote:

More or less. It is an open setting, with 3 built in adventures. The text specifically says that it is a labyrinth, with lots of side passages and tunnels, and plenty of empty rooms you can put whatever you want into.

One thing I find odd: the first adventure is specifically lvl1. By the last fight, your players might be lvl2, but the last fight is a lvl7 encounter. LVL7! That's level plus 4 or 5. And the next adventure listed seems to be back to lvl1, and seems to be assumed to take place after the first one (though you can easily adjust however you want).


5 levels above? Seems perfect to adjust with my own monsters etc. to gain those missing levels correct? Also plenty of rooms, passages and tunnels sounds great.

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5 months ago  ::  Jan 07, 2013 - 7:23AM #22
mboss77
Date Joined: Aug 29, 2008
Posts: 1,108

Jan 5, 2013 -- 9:45PM, teacha wrote:

This is something to note also. At one time it was announced that a future DUNGEON magazine would have a fourth adventure for Halls of Undermountain that would finish the quest that is weaved throughout the three part adventure. Keep an eye out for it.


There's a strong possibility that this won't happen at all.

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5 months ago  ::  Jan 08, 2013 - 12:58AM #23
Neutronium_Dragon
Date Joined: Aug 11, 2006
Posts: 5,778
Given the length of time that has passed between HoU's release and now, the fourth adventure is probably another victim of the 5E focus-shift.

  --

  Unfortunately, the "levels 1-5" thing is essentially a fib: the first adventure is balanced for a level 3 party. A 1st level group is pretty much going to be stuck picking away at it one encounter at a time before retreating, which doesn't work very well in terms of presenting a coherent story but presumably was meant to "recapture the old school feel" or whatever the talking point was at the time.
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5 months ago  ::  Jan 08, 2013 - 3:46AM #24
frothsof
Date Joined: Jun 4, 2010
Posts: 10,488
I actually really like that aspect of it. In fact, I think this is a pretty good product, although nowhere near as cool as it could have been had they kept it a boxed set. Best thing about it: 60-plus rooms and not a skill challenge to be found.
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5 months ago  ::  Jan 08, 2013 - 11:46AM #25
Style75
Date Joined: Oct 25, 2009
Posts: 1,957
I ran it last summer as a 6 session mini-campaign and enjoyed every minute of it. It's a great, old school dungeon crawl. I think it's important to not railroad the party into doing the quests if they don't want to. One of the best parts of Undermountain is its sheer size and complexity. By railroading them you are effectively turn a huge, interesting dungeon into a linear dungeon. Instead I let the party go whereever they want and only payed attention to the quests if they intersected with the rooms that involved the quests.

I don't know how much access to technology you have at your game table, but I ran maptools on a laptop and another laptop to display the player view map. I used a single token to show the party location and then revealed only the part of undermountain that they could see. It worked out great, they loved it.

In fact, my party loved undermountain so much they want another crack at it this summer. 

.... and yes, get the Monster Vault. It'll work with MM1, but the encounters as written are designed to work with the MV monsters so it will save you a lot of time. No need to tinker with stats or redesign encounters.
Want to know more about the history of D&D, especially how to play older editions of the game? Check out Crazy Monkey's "Tour through the editions":

http://community.wizards.com/crazymonkey/go/forum/view/133793/225799/Asylum_Play-by-Post

The current edition is BECMI, the most popular form of Basic D&D and the adventure is the classic Red Box quest to kill Bargle the evil magic user. Check it out, learn about the games roots, and enjoy the story as it unfolds.
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5 months ago  ::  Jan 09, 2013 - 11:45AM #26
WhisperMagellan
Date Joined: Jun 8, 2010
Posts: 2,701
Yet once again, WotC's shoddy editing policy allowed tons of typos to creap into their product. "charasters". Really? A basic spell-check should have caught that one! BEFORE it went to press.

I find the map numbering system odd. Encounter at room #49 continues with 53, because suddenly they wanted to detail something 300 feet away down a different hallway?
Still, reading through it has been fun. I can see starting my next campaign with this one, and adapting some of it to one of my PbP games.
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For some reason, none of my friends were surprised by this...
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