Expedition to Undermountain

Overall score:

If 2006 was Year of the Dragon, 2007 is Year of Adventures over at Wizards, with the first six months netting more adventure releases than in any of the past few years. With the amount of time it takes to craft a good adventure and for a lot of people (especially newer players) picking up a pre-made adventure book that provides several sessions worth of play for $15 can be a good investment.

There’s a lot of money to be made from this segment, something 3rd party D20 companies have been taking advantage of for years now. It’s good to see Wizards taking renewed interested because only they can offer adventures that truly fit with their popular setting of Forgotten Realms and Eberron, as well as the high production values that Wizards helped bring to RPG gaming. Unfortunately, Expedition to Undermountain is none of these things.

Fans of Forgotten Realms will probably recognize Undermountain as a large “Dungeon” complex under the city of Waterdeep (which is like the New York of the setting). And while the book starts out with a lot of setting information to cover all the known areas of Undermountain, the authors completely take it out of the setting of Faerun and try to make it as generic as possible in a vain attempt to make it more appealing to personal worldbuilders instead of one of Wizard’s settings.

Which is funny because any long-time player will tell you the type that creates their own setting aren’t the ones that buy pre-made adventures. However, the setting part of Expedition to Undermountain is by far the best part of the book and it’s nice to have the information since the actual adventure only covers a 10th, if that, of Undermountain itself.

The adventure is divided into four parts, with each part covering one level of Undermountain; with the exception of the last section (which covers two) where the players are supposed to make their way miles underground and stop doomsday from happening. This is where the book breaks down.

Each section was apparently written independently of each other--and possibly even out of order--since things brought up (including powerful magic items given players) are forgotten in other sections; important quests turn out to only have a paragraph or two in the book; maps are inconsistent (many are missing features or are at odds with descriptions in the text); and worst of all, the reason the players go down into the dungeon is randomly changed with little rhyme or reason.

Case in point, to make Undermountain more difficult, the adventure states that the most recent wizard created barriers that prevented teleportation into or within the massive dungeon. Three of the four sections are written with this in mind and give various ways of getting to that level of the dungeon and sometimes means of restocking supplies. But in the first section this is all ignored by an item given the players that allows them to teleport at will within Undermountain, which begs the question as to why it's in the book or why the item is never mentioned again in subsequent sections.

To advance players through Undermountain they’re usually “hired” by various NPCs to fetch things for them. In one instance the writers forget that one of these quests was supposed to be a major plot point—even though it had little to do with the original quest. After spending pages talking about the negative effects of a Drow stronghold getting destroyed; the players getting hired by the Drow to explore the ruins; and finding the cause at the destination...there’s no map provided, no encounters and only a few lines of text. Apparently the authors decided that the other reason for going to that part of Undermountain (fetching a crown for a Dwarven Prince)--again that had nothing to do with the end-of-the-world story the adventure started with--was more interesting or something.

It's not until you start the last fetch quest in the last section that the book remembers there’s this other reason you’re down here. And with a grand Dues Ex the players are teleported to the last area which they’re then supposed to do something that’s different from the original reason. Now the adventure decides that the horrible event won't to happen right away, but now there's another faction trying to take over, and the players have to prevent them from entering Undermountain. But the players know nothing about why or how of this new group except from a sentence given by the Dues Ex, nor does the adventure present a clear way to the players to stop this new group (though the GM is given a magic item description as a random result of usage).

Expedition to Undermountain is a mess of a book that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and considering this is an adventure that could easily last a year for causal players, that’s a bad thing. What caused this adventure to even turn out this way is mind-boggling. Did the writers never talk to each other? Was there originally ever an outline covering the story or was each author just asked to turn in a section that related to one level with no worry about what the others were doing? Was the adventure too many pages so an editor decided to cut out random parts? Were parts of this written out of order?

I think the answer to all of these questions is a resounding, "Yes!" Which is a real shame because Expedition to Undermountain has a lot of promise to be good. The encounters seem fairly balanced and interesting, but I didn’t have time to play test anything, nor did I want to subject anyone to the actual story, let alone try to fix the problems so I could run it.

There are better ways to spend $35 and unless you really, really want to do something with Undermountain I’d stay away from this book completely. You’ll get adequate information from the Waterdeep book released last year for the same price, plus all the info on that city and of Skullport—which would be more useful then the brief 20 pages you’re getting here.

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Written by Spriggan on August 13th, 2007