Aries said:
My god, someone else mentioned the World's Largest Dungeon.
Was just going to mention it. Buddy bought this 100 dollar mega money grab. In truth, it's likely a fun item, but gawd, I'd rather just use a minor program for random dungeon mapping, and make the stuff up on my own.
Maybe my being a writer at heart, and a person of too much imagination is simply not all that common.
It's really well written, interesting to read on it's own (with the maps out to follow along, of course!) There are politics, backstory, etc written for it - while you could play it Dungeon Hack style, that's not how I've been doing it. It's almost disapointing that at the rate these guys are going, they're going to barely touch half of what's in the book (and the guys in my gaming group are a pretty thourough bunch.)
With the DM needing some downtime and less than two weeks until our next gaming session, it fit the bill perfectly. When characters die, the party stumbles across others 'lost' in the dungeon (I'm not above killing off characters if they're asking for it, most of the really nasty situations in the WLD can be handled in several different ways...)
One handy bit is that monster stats are printed in the encounters themselves, and they're tweaked so that hobgoblins in room/area A won't be quite the same as room/area B. There are some text blocks/descriptions that could be read, but I primarily just read them for myself.
As for this being a money grab - we're talking about a 5.5 pound, 840 page hardcover book with 16 22x17" full-cover maps. The pages are black & white, but are pretty much packed with text. For the scale that this book was printed at, it doesn't seem that bad to me.
- Chad
PS: The book says it includes all monsters from the SRD, this isn't quite true - for example while there are dragons present, not every type of dragon is.