D&D 5E Waterdeep - Dungeon of the Mad Mage

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Thinking about running this as a twice a month get together and play with friends/family. What are your thoughts on Waterdeep - Dungeon of the Mad Mage?

 

[ezo]

I would run it as a DM and love to play in it.

I played in Undermountain/Waterdeep in prior editions, but not 5E, and enjoyed them.

 

[TiQuinn]

As a player who had a good DM, I loved it. One of the favorite campaigns and the first time we made to level 20.

I think my DM would have a little bit of a different opinion. He told us while he enjoyed running it, he had to use a lot of outside resources to really make the campaign work, and the later levels had a lot of rework done to the monsters to make them challenges to the party. I believe he followed a Reddit channel for Dungeon of the Mad Mage that had a lot of tips and tricks which he said was invaluable to him.

 

[Retreater]

It's bad. It's boring. It's incomplete.
In my group it's described as the "big, empty dungeon of nothing."
It's basically the equivalent of someone just drawing a bunch of rooms on graph paper with nothing to fill them.
Just download some free maps from Dyson Logos and populate them yourself.

 

[Andras]

The problem I had as a player is you don't go anywhere. There's the whole wide world out there and you are stuck in mom's basement for the whole thing.

 

[Turgenev]

Never ran it, but it was a blast to do the maps.

Cheers,
Tim

 

[Enrico Poli1]

I DMed it. It's more of a mini-setting then a campaign. If played as it is, it's utterly boring. I suggest to be creative and find a plot to use within this setting.

 

[Evaniel]

Never ran it, but it was a blast to do the maps.

Cheers,
Tim

The maps were the best part for me, easily.

DotMM is a bit of a heart breaker for me. I have wanted to run an Undermountain campaign ever since I got my hands on the original boxed set back in the early 90s. I was positively buzzing to run it for 5e.

My group bounced off it pretty hard. Without a lot of heavy lift from a DM (who's also willing to incorporate third party stuff, Reddit, DMsGuild, etc.), it feels like a lot of floundering in the dark. I'd love to give it another try, but I don't know if I'm willing to put in the work for a module I already paid for.

All of that said, I love love love Turgenev's maps. The early levels are very useful, scaled-down versions of the original. The lower levels are truly inspired in terms of how to access certain areas, how to circumnavigate others, and overall are a really good study of megadungeon map design.

 

[pukunui]

OK so I started running this as a palate cleanser after years of COVID disruptions messed up a bunch of more plot-heavy campaigns. I sold it as an "old school; beer and pretzels; kick in the door, kill the monsters, and take their stuff" style of campaign. There is no plot; the plot is what the players make of it.

I downloaded the DotMM Companion from the DMs Guild and started off using the Halaster's game show variant. The party near-TPKed against the drow in the temple on the 3rd floor.

So with the replacement party, I made it so Halaster wanted them to do some "house cleaning" for him so he could reset the dungeon. It was a bit of a slog, and they did skip a few floors, but we did eventually make it down to Halaster's lair!

We had a lot of fun with it, and I didn't put a lot of effort into DMing it (with a few exceptions). It was the right campaign for us at the right time.

Now I'm running The Wild Beyond The Witchlight as a palate cleanser after all that dungeon crawling!

 

[TiQuinn]

I will say one other thing about DotMM - even if you don't run the campaign as its own thing, each individual level stands on its own as something to piecemeal out into other games as standalone dungeons.