Reading Rappan Athuk: Level 3

I'm continuing my read-through of Rappan Athuk with the third level, "Beware of Purple Worms!" It's another level that doesn't quite manage to be competently written, but isn't noticeably awful, either. It has a moment or two that is fairly decent, and maybe an idea that could be reused in another, better dungeon.

Beware of Purple Worms

That warning is inscribed in glowing runes just before the entrance to the dungeon level proper. As warnings go, it's a little vague: the purple worms attack people in the center of the cavern that is the first major room, and also are attracted to light sources. Another line or two about staying near the cavern walls and/or not using light sources would probably have been useful, but it's a warning that explicitly names a threat in the dungeon. For Rappan Athuk, that's pretty good.

The description of the level itself claims there is a delicate food chain: the purple worms feed on giant rats and are hunted by umber hulks. Exterminating one of the elements of the food chain changes the presence of the other elements, and the GM is directed to "adjust the wandering monster table accordingly." That's the kind of directive I might write in my own campaign notes as a reminder to myself, but I think it's a bit lacking in a published dungeon. It's basically an instruction to make something up, and if the GM had the time or desire to make stuff up, why buy a published dungeon?

Pointless Treasure

There's a very well hidden tomb of an unknown mage in the purple worm cavern. There's some extremely nice treasure: staff of power, robe of the arch-magi, and roughly 10,000 gp in jewelry. All that treasure is also cursed if stolen, with a curse that is extremely hard to remove, requiring multiple high level spells and then inflicting a secondary curse on the thief. It's possibly realistic, but it basically means that the PCs either can't take the treasure, or get punished heavily for doing so. It works out to about half a page of text that might as well not be there.

Maybe Interesting, Definitely Complicated

A description of a rakasha's lair and his multi-layered illusions takes up two or three pages. The rakasha has different illusions depending on how dangerous he thinks the PCs are, and each of his three rooms gets different descriptions depending on which illusion is in place. I can't really tell if this is a hint of brilliance or more humdrum stuff, because the set up is just too complicated. Still, it seems better than most parts of Rappan Athuk.

Level Layout

The purple worm cavern is on the
middle left, and the rest of the level
is on the middle right.

This is a surprisingly short level, with only 9 named rooms and another six subrooms. As is usual for Rappan Athuk, it's a fairly linear level. There's a total of three branching points, and it's otherwise a straight shot. The map makes it look slightly more complicated than it is.

There is a subcomplex of rooms that loop and branch, but since they're all explicitly empty except for random dungeon dressing and random encounters, I don't know how useful or interesting they are.

One of the branching points is a river passage to level 3a. As usual in Rappan Athuk, there's no text in this level describing the passage, and the text in level 3a vague about this passage: there's certainly a rapid currrent in level 3a that will carry people to level 6a in twenty minutes, but there's no suggestion of how long it takes to get from level 3 to level 3a. Somewhat bizarrely, the level 3a room description alludes to the river in level 3 splitting, so it's possible to go straight to level 6a as well as go through level 3a on the way to level 6a, but there's no text in level 3 about it. The description of level 6a barely mentions the river at all, and says it comes from level 3 only. It's endemic of the slap-dash, half-assed way that Rappan Athuk is put together.

Opinions So Far

Rappan Athuk isn't a very good dungeon. It's very linear, both in its design for individual levels and for the connections between levels. It's uninspired, with underdeveloped encounter design. It's not put together very well, as I've noted about the few alternate level connections like the river above.

I don't think I'd enjoy playing in Rappan Athuk. And as a GM, I'm annoyed that I paid money for a not very polished, not very well designed adventure. Fixing the problems with Rappan Athuk would take nearly as much effort as creating my own dungeon (because that's basically what I would have to do). It wouldn't even provide much inspiration for a redesign, since the individual levels are so bland and badly put together.

I'm going to go through a couple more levels to see if some part of it starts to hang together. If not, I'm going to give up and try doing a read through of something that isn't so uninspiring.

Reading Rappan Athuk: Level 2

Another Monday, another level in my read-through of Rappan Athuk: Reloaded. Level 2 is bland and uninspired, but bad not bad in the way the previous levels were: it's not completely linear, has no inexplicable death traps, and doesn't involve toilet humor. It doesn't really have anything going for it, but it's still an improvement.

Rappan Athuk's level design has advanced
all the way to "not obviously bad." They
need to do better.

Boring and Pointless Hallways

Level 2 is officially titled "Marthek's Place & Ambro's Base," but that doesn't amount to much. It's mostly a square made from long hallways, with several complexes of a few rooms off one side or another of a corridor. The map itself is dull and I doubt these would be memorable levels of a campaign.

The rooms themselves feel unconnected to each other: Marthek is avoided by the other creatures, the moody skeletal warrior lair stays in his crypt, and Ambro the ogre doesn't go on patrol. Some dungeons have an organic quality to them, and a sense that things might be happening behind the scenes. Rappan Athuk doesn't have that quality or sense, even though the text refers repeatedly to the evil priests on level 4 who are supposed to go around resetting traps and using charm spells to produce new minions. Instead, every area is its own encounter, and there's no sense of what the "Dungeon of Graves" was before it because a monster infested hole in the ground.

There's nothing in this level that really ties it to any other level of Rappan Athuk or to the dungeon as a whole. It could easily be replaced by something better if a GM wanted to put in the work, or it could be painlessly removed and inserted in some other dungeon, though why anyone would bother is beyond me.

Marthek and Ambro, Unremarkable Antagonists

Given that the name of the level refers to these two, you'd think they'd be impressive or memorable. They aren't. They're completely forgettable. The most interesting thing about either of them is a map which is a pointer to a different adventure by the same people. If the most interesting part of a published encounter is a suggestion that the party go someplace else, then that encounter has real problems.

Marthek himself is a barbarian, once chaotic good and now cursed to be chaotic evil by insanity. He can be cured, but since he attacks on sight and there aren't any rumors about him, I doubt most players are going to try to cure him. More likely, he's going to get hit by a Color Spray or Hold Person or just beat down thanks to the action economy. Without a lot of work from the GM, no one is going to remember him by the end of the session.

Ambro is an ogre, leading a group of 4 other ogres. There's a little bit of pointless color in his room (coins lined up heads or tails as the ogres sort them) that I can't tell is amusing or slightly crass but either way doesn't add much to the encounter. It's nominally a fairly high level encounter but I would expect most PC groups that got this far into the dungeon to handle it with ease.

Saracek the Badly Boxed Off

Saracek is the previously mentioned skeletal warrior. The module text frankly states that low level parties shouldn't enter his crypt, but the lock is only DC 30, so a reasonably competent 3rd level thief should be able to open it. I assume this is more of Rappan Athuk's general difficulty in converting to D&D 3rd edition, but it's still a bit sad that they couldn't even manage to prevent a low level party from getting into it.

Also annoying is that there's a warning at the door, written in such a way that a character needs to know both the Celestial and Infernal languages to read it. Depending on the campaign, that might not be combination of languages that anyone in the party can manage, in which case the warning is useless. Even if the party can read the warning, "in death a dark warrior-king" is probably not sufficient information for a party to determine that there's a skeletal warrior beyond the door and evaluate whether they're good enough to defeat him. So the entire warning is most likely a waste of time.

Some Stuff That's Incomplete

The map shows that rooms 10 and 20 have exits to the surface. I had to read through the room descriptions twice to find the text for the relevant tunnels. Room 10 exits to "a cave" but doesn't specify where the cave is on the surface map, and the text for the wilderness section doesn't mention this entrance either. Room 20 also just exits to the surface with no location specified, but has the added benefit of having a second tunnel descend to level 4 without specifying where on level 4 it goes. The level 4 map has a tunnel that goes to room 20 on level 2, so that's answered, but the room description for the area near the tunnel doesn't mention the tunnel or the passage to level 2. It's just shoddy.

Opinions So Far

This isn't a terrible level, which as I said, makes it better than the previous couple of levels. But it isn't a great or even fairly decent level either. It's nothing that any GM couldn't come up with in a couple of hours of work with a random dungeon generator, a copy of a Monster's Manual, and a sheet of graph paper. There's not a single interesting setpiece, trap, or random encounter in the entire mess.

Hopefully, the rest of Rappan Athuk will be better. At this point, I really think Keep on the Borderlands is a more interesting dungeon to play in, and more useful for a GM as either inspiration or a learning tool. Rappan Athuk has nothing going for it.

Reading Rappan Athuk: Alternate Level 1A

I'm continuing with my read-through of Rappan Athuk Reloaded. The next level is the Temple of Final Sacrament, level 1A, an alternate entrance to the dungeon that is part of the new content in Rappan Athuk Reloaded, as opposed to just Rappan Athuk.

Once again, this level is a mess of questionable design decisions and shoddy mapping. On the plus side, it doesn't include toilet humor or questionable instant kill traps.

Finding the Temple

The temple entrance is above ground, north east of Rappan Athuk itself. A 5th or 6th level party, which could probably handle the Rappan Athuk main entrance, could just stumble across the Temple while mapping the surrounding wilderness: it's less than 5 miles off the road. There's no indication that the temple entrance leads to a particularly deadly dungeon, so the first sign of danger might be the bone crawler in the first room.

The bone crawler looks like a pretty nasty closet troll to me, capable of delivering 4 attacks on each of 3 different PCs and doing 1d8+5 per attack, and hidden behind an illusionary wall. It's probably not too difficult for a 10th level party, but it might be a nasty surprise for a 5th level party.

Temple Layout

The temple consists of fifteen rooms, laid out in a spiral. There's no real choice: move on to the next room or don't. Each room consists of a nasty guardian: some kind of fairly powerful monster usually backed by a trap.

There's a poem outside the temple that very vaguely alludes to each of the guardians, and the text says "perspicacious characters may realize this to their advantage" but I'm not really sure how. Even looking at the poem and the GM text for each guardian, I can't see how it helps. The stanza for the third guardian reads as follows:

"NOT IN THE FLESH, MERE MEAT TO ROT TO NOTHING; LET THE WORMS FEAST UPON IT."

and the third guardian (flesh) is an ebon ooze, a new variant of the black pudding. It takes full damage from fire and force attacks, is stunned by cold attacks, and doesn't split when attacked by slashing weapons like black puddings do. It isn't specially vulnerable to worms and I think a party is supposed to blow through all 104 HP with weapon attacks. Nothing about the stanza suggests ooze to me, and nothing about the stanza tells me how to defeat the ooze even if I know what it is.

Later on, there's a riddle "what is the third sacrament?" that can supposedly be answered by the fourth stanza of the poem. The poem is the Epitaph of the Final Sacrament, so there's no particular reason to think it's relevant to answering a question about the third sacrament.

Final Battle

The climax of this level is a 5th level Sorcerer that is also a Crypt Thing, protected by a lesser globe of invulnerability. I'm not sure how much of a challenge that is for a 10th level party, but I suspect its not that challenging. There's some confusing text about how its magic throne revives it after a few days unless the throne is destroyed and the room is hallowed by a spell, but also that the throne loses its magic if removed from the room. I suspect that's an editing error in that the "all magic" refers to the throne's constant defensive spells, not its vaguely defined ability to revive the Crypt Thing.

There is an option to communicate with the Crypt Thing, which I note mostly because she has perhaps a paragraph of backstory.  If this were a Paizo product, the backstory would take up a page and a half and would displace other, more useful information.

Opinions So Far

This is a terrible level. There's some justification for why it's a simple linear trek through a bunch of challenges of varying difficulty, but time spent coming up with that justification could have be spent making a more interesting design. It's just boring.

And given that there's no evidence of a time limit, there's no reason for a moderately intelligent party to not take it one room a day, and alpha strike with all their best spells on each room. That's another piece of bad design. I'm sure the designers of Rappan Athuk would have some kind of hostile GM response to a group of PCs approaching it that way, and even though I would loathe that response, I wish they had gone ahead and put it in the text of the adventure.

Reading Rappan Athuk: The Ground Level and the 1st Level

So I never really did much with my read-through of Rappan Athuk. Now that I'm running a small mega-dungeon, I've decided to try to pick up on the read-through, adding a little more every week.

Ground Level: The Mausoleum

This entire area shows a continued lack of familiarity with 3rd edition D&D mechanics: the handy sidebar puts the Difficulty Level at EL7, but the some of the wandering monsters include dire rats, the locked doors are DC 20 (which a 7th level rogue without equipment should be able to open by taking 10), and there's a DC 8 Spot check to find a hidden compartment (search focused characters shouldn't be able to NOT find that compartment at 7th level if they look for it).

There's an enormously hokey bit where there are some freshly dug graves of famous adventurers, alongside an empty grave with a headstone bearing a PC's name. I get that Rappan Athuk is supposed to be a total bloodbath, but that's the kind of trick that works in Scooby-Doo, not when dealing mid to high level adventurers who can cast Divination spells and are going to wonder "how did that happen?"

The crowning glory of the Mausoleum is the nigh-inescapable quick kill death trap for anyone that didn't search a random (though admittedly, prominently placed) statue to find the compartment and the hidden key. Using any other method to get into the Mausoleum sets off a rising floor trap that crushes the PCs into the ceiling and kills them. There's a possible escape via a secret door which is actually easy to find (if the PCs search the right area), but gets blocked by the floor after a minute, so the PCs need to get lucky in their search.

Frankly, the entire thing seems like a dick move for a killer-GM. It's not entirely as bad as it could be, because there is an easily available key that circumvents the trap, but the fact that the statue isn't mentioned in the read-aloud text means that PCs aren't necessarily even going to find it. The fact that the trap seals the secret door four minutes before the trap kills the PCs is also poor form, because it means that through little fault of their own, PCs can get killed even though they've found the secret door. The entire thing seems like a recipe for player metagaming, using the knowledge that their dead characters' gained in a TPK to circumvent the trap the next time around. As I mentioned in my last review, all this would be less onerous if the rumors at least mentioned a deadly trap at the door and the need to find a key.

Alternately, the entire thing is just an aggravating example of pixel-bitching, and could just be replaced by a door to the first level of the dungeon.

Dungeon Level 1: Lair of the "Dung Monster"

There's really no other way to put this: Rappan Athuk is a published adventure that deals with toilet humor. I'm not really sure what to think about a GM who would put toilet humor like this in his personal campaign, much less one that would keep it for publication. It's just really juvenile.

At any rate, level 1 of Rappan Athuk is schizophrenic. It's nominally an EL 3 zone (which can only be reached by fighting your way through 8 gargoyles, an EL6+ encounter), but the titular monster is invulnerable to non-magic weapons and has insane magic resistance (SR 100? really?) and 140 hit points and can grapple and engulf anyone foolish enough to fight it at melee range. The rest of the foes are mostly minor trash monsters like dire rats or lone ghasts.

The level itself has a fairly linear flow, with only two real branches among fourteen rooms and no loops. The corridors also flow straight into the rooms, so there isn't much choice as to what to avoid and what to encounter. About half the encounters are traps, placed more or less randomly and with little warning. Treasure is either minimal (22 cp in one room, 200 cp in another) or ridiculously hard to retrieve (dig for a week to find a +1 keen short sword; there's a 25% of encountering random monsters every 15 minutes while digging).

The climax of the level is a fairly well designed ambush by a group of wererats. There are some notes on how to modify the ambush so it's less of an automatic TPK for low powered groups, but it seems like the entire encounter could be better written to either provide a level appropriate challenge or better warning of the potential danger. And then the level could have been rewritten to be less linear and provide more than one way to reach the next level. I mean, there's an underground river to level 9, but I meant something that most parties would consider taking.

Opinions So Far

This is a fairly awful entrance and first level: maybe fun for sadistic killer GMs and players that don't take the game seriously at all, but inconsistent about the difficulty level for no real reason. Also, it involves some really puerile toilet humor. There's really nothing here that can be easily repurposed for another game, either, and most of it would need to rewritten (and in the case of the map, redrawn) before being used.

One of the many reasons why Castle of Horrors started with Castle Ravenloft, and I didn't even consider Rappan Athuk, was because Castle Ravenloft had lots of encounters that could be used more or less as they were written and the maps provided a lot of branches and level changes for exploring. Rappan Athuk provides none of that, and is worse for it.

Reading Rappan Athuk: Introduction and Wilderness

As part of my project to maybe write a mega-dungeon, I've decided to read through some of the published mega-dungeons for inspiration. Unfortunately, most published mega-dungeons are generally known to be awful. So I'm going to have to rant about them.

I'm starting with a fairly famous one, "Rappan Athuk (Reloaded)", which you can get from the finely crafted link there.

About Rappan Athuk

Rappan Athuk, per its introduction chapter, is "nothing more and nothing less than a good, old-fashioned, First Edition dungeon crawl updated for Revised Third Edition play." (All editions referenced here are D&D, not GURPS or Shadowrun or anything like that.) It was released by Necromancer Games in 2000 with some supplements and web material coming out in 2001, and re-released in 2006 in an expanded (Reloaded) edition for D&D3.5 that included all the previously published materials and some additional levels.

Rappan Athuk Reloaded consists 3 books. The first details the namesake dungeon, all 31 levels and sublevels, and the surrounding wilderness. The second book contains the monster and NPC statistics. The last book has the relevant maps.

The concept of Rappan Athuk is simple: two centuries or more ago, a group of refugee priests of Orcus carved an underground complex beneath a hill and eventually made a mausoleum and graveyard above it. For a hundred years, curious and crazy delving bands have been exploring the complex and mostly dying horribly. Still, rumors abound of great riches somewhere in the complex, so delvers keep venturing out.

The Introduction

The first chapter explains what Rappan Athuk is and lays out the conventions for numbering rooms, statting out monsters, and describing the standard characteristics of a given floor (in terms of suggested PC level, corridor and room height, normal light sources, etc). This is pretty standard stuff, though I do appreciate that they had a standard format for describing basic information about each level and used it consistently in the following chapters.

The Introduction chapter also includes a table of 60 rumors - 44 are mostly true, and 16 are generally false. There's a weird rules quirk in that most PCs have a chance of knowing 2 rumors, but wizards, clerics, and bards have a chance of knowing a third. Druids and sorcerers don't get that chance, and there's no provision for PCs to go seek out more rumors by making Gather Information checks. (As an aside, the conversion of this adventure to the D&D3 ruleset is often a bit weak, but since I'd have to convert it by ear to GURPS if I were going to use it, I don't really care beyond some minimal snarking.)

The rumors are generally useless. Most of them are so vague as to be meaningless: "Giant scorpions guard the way to the tomb of a fell king" provides what information, exactly? If the rumor specified a level, or mentioned some kind of weakness of these particular scorpions, that'd be something, but as it is, there's nothing for the PCs to do with it.

Another problem with the rumors is that they don't cover things that you'd expect them to. The mausoleum has a very lethal, nearly unavoidable instant death trap unless the delvers use a specific magic key that can be found nearby. This is the kind of thing that you'd hope previous explorers of the damned dungeon would relate, not "A great city of Goblins lies deep in the complex, and they are followers of Orcus."

Wilderness Areas: Dying Outside the Dungeon

That's the actual name of the second chapter. It's actually a reasonable wilderness area: a coastal region, with some lowlands lying between the sea and a forest, with a semi-patrolled trade road providing access to Rappan Athak and points beyond. Each of the major terrains in the area have their own write-up, including random encounter tables with encounter write-ups and a few monster lairs. The encounter tables have a nice trick where the base roll (usually a 1d10) is modified by location and day or night, so it's possible to sometimes encounter foot patrols of the local governments in the swamp, but only in daylight and within a few miles of the trade road. Conversely, will-o-wisps only show up at night and deep in the swamp. It's very elegant.

As nice as that is, there are the bandit groups. I quote from the text:

This encounter can be used when the party first exits the dungeon with a load of treasure. The purpose (other than a lot of fun for the DM) is to teach them a lesson about over-extending themselves.

That's the introduction for an encounter with an ogre and 112(!) kobolds. So after a potentially difficult delve that results in recovering pocket change, the delvers get ambushed by an insurmountable number of kobolds and robbed of their weapons and new found loot. That's to teach them to not overextend themselves, supposedly. Looking at that from the perspective of a player, it teaches me not to play with this GM ever again. How is that encounter supposed to be fun?

Opinions So Far

I'm only two chapters in, and already the sadistic GM tone of the writing is getting to me. It'll only get worse as I read more.