GURPS PDF Challenge: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 21: Megadungeons

 So, here we are.  We've made it through the total line up and reached "the cream of the crop," the ultimate release of the PDF Challenge.  Was it worth it?

In short: yes, it's worth your money.  I should clarify up front that at the end of the day, this is a "GM Advice" book more than a resource, though it does include some tables in it. Maybe I'm not the best person to judge a dungeon fantasy book, and I'm not generally a fan of "GM Advice" books, but I legitimately found this useful and it's made me reconsider some of my hesitations towards the genre.  I think if the rest of the DF line began to follow the logic laid out by Dell'Orto, it would only profit from it. That said, I think after you've read it and digested the information within, I doubt you'll read it again (perhaps to use a few of the tables).

Behold the Full Scope of It!

The book really breaks down into two parts: the Megadungeon and the Campaign.  The Megadungeon breaks down what a Megadungeon is and how to set up one, and the Campaign discusses what changes to make in your campaign to accommodate one. To my eye, they sort of blurred together into one long set of advice.

Megadungeon discusses what defines a megadungeon, where they should exist (and what different choices mean), some themes and elements of megadungeons, the concept of "challenge levels" and how to randomly generate elements within them (with a focus on monsters and their stuff).

The Campaign discusses how to integrate them into your campaign, what changes you might need to make to magic to make them work, and alternate Experience award schedule and the most valuable sort of words written in an RPG supplement under "But it's not ready yet!"

And that's it, that's the book.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

A few comments before I move forward.  First, I'm firmly of the belief that Dell'Orto is the top blogger for GURPS.  It wouldn't surprise me if he eclipsed Kromm for views.  I think he's becoming the most influential voice in the DF community, and Megadungeons shows a lot of why that is.

The second thing I'd like to discuss is my own relationship with Dungeon Fantasy. I grew up with a very religious mother and we were afflicted with the 80s moral panic about D&D as much as anyone else was, so when it came to my formative RPG years, I wasn't allowed to play D&D (I'm sure the fact that the one time she played she died in the first scene had nothing to do with her antipathy towards the game). But my father introduced me to Traveller (the original version, with the little black books and the ability to die in character creation) and I also expanded into Marvel (the FASERIP version) and then eventually I was old enough and beyond her reach that I could run what I pleased, but by then I had already escaped the D&D "walled garden." Where for many gamers the six stats of D&D and class systems were obvious and intuitive and everything more free-form that was weird, indie scariness, these other systems were my bread and butter, so I was pretty good at them. But it also meant that D&D was a fairly foreign thing to me, a frustrating array of arbitrary decisions made decades ago and suffocating class structures. 3e began to free things up a bit, but like I said, by then I was gaming in other worlds.

When I finally got to D&D, it was mostly with 4e GMs, and what I found was extremely sanitized, an almost MMO-like experience where every room was an intriguing, bespoke encounter, every fight balanced for the party. I didn't mind 4e; to my outsider eye, it was the edition ever created, but the culture around "Fighting Fantasy" wasn't for me. I found myself thinking: "This isn't how I would run a dungeon."

For me, I'd want there to be a sort of logic to the dungeon.  I would expect to find empty rooms dripping with flavor, or just there for camping.  I would expect to find areas with no monsters and just traps.  I would expect to be rewarded for understanding the layout of the dungeon: instead of being expected to play through a series of escalating encounters, I would fully expect that clever play would allow me to bypass them all and defeat the boss monster at the end and get the big payout, without sacrificing a ton of XP or otherwise being punished for doing so. That's the sort of game I would want to play.

Now, perhaps some old grognards are nodding along and saying "That's what D&D is" (or was, at least).  I suppose it depends on the GM who runs it.  But Megadungeons is very much written in that line.  I went from thinking that I wasn't the sort of person to run DF to thinking that, hey, maybe I was, and maybe the sort of ideas I would bring to the table weren't remotely out of line.  When Dell'Orto discusses stocking a megadungeon, he outright discusses empty rooms or room only with traps (these must exist side-by-side, by the way.  This is not a comment he makes, just my own observation: if every room is trapped, then the players will always guess that a room without monsters is trapped. If most rooms aren't trapped and may or may not have monsters then when you do find a trap, it's a surprise!). If you follow his numbers, about a half of all rooms will have neither monsters nor traps.  And his final experience reward schedule has to do with the treasure you collect, not the monsters you defeat.

But I think the most critical aspect of this work, as noted above, is his observation of "It's not ready yet!" This is the core observation of the Psi-Wars design process as well.  GMs get really attached to the idea of a complete, finished game, and they often like big projects.  They'll do things like come up with a single race and want to give it extensive history and super-detailed rules.  All you really need, to get started, is a template.  Likewise, if you want to run a Megadungeon game, you generate it on the fly. His rules for creating a megadungeon will let you more-or-less randomly generate it, but what these rules are really for are for creating enough of a megadungeon to keep your players happy for a couple of sessions, and if they go off the beaten path, the book will support you randomly creating more stuff.

This book pleases me on a philosophical level, but it managed to deflate some anxieties I've had about the game, which isn't what I expected.  What I had hoped for was some advice I could use for Psi-Wars Labyrinth, and there really isn't that much in here for that, but it wasn't really meant for that.  This isn't a big on vast, underground complexes, it's a book on how to run DF with a vast "dungeon", whatever shape that take, a "challenge world" and what it might look like.

I would absolutely run a DF game like this. I've seen some people pitching settings on my discord that run games like this. It's a useful book, and at 10 pages, it doesn't overstay its welcome. I wouldn't put it as a "Cream of the crop" book. I think Mercenaries and Tricked out Rides were better books, but this is up there. It's easily one of the best books from the Challenge, especially for DF.