Megadungeon Book Club - Dungeon of the Bear, part 4
Overview
Ok time to finish up Dungeon of the Bear, see if any actual bears will show up as a motif (we've got....like half of one so far on Floor 1) and see what other shenanigans we can get into.
Floor 2, part 2
So right off the bat - what is up with Room T? What do you mean "this doorway is enchanted like that of of the demon's room in room B", text? There is no doorway, this is a cavern! The magical pool in the back is fun, another case of someone getting turned to gold if they mess around too much. Honestly no reason not to do it, considering that it's T&T - You're supposed to run multiple characters per player anyway, just chuck your least useful one at these things and get some extra treasure!
Something positive though - Room T and Room U have handy indicators of how wide the caverns in question are at their widest point right on the map. That's useful. It is also not used anywhere else despite there being several other caves.
Room W is where we finally get an actual bear as an encounter! It's a huge cave bear (with a MR of 450, making it significantly hardier than the literal Giant in the previously keyed room!) The bear itself is just that, a bear, but the room is also accompanied by yet another "There's magic here stopping you from actually doing the logical thing you'd do, which is to shoot at this enemy from afar, haha ain't I clever??" situation, which is like the third one already and is starting to grate on me a bit.
Next up we have a pool full of treasure and gold guarded by a giant octopus with a whooping 1200 (!!!) monster rating. Appropriately enough, like the Chimera on Floor 1, this monster guards one of the entrances onto Floor 3.
We finish up Floor 2 with...frankly a rather baffling room. The annotation makes no sense, the text mentions double doors which are not on the map, a "point 3" in the room that I at least can't seem to find, and all in all the thing is a bit of a mess. It does contain a bunch of orcs on wargs, some Demon Dogs and a cool ass magical sword that needs to feed on blood, and is also so transparent you can literally only find it by tripping over it.
There's a bunch of other stuff on this floor that I skipped over, but honestly, it's just kind of more of the same - monsters that will always attack when you help them out, gems that fuck you over, and all kinds of arbitrary "nah you can't do that" kind of magic that seems to be a staple of this time period of dungeons.
Floor 3
Now, finally onto the last level of the Dungeon of the Bear! An interesting thing is just how much this level is dominated by an enormous pool of water in the center of the map, like seriously look at this thing:
There is also a note that one square in here is 100' meaning that this map is truly enormous
It again opens with a note for the GM, which I do like that each floor has had those (makes sense too, considering they were originally separate booklets). It tells you that this is the stronghold of the monsters, and can be run "in a military manner" if you so desire, with organized groups, patrols and so on. It explicitly mentions wandering monsters, which have not really been commented on in the previous two floors.
I quite like the detail of the door b which can either activate or deactivate all the hall traps beyond it, depending on whether the monsters want to pass safely through it or not. It is a bit odd that all of a sudden the monsters care about this stuff when they simply were happy to exist in small locked rooms in perpetuity waiting for some dingdong to trigger a trap, but so it goes.
Following this we find some kind of a prison/zoo which, lo and behold, also contains some bears!
Next, we actually get something that explains some of this bullshit - the lab of an orc wizard (The brilliantly named Crackedclaw Mindmush) who is the one creating some of the weirdo monsters around! It also has a sexy lady crossed with an alligator you can potentially have join the party as a follower, so that's also cool.
Attached to the lab are also 4 different rooms with animals in them which, if entered, transform the character into a hybrid of some kind of their own. I do really like the continued motif of transformations, morphing into things and so on. It's a neat idea to build a dungeon around. Hell in the next room it even provides a (hard to get to) way to reverse the transformations from the mad orc's weird magic thing, if the players so choose.
The actual hallway of traps (the ones that door B can disable) are nothing to really write home about, but each one is different so that's neat. I do find it funny how the text goes out of its way to explain how to disable the hallway of traps before, and then it just puts a deadfall pressure plate trap right in between the common room and the barracks the monsters use. Apparently EVERYONE just always remembers not to step on the one random spot on the floor!
This is followed by a series of small rooms all connected to the giant room of water in the center, full of various monsters. Of note is "The great-grandmother of all Water Snakes" with a monster rating of 2000, harpies (with a corresponding magical transformation gem) and a random trapped wizard (who is appropriately enough an asshole).
We also get to the treasury with a fairly long list of contents within it.
Overlooking the enormous subterranean lake there is room V with a very, very big crossbow and its crew, which can be used to attack the players as they use a raft or a boat to traverse the lake, or in turn used by the players to attack the various bullshit monsters around the lake itself. A nice detail and one that can offer an interesting way of approaching things.
It also is hilariously statted up like a normal T&T weapon, meaning it rolls 3360 dice which is both funny and also utterly meaningless as an actual practical value.
An interesting bit is the vault containing a powerful djinn from the "pre-Wizard's War" era (a nice bit of worldbuilding just throw in in there) which if unleashed will start killing PCs, but can be bested and negated by entering the next room down the hall which contains, finally, more bears! Or in this case the statue of the Bear God Jambavan (that is a great name), which will animate and come alive in the presence of the djinn and subdue it.
Curiously the way the writing goes, it simply assumes that the party have entered the room of and released the Djinn, before they interact with both the Bear God's room and, indeed, with trap n after it. This is definitely something I noticed in this dungeon, is that the order in which things have been keyed seems to be assumed to be the order in which the players will run into things, which is definitely a choice.
We finish the floor with Object JJ, a statue of some long lost king which will, of course, animate and fight people if they mess with it, or will also fight the Djinn if it is present. The treasure on it though is quite the thing - the Lesser Troll Stone, which when held allows one to control all the monsters in the dungeon, effectively negating the entire dungeon at that point (except, for some random reason, the crew of the giant crossbow which are immune to its effect. No it is not explained why they are immune to it, obviously).
Additional Material
After the dungeon itself concludes we have a roster for the GM to keep track of PCs (useful, but why is it in the book? Just print one out or make it yourself), and a synopsis of the various magical items in the book. This one I really like - I always find it very handy to have all of this info in one place. There is also an appendix with some additional info on where exactly in Trollworld the Dungeon of the Bear is located, which is nice, but ultimately of not much use, unless you are running some kind of T&T Grand Campaign and are setting it within Trollworld itself. (And considering the very sparse info on it over the years and spread over multiple books, that's an unlikely situation to find yourself in).
The appendix also outright contradicts what is written in Castle Ward, by placing the dungeon next to it, and not underneath it (thus rendering the existence of Castle Ward meaningless).
It does not explain why it does that, and it is yet another just baffling inconsistency.
Conclusions
Man these are some long fucking posts. Jesus. If any of you actually read all of this, good on you!
So overall what do I think of Dungeon of the Bear? It's a bit goofy. And not entirely in a nice way. While I'm happy to acknowledge that this is from a style of playing dungeons that I don't really have a lot of interaction with, I found the constant utter nonsense of the dungeon mostly tiresome, because it does really seem to assume the most baseline of stereotypical "Dungeon crawl" play - Walk into a room like idiots, trigger the trap or enemies, pick up any treasure, and just walk onto the next one. Exploring a space? Navigating traps and obstacles? Fuck it - wanting to just shoot at obviously chained enemies?? Nope, get fucked, just walk into the room and do the thing.
It feels like it actively discourages clever play, which I hate in dungeon modules. However, if you want some truly nonsense monster zoo dungeon experience, where nothing matters and half the treasure is just a gotcha? Then yeah honestly you might be better off going with Dungeon of the Bear than any of Gygax's contributions in that sphere!
I did get some things out of it though. I really like how various monsters get extra dice due to their abilities, their weapons and so on. That is something I definitely plan on incorporating more into my own T&T-based megadungeon, as it can help modulate enemies a bit better than the brute force approach of just a single Monster Rating does. Either that or instead simply statting them up like normal characters, which works for some enemies, but not others.
All in all a fun and interesting read, if for no other reason than to get a nice glimpse into a different era and scene and how these people viewed dungeons, dungeon delving and the play surrounding them.
I don't know if I'll be joining any following Megadungeon Book Club read togethers, but if it's something as fun as this - hell yeah!
Oh and one last thing - There were definitely not enough bears in this dungeon. Like come on man, it's called Dungeon of the Bear!