The Ruins of Undermountain - your experiences?

[Mark Hope]

Third thread of a series on the younger classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules. It is interesting to see how everyone's experiences compared and differed.

The Ruins of Undermountain

Synopsis: A masssive dungeon beneath the city of Waterdeep, Undermountain is "the deepest dungeon of them all". In addition to crypts and catacombs, Undermountain also features the city of Skullport, a wild and lawless place on the banks of a subterranean river.

Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did) or any of its sequels? What were your experiences? Did you complete it? What were the highlights for your group?

(With thanks and a tip of the hat to Quasqueton for his ground-breaking series of classic adventure discussions.)

 

[Gilladian]

I ran bits and pieces of this one, and added tons of my own content. Eventually after I quit playing in the realms I gave it away. I wish I hadn't, just to be able to look at it again now.

It was an okay adventure. There were some fun parts of it, but overall it wasn't especially good. I liked the idea of skullport, but not the implementation of it. I remember doing major redesign work on it.

One of the best things I remember from the upper levels was a silly gold coin that was either glued to the floor or melted through the floor or something similar. My PCs spent hours poring over it and trying to figure out what was going on.

 

[Psion]

My favorite megadungeon, with the caveat that I also used ROUII and Skullport.

The whole "Halaster was a nutty mage" explanation for the magical nature of the dungeon never sat well with me. When I yoinked it out of the FR for use in my home campaign, I altered the backstory. The magical wards, portals, and preponderance of creatures were due to the fact that the Undermountain was originally a holding pen for dangerous evil creatures created by a society of powerful mages. After their civilization was brought low, some of their wards started to fade, but a lone mage (my halaster equivalent) found his way into the "control room" of UM and dallied with the wards. However, as the wards faded, drow and other underdark creatures made it in from nearby underdark tunnels.

I find it baffling that some people hated that there were undeveloped sections. To me, the UM wouldn't have been half as useful to me if it hadn't been that way. I dropped in my own encounters and adventures that ran through the undermountain, and took advantage of some of the cool encounters in surrounding areas that were written up.

Most of these "it's so undeveloped" rants ignore that the undermountain book is huge. Not being able to direct players to encounter areas you find interesting... especially in a dungeon full of teleports... is on the DM AFAIAC.

There were some great, flavorful encounter areas. One of my favorites is a room with a ghostly woman holding a staff surrounded by animated suits of armor. You go for the staff, the armor moves to strike. (This encounter becomes really nasty in 3e, since these creatures got powered up pretty nastily.)

I hated the whole "Test of Tyr" thing in Undermountain II, but loved the ancient drow fighting school and willowwood as well as some of the cool NPCs, like the archmage in permanent form of a boy.

Overall, I got a lot of mileage out of the two boxed sets.

Did you complete it?

How does one "complete" Undermountain? Stardock sort of gives you some closure, but that's as good as it gets.

Really, the "undone" thing I never got to try was to run the slavers stockade on the 3rd level. That seemed like it would have been a hoot.

 

[hong]

It's the setting for NWN: Hordes of the Underdark, so there's at least one good thing going for it....

 

[GwydapLlew]

I loved RoU. I used bits and pieces of it throughout my DMing career, but I've never based an entire campaign around it.

 

[Ambrus]

The original boxed set had beautiful poster-sized maps and lots of flavour to it, but in the end it amounted to little more than a big box of air. IIRC the text on the back of the box boasted "over 2000 rooms to explore!" Unfortunately, upon reading through the suspiciously thin booklet inside, one discovered that roughly 1850 of those rooms were completely undetailed, with no contents, monsters or treasure. The backstory and metaplot of the dungeon was likewise paper thin.

Essentially the box set was a fill-in-your-own dungeon with ready made maps and little else trying to pass itself off as a ready-to-run adventure. I bought it expecting something akin to the World's Largest Dungeon™ and ended up with some very expensive graph-paper instead. :\

Edit: I did end up running my players through it once, but it was fairly boring with only a handful of rooms having anything noteworthy in them. It amounted to little more than having the characters running around lost in a massive empty maze.

 

[Crothian]

It was fun. There is a room in there that has a lot of treausre in it assuming I'm thinking of the right place. There were like a thousand gems worth quite a bit and a very big emerald. I remeber that because my character got out with all of it and retired. Of course I left the rest of the party to do so. Ah, good times!!

 

[Rhun]

I had a great time using Undermountain. Ran an entire campaign set in Waterdeep, and my players would make sorties into the dungeon on a fairly regular basis. I've even continued to use it in 3rd edition D&D. As I think I mentioned in another thread, more of my players' PCs have been killed in Undermountain than probably any other "module" that I've ran.

 

[Rhun]

There were like a thousand gems worth quite a bit and a very big emerald.

That emerald was worth 300,000 gold. I remember it well. It was funny, because I went by what it said about the gem. Something like "The PCs will quickly discover that although very few people can afford to purchase the gem, many people can afford to hire thieves and thugs to steal the gem."

 

[diaglo]

i never used it as written. but i bought, read, and converted parts of it for my OD&D campaign.

WotC has other stuff for it too: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ru/20050309a

Maggoth's Castle, Stardock, and Lost Levels are there too: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downloads