Expedition to Undermountain: What Good Is It?

[northernbard80]

I've been reading over the book Expedition to Undermountain and I am impressed. There are maps, encounters, exits, entrances, etc.

But the big question I have is - what do I do with all that?! It seems to have no real purpose. There's no storyline, plot, objective. For all its faults, at least Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil had a story.

Any suggestions for what to do with Undermountain other than running around like decapitated chickens?

[Geeksthenewsexy]

That is kind of the beauty of that type of module. The answer is: Whatever you want. It neatly fits into any world because you can just make liberal use of a McGuffin of any kind to get players set on challenging what's there. It doesn't even need to be ´connected to the module. "Thief X stole Y from NPC Z and the locating magics we used indicate they're hiding at this place. Go fish them out and return Y to NPC Z" Ta-da!

[Gemini476]

The adventure itself provides some suggestions, for what it's worth. Obviously there's the overarching Halaster's Call plot thread (p.7-8) if you want to pull at that, but Chapter One (p.9) opens up with an entire heading that's basically just "hey, so what are the players doing down here anyhow?"

To summarize the "not just open-world dungeoneering" suggested missions:

Recovery - the PCs are looking for something, or someone, that's in Undermountain.
Discovery - the PCs want to explore a specific area of Undermountain some a specific purpose.
Power struggles - two or more factions in Undermountain aren't happy with each other, and the PCs end up in the middle of that.


Undermountain, like most of the classic megadungeons, is more of a setting than a single one-and-done adventure. It's something you can return to time and time again, each time exploring a completely different section - and the 3E adaptation is just a small sliver of the full dungeon. (And even then, the old 2E Ruins of Undermountain (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16785/The-Ruins-of-Undermountain-2e) didn't cover the whole thing either.)

To quote the DriveThruRPG page for Expedition to Undermountain (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/50044/Expedition-to-Undermountain-35):

Where's the Earth-Shattering Kaboom? Due to the nature of the beast, the DM has extensive freedom to customize his adventures within the framework that this book provides. The downside of that is that there isn't necessarily a noteworthy cinematic climax to the adventure as written. PCs have so many options on where to go and how to explore that providing a single scripted ending would be difficult. Yet even with lots of fun, exciting smaller encounters detailed within each area, DMs may want to think forward to crafting this sort of emotional and deadly conclusion to their PCs' adventures. With the tools and framework provided, they'll have a lot of options for doing so.

If you're looking at a massive dungeon crawl for 3.x D&D, or if you want superb inspiration for assembling a mega-dungeon of your own, you'll find this book both useful and entertaining.


And if you just need a quick hook, well, there's a big well in the Yawning Portal Inn and people say there's all sorts of adventure and treasure to be had down below.

[Fizban]

It's a series of smaller dungeon segments set in and around Undermountain, that's pretty much the entire point. You run it because you want to run the glorious legendary Undermountain, without making up what that actually is. Undermountan as described in most of the FR books isn't really anything, just a literal a-wizard-did-it excuse for giant status quo dungeons that could contain anything and restock or change in response to the PCs, but for all it gets name dropped there isn't actually anything to it, since it's just an excuse. So eventually they made little campaign book for it with a series of examples. As Gemini has said here and I said in a neighboring thread "megadungeon" is more of a setting than a campaign- I'm pretty sure this one spends quite a bit of time detailing the town bits above and laying out possible factions to interact with.

I also recall that the later chapters actually do have a bit of plot, with the final one having some sort of "fix/stop/whatever the device to avoid apocalyptic catastrophe" even though the party is like 10th and this is FR, and it all tied back to a particular named NPC meddling with stuff, though I don't recall if there's much information actually given to the players about this.

Do take note that like many, many, many published adventures it claims to start at 1st level, while actually starting waaaay above 1st level. Like, usually "1st level" dungeons are closer to ECL 2, this one was either 3 or possibly even 5, like you'd have to have a perfect and oversized party just to not die at 1st. Now granted, I don't think the book specifically says the first given dungeon segment is 1st level. . . but if you put "1st-10th level" on the cover and your lowest level area is not 1st level, that's false advertising as far as I'm concerned.

Searched up an old more detailed response:

Expedition to Undermountain is if anything worse than most, and will absolutely slaughter a level 1 party that tries to give it a straight fight. Just look at the EL of the encounters and wonder at how some idiot wrote 1 on the cover. The Caryatid Column might be pretty obvious as something to run from, but the giant ambush with the Metalmaster clearly assumes the party will just run for the lift instead of fighting without actually telling the DM they need to do that, and since every encounter is massively overleveled the PCs will most likely be limping back to base on empty while still at 1st level when it happens.

Let's take a look:, you start by either walking into a defended goblin position or walking into an AMF with an invincible construct, then walk past a mimic after being baited into thinking the mirrors are harmless, before finally reaching one almost level appropriate darkmantle fight. They then proceed through more only slightly overleveled fights against things they can barely hurt (a swarm which by rights should be immune to weapons but fails to list that property, and a living spell with DR 10/magic so I hope you prepped magic weapon) before reaching the boss, a flameskull- that's a flying enemy with DR/bludgeoning, fast healing, a fireball, and of some laser spam, and minions with magic missiles, oh and every fight with the undead happens to take place in an Unhallow so if the party happens to be Good then ACs just go right up. Expecting the treasure to help? There's one wand of burning hands which won't work on the boss, and three +1 arrows. And if at any point the party decides to bug out, or merely thinks that because the dungeon is under an inn they should rest in the inn rather than the dungeon, then they get ambushed twice: once by the boss if they made it it past the darkmantles, and again by the goblins and metalmaster.

It's actually a pretty well made dungeon. . . for 3rd-4th level parties.