Rappan Athuk: DnD Megadungeon Review

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[@QuestingBeast]

Get 10% off of Into the AM apparel: bit.ly/IntoTheAM10 Rappan Athuk PDF for Swords & Wizardry: bit.ly/AthukSW Rappan Athuk PDF for 5e: bit.ly/Athuk5e Rappan Athuk PDF for Pathfinder: bit.ly/AthukPF Print edition for S&W or Pathfinder: bit.ly/AthukSWPF Print Edition for 5e: bit.ly/AthukPrint5e

[@dragonshadestudios]

I've run this dungeon in most editions starting in 3.0. In fact, was the first module I ever run, and continue to run it. It's an intense experience for players to play through, but risks them experiencing dungeon fatigue because its just so much dungeon.

[@ZachGlazar]

Thank you Ben, I remember running the Mouth of Doom for you at Crit Hit. I am pleased you had a good time. Nice and accurate review of our book, appreciate the time you spent.

[@johnkennedy3403]

Recently finished a 2 year campaign of this, was one of my best ever experiences as a player. Our DM had to do a fair bit of work to make the monsters and so on work properly, but we got all the way to the bottom of Rappan Athuk and then got TPK'd (technically twice, because we had an A Team and B Team set up because of the high rate of character death, so we ran B Team at the end boss first and then A team afterward, and both got wiped!). It was an awesome experience from start to finish, and it feels fitting that our hubris lead us to defeat in the end. Rappan Athuk is something special.

[@brianthomas4383]

I bought this during this year's Frog God Games holiday sale for Swords & Wizardry for $30. For a 500 page hardcover megadungeon, that was an amazing price.

[@stillmattwest]

Damn, that’s a steal! This book is one of the best in my collection.

[@DungeonMasterpiece]

When you flipped to the elevation map: dungeon: me: "WHAT THE FFFFUUUUU"

[@Drew1749]

Rappan Athuk is my absolute favorite Megadungeon. The sense of humor is great and the room variety is absolutely amazing. The setpiece encounters are very memorable as well. Its just so great.

[@stillmattwest]

I love that the wilderness area is called "Dying Outside the Dungeon." I already have Rappan Athuk although I've never tried to run it. It's by far my favorite dungeon to read.

[@pedrobernardo5887]

Seems like a great one-stop resource for dungeons-for-life.

[@evansmith6552]

Rappan Athuk has been my favorite megadungeon since the 3.5e era. I've run a bunch of parties through it across multiple games, and have always had a great time. That being said, it is a grueling player experience on account of the high (and often unpredictable) difficulty and the fact that much of the treasure and other rewards are very well hidden... GMs, make sure you set proper expectations with your players before running this.

[@iantaran2843]

I ... Miss tabletop roleplaying so much... Truly not having many friends or people I get a long with... God it sucks ... I just come here and day dream about attempting to run the adventures shown here... OSR is so much more interesting to me than 3,3.5,4th, and 5th editions to me as well the adventures are so damn creative !

[@danitenotes]

You should get a group together! I believe in you!

[@thesharksurfer]

I’ve ran RA at least 7 times and I really want to run it again. It’s by far my favorite book to run, there are stories and plots/subplots stacked upon each other and it’s super easy to tie player’s characters to the dungeon. Also easy to add things, there are a lot of areas that just lead to “insert your ideas here” or ignore if you like. It’s so great. Recommend not only reading about the floor the players are on but also all floors that connect to it as it’s super easy to end up in 3-5 different floors in one 4 hour session.

[@ronaldsanfran]

I assumed you used one of the OSR systems, yes? We ran it in Pathfinder 1e and finished it, but after 9th level or so it lost its challenge because Pathfinder be Pathfinder. If I were to visit this again I'm pretty sure I'd use AD&D or Basic D&D.

[@thesharksurfer]

@@ronaldsanfran I have three different system books for RA and have ran it in each system and yes, the hype about it being impossible end game wise is not correct if running it straight from the books. I had to tweak things heavily, the orcus fight is a huge let down as written. I’ve added a lot of undead that help orcus to balance the battle. After playing through a few times you get the feel of what is going on and it’s easy to rev the dungeon up with the character’s levels.

[@pi4t651]

The Mouth of Doom is one of the largest single levels in the dungeon. Many only have around ten rooms. So while it's huge, it's not *quite* as huge as this review implies.

[@sebastiencarrieres8825]

I'm currently running it...and I disagree. Ever looked at the Bloodways?

[@OvaltinePatrol]

I got the Pathfinder edition some years ago, what a mistake, the book is so huge and dense as to be impractical. File it under cool things I'll never get to run.

[@stopdropandroleplay754]

I ran the Pathfinder version, and it was rough. One of my players was an alchemist and by level 8 I'm pretty sure he could have cleared the whole thing by himself.

[@samaamas9729]

Former DM of Rappan, Pathfinder edition, here. It Is dense. True - perhaps no truer statement about rappan has been spoken. But I'd offer you take another look at trying to run it. I don't know what hurdles you faced or thought you would come up against, but I have some not-asked-for advice/tips for you that if you're not interested in - no problem, just a friendly gesture, I'm sorry for bothering you. If you are interested, here's how I tackled the book for my party with some things I would change looking back and hopefully it both inspires you to run it and helps you if you do. STARTING RAPPAN Rappan is full of information and rooms and resources to an overwhelming amount making It hard to decide where to start. If you're just beginning your Journey at level one, and need impetus to move your players forward, I'd suggest looking at a goal for your players to begin with and starting them by way of boat in Zelkor's Ferry. There's a lot of content and while the long term goal of "DESTROY ORCUS" might sound OK at first, I've played a fair share where my party started questioning not only the urgency of their mission, but the way to go about it. (Enter in the mining expedition they did, using detect metal to back door into rooms with treasure to fund their task, and try to shortcut by way of carved staircase down to Orcus). Instead, perhaps they are looking for an npc friend of theirs whom, upon talking to the townsfolk of Zelkor's Ferry, was lost on level 4-5 when they rushed off without the party, only one of their measly guards returning to tell you of their capture. Short term goals give a sense of achievement over the sluggingly long arc that is the dungeon, and then if the game starts to dry up, you can atleast end on killing a priest of Orcus, dealing a hefty blow against this enemy. Zelkor's Ferry also should be a nice little base of operations, reprieve from danger, and a place to get the wealth flowing for the players and, while maybe not at just the snap of some magic fingers, you should devise or instruct the players to have ways to return there. If you are starting at a higher level, or coming into Rappan as a plug-and-play area in your world, I'd recommend beginning in media res, past anything lower than their level, skipping all that content. If it's something vitally important that you skipped by accident, you can always roleplay a happenstance where they come across it later. But for the most part those areas (monsters traps loot and all) were lost to massive sinkholes and collapses and there seems to be a passage that someone else has made to continue further down to the next area. This avoids slogging through lower than at level appropriate areas and removes loot bloat for an already geared party. RUNNING RAPPAN When prepping sessions, I can't say this enough, read read read those areas. Maybe you've gotten to be like me where you are competent enough to run things at the bat of an eye (as long as you can take a minute or two of being eyeballed by your players as you discover only moments ahead of them what comes next). This does not work in high level play nor does it work here. You have to read ahead just a little bit so that when something happens, it's not you being surprised, it's your players. Rappan is full of such surprises which gets me to my next point: perception. This is a dungeon crawl. There are traps. There are secret doors. There are stealthy monsters. And perception is weird in pathfinder when your players want to say they are rolling perception every 5ft for everything. Set the standard ahead of time - man leading the crawl is the only one making checks for traps and monsters; those that wander to go do things makes their own perception checks. Set this up and if they ask why they can't have two leads in 2 wide hallways - that'd be like having 2 heart surgeons with scalpels trying to perform open heart surgery at the same time. If player A succeeds but player B screws up hard enough that he accidentally triggers the trap, what happens first? Now you may have 2 or more pc's in danger. There's a reason why they spread people out when searching for bombs on a minefield. Figure out how you want perception rolls done at your table to avoid roll bloat and PC's doubling or tripling up on rolls. There's a lot of material in Rappan, and if future me was able to talk to past me, he'd impart these words, "Your players are not expected to encounter everything." *Gasp* Shocker. Yeah, maybe pretty obvious, but it can get lost if you are looking from the haze of material material material. There is a ton of stuff here and not all of it is fun for every party and it cannot be completed even in a year evennn if you have weekly sessions evennnnnn if those sessions are 5-6 hours long - TRUST me on that. Now, I always presented the way going forward (I didn't hold them until they completed a level) but, just like when starting at higher level, you might say, "huh, my party is now level 6 and they are on level 4 appropriate material... I should probably do something about that" and instead of MAKING things STRONGER you should be emptying the bloat. Blow up a few rooms (especially the ones that have nothing in them), bypass a level or two if you think it will be a slog, and especially disintegrate levels you think will just have your party numb and tired in the end (I'm looking at you Fountain of Pestilence). It can be fun to run everything and I have certainly tried but at the end of the day, run the material that will be exciting for your party. Something to consider; following information is debatable as every table is different (this is from personal experience). Pathfinder has a huge number of options for characters your players can make. This can lead to a good amount of min/max and unforseen playstyles rappan was not built for. The 2 things I encountered were Army Characters and Power Scouts (and while they're plenty more these are the 2 builds that come to mind). I'll talk about the supreme advantages of these characters in a minute but I'd advise curating against playstyles you want you your players to avoid. Army Characters are any build that can make semi-permanent or permanent ally combatants for little to no cost whatsoever in mass - these would be your summoner and necromancer. I advise against these because of the size limitations of the dungeon and the ease to cheese encounters be they traps or combats. If the party has a roiling frothing and nigh limitless amount of things to take damage and block hallways and prevent enemy melee from getting close and to walk into traps, this style will get old. I'm also pointing at things you can have die for you with no backlash in terms of resources or PR (not like how leadership will impact you if your men keep dying). Either get everyone to build army characters or just say no. Power Scouts are another thing I saw the dungeon didn't have an answer for at low to high-mid levels. Power Scouts are builds that create a proxy creature that your character uses to survey the dungeon for them. This can be any build with an expendable pet. The intent behind the build is not to defeat the dungeon but to look ahead and gift the party with knowledge of encounters before they're encountered; any proxy the party can use that causes zero repercussions on death and that can be perceived through (bonus points if unlimited use) fit into the Power Scout. This I feel is fine for divination wizards or characters that have limited use foresight abilities but not so for characters that have an unlimited or nigh inexhaustible resource for doing so; the party can simply leave if that resource goes away leaving any potential danger moot as the party will only move against problems they know they can defeat with zero consequences. Risk becomes closest to zero for party's with this character. Either consider saying no to things like this, get the entire party to do this (Solid Snake it through the Dungeon) or compensate (have more random encounters that spiral into other encounters from the noise or something akin to this - not defeating the use of the character but making it so they can't avoid EVERY challenge). Two things I didn't do that I wished I did: 1)Drawing more narrative from the dungeon to interact with the party. 2)Milestones over experience. These 2 things require a bit of work. Firstly, reading each and every floor i'd like to run and building npcs, encounters, or events that tie into the lore of those floors and plotting them through the overland and throughout the dungeon. That way, when people ask "what the hell was this floor all about," I can point to other things they've encountered or people they've met that were related and let them draw conclusions, rather than a vague death floor. The other thing is milestones but that because I was running everything - all the content. They were overlevel for a number of encounters and I started implementing a SkipRule to get past content that would have been a slog of rolls where they take little to no damage and expend little to nothing. Implementing milestones from the get go and making the pcs aware of these when they are in close proximity to them whilst keeping a few hidden would ere less on the skinnerbox experience mine the dungeon became and actually influence more exploration or triumph on certain important encounters over the vast majority of "200 centipedes in a room" encounter-like stuff. Overall, as this is getting LONG, I'd suggest tackling Rappan again and looking towards how other people online have ran it as well to find a certain level of ease you can have to flip the switch on this machine and get it running. Plenty of memorable stories can come out of Rappan and from one stranger to another, I'd say give it a shot if you can convince a table to do a dungeon crawl.

[@cannastartover1720]

@@samaamas9729 Dude, lol

[@samaamas9729]

@@cannastartover1720 yeah, im looking at it now, and that is a big @## comment.

[@metallsnubben]

@@samaamas9729 This is the Rappan Athuk of youtube comments haha

[@daviddcain]

I was hoping you'd do a video on this. I'm about to run the 5E version as an open table/psesudo-west-marches campaign. The dungeon is enormous, maybe too big, and lacks factions and a cohesive story, but the rooms and encounters are genuinely original and interesting. Can't wait to see what my players do here.

[@chriscotgrove9674]

Great video, Ben.

[@tednovy7762]

Thank you for clarifying the pronunciation (was never quite sure) . . . and the review, of course.

[@alberthennen7370]

Enjoyed the review as usual. For me however , making dungeons is part of the allure of being the DM , and I only go to someone elses design when short on time or inspiration. A vast amount of work clearly went into this work , and that is surely to be respected. I enjoy your youtube channel and often find good value in your releases. Thanks Albert Hennen

[@carmillachoate]

I absolutely LOVE Rappan Athuk. I played it first about 7 or 8 years ago in Pathfinder and then upgraded to the 5e version when it was made. The 5e version includes a fair amount more material as well as a few things cleaned up One of the things I really enjoy about RA is it is well designed overall so a DM doesn't need to read the whole thing to run it and have things make sense. Plotlines are thought out and hook and payoff well without the DM having to finagle it. You still need to read and prepare for the area/level the group will be investigating but each one is a very manageable size

[@keithvanboskirk7327]

thanks I recently picked this up from humble bundle

[@RodBatten]

Was wondering if you'd review this classic. It fascinates me, but I don't think I can get it to the table these days.

[@youtube-critic]

Great review

[@benperry5233]

This is one of my favorite truly a beast and a blast to play

[@shitmandood]

It looks amazing. I think I'd rather make the dungeons modular and put the pieces in different places of my Red Tide/Scarlet Heroes solo game I'm working on. I think I'd stick with the Swords & Wizardry edition.

[@issacjr01]

I ran this back in 2001 for years and killed dozens of characters this is an epic dungeon that punishes stupid actions. Which is why I recommend it highly:)

[@mykediemart]

[@JoshuaGoudreau]

I owned and ran the Pathfinder edition of the game and it is virtually identical in print quality and presentation. I now own the 5e version and the quality is dramatically improved. As far as the game itself, it's one of the only megadungeons I've actually enjoyed. It's a really fun place to explore and there is a story (well, more than one but still) that plays really fun too. It's a bit pricey, but the amount of content you get it's very much worth it. The text seems dense, but I took a highlighter to mine and it runs just fine.

[@defnlife1683]

Damn, those stuck pages. Geez. What a shame. The problem I’ve had with FGG is that their book quality is notoriously bad. I had to return the S&W rule book because of stuck and loose pages. It’s a shame because the rules are great. It felt like LULU books were better quality. :/ I just want them to put out better quality stuff, they’re an important publisher in the space.

[@stillmattwest]

Hasn’t been my experience with FGG at all. Excellent book quality from what I’ve seen.

[@defnlife1683]

@@stillmattwest glad your experience is different from mine. I absolutely love their content but the rulebook was very flimsy. I gifted all my books anyway, I haven't had time/friends to play.

[@stopdropandroleplay754]

Big DO NOT RECOMMEND from me. Ran it for two years, and every hour of play needed 1-2 hours of prep depending on the floor, and some of the later floors most of the rooms are empty with a suggestion that you buy another one of their products to generate Dungeon Dressing. The early floors are pretty tight, and there are some pretty cool things in here, but between the formatting making it hard to skim and the descriptions often being hard to understand it's hard to say that this is even a good one to recommend to tear apart and use pieces in other places. I wanted to run it because at the time it was all the internet was talking about when it came to great megadungeons and I wanted to learn how to run/make dungeons like the best of them. All I learned from this is what not to do.

[@ronaldsanfran]

I ran it in PF, which I think the dungeon is not suited for. I got a hold of a copy of the Swords & Wizardry version, and I found that there was virtually no change in the treasures between the two versions. Gold placement is CRUCIAL in OSR. And there doesn't appear to have been any adaptation from 3.0 to PF, where characters are definitely more powerful than in 3.0. I remember seeing names of magic items in the PF version that were from the 3.x era. My middle- and high-school players (who, granted, are pretty big optimizers) beat the final boss of the dungeon and his minions were pushovers. The last third of the dungeon was a 90% filler with 10% memorable fights. (The last couple dozen sessions or so I had to do pretty much all homebrew.) This all made me doubt that there was any real conversion work between the editions after 10+ years. I think a GM needs to do a rework with the PF and 5E versions to give it the brutal feel that it's known for. When my players finally allow me, I'm thinking of running this again but in Basic D&D or AD&D. I really like its "sensibilities," its randomness, and "humor" if that makes any sense. This or Barrowmaze.

[@issacjr01]

I ran it many many times using theater of the mind, no prep.

[@gpn962]

What would you recommend instead? Trying to decide on a mega-dungeon to run.

[@kontrarien5721]

In haven't run a megadungeon, but I've been watching 3d6 Down the Line playing Arden Vul and I heartily recommend both watching them play and running it yourself.

[@kontrarien5721]

It's even on sale right now at Bag of Holding. The PDFs are $25 vs the normal $109.

[@bjhale]

Good job. Now review Halls of Arden Vul. :)

[@Infyra]

I love this dungeon, but I think its companion Slumbering Tsar is even better!

[@johnhansen4794]

One could alter the "lock" state of distant doors with the panels.💩

[@andrewrockwell1282]

Best dungeon ever.

[@SilverAphelion]

Hey Ben what typefont you think is great for the conventional hack rule book? By book I mean something like Knave.

[@QuestingBeast]

I often use Crimson Text or Alegreya

[@Morgodor]

Which version of this Megadungeon would be best suited for Old School Essentials? S&W, 5e, or PF?

[@QuestingBeast]

S&W by far

[@Morgodor]

@@QuestingBeast I imaging that would be the case. Thanks for the response, much appreciated.

[@BoggarthVT]

This looks like a medieval spelling for rapping attack

[@AlVainactual]

17:40 I don't know if you have artist players, Ben but that really doesn't look like something my players could draw XD . It's not the best art out there but it's pretty proffessional, haha

[@davidgrider4302]

Don't go down the well! I have the SW and 5E versions.

[@milo8425]

What is your favorite megadungeon module?

[@Alan13448]

Great mega-dungeon, but how all the levels line up is very hard to keep up with, the over all maps are hard to understand.

[@MegaKemper]

I have an old copy of it and I ultimately found it too cumbersome to run. I felt like I had to memorize the whole mammoth tome in order to begin to understand how to run it. It felt like a bunch of dungeons cobbled together, rather than a coherent whole. As you said, I felt that it was better to loot some of the ideas than to play the dungeon. For $100 I'd probably suggest looking elsewhere for ideas.

[@RedDiceDiaries]

It's sounds cool but $40 for a pdf? Damn

[@stopdropandroleplay754]

It was way more than that when I ran it, and ended up splurging for the book so I could make notes in the margins and whatnot. Even that made it tough to navigate, and I can't imagine how rough it would be running it off a pdf.

[@RedDiceDiaries]

@@stopdropandroleplay754 : I believe the pdf and book together is nearer $90/$100

[@DrWaites]

I think it's on Humble Bundle right now. You can get it from time-to-time at a steep discount.

[@alexeyoganezov]

Close to 1$ per dungeon level, why not? A lot of work was put into this.

[@RedDiceDiaries]

@@alexeyoganezov : I have no problems with them charging that, it doesn't affect me because i'm unlikely to spend that amount of money on a single (mega)dungeon.