So...Dwarrowdeep. Thoughts of those who have it?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
L

Lord Dynel

Legendary Pubber
Joined
May 3, 2019
Messages
161
Reaction score
414
This one's at the top of the DTRPG site and every time I visit the site, I look at the description. I almost add it to cart every time. But it's an expensive book. I'm sure it's of great quality, if Barrowmaze and Archaia are any indication. Any owners of Dwarrowdeep care to share their opinions?
 
I consider Barrowmaze one of the best megadungeons out there but mixed reviews have made me wary of plunking down $35 for a pdf of Dwarrowdeep.

Gunderholfen is a 420 page megadungeon for $10 and Bottomless Pit of Zorth by the same author is $7.50. You can buy both of these quality publications instead of Dwarrowdeep and have enough left over for lunch.
 
Brock Savage said:
I consider Barrowmaze one of the best megadungeons out there but mixed reviews have made me wary of plunking down $35 for a pdf of Dwarrowdeep.

Gunderholfen is a 420 page megadungeon for $10 and Bottomless Pit of Zorth by the same author is $7.50. You can buy both of these quality publications instead of Dwarrowdeep and have enough left over for lunch.
Click to expand...
I agree, the price is a bit steep, at least for a pdf.

I have a hard time with reviews these days. If I cannot tell if the reviewer is interjecting some bias for some reason or another (such as disagreeing with a creator over certain views, for example), I don't know how reliable the review can be.
 
The basic premise is sort of like The Hobbit, but instead of a dragon that drove the dwarves from their ancient home, it was a civil war. Now it's up to the hearty adventurers to help the remnant dwarves, who settled in a nearby surface community, reclaim their lost homeland. Beyond that it's very similar to Barrowmaze in terms of art, layout, organization and approach (surface hex crawl, and multi-entrance approach to the underworld).

If you liked Barrowmaze then it's probably worth a punt.

Add: Also, there's a lot more intelligent/sapient enemies vs. the hordes of undead that dominated Barrowmaze, so potentially a lot more room for clever players to exploit factions against each other, engange in diplomacy/treachery/deception, etc.
 
Last edited:
Lord Dynel said:
I find that a little...distressing?
Click to expand...
It is my understanding (based on previous discussions on the topic) that students do need to purchase and review, but they are not expected to post the reviews publicly. At least one student has posted a public review complaining about him, but it appears this was of their own volition.
 
Sable Wyvern said:
It is my understanding (based on previous discussions on the topic) that students do need to purchase and review, but they are not expected to post the reviews publicly. At least one student has posted a public review complaining about him, but it appears this was of their own volition.
Click to expand...
Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation!
 
Lord Dynel said:
I agree, the price is a bit steep, at least for a pdf.

I have a hard time with reviews these days. If I cannot tell if the reviewer is interjecting some bias for some reason or another (such as disagreeing with a creator over certain views, for example), I don't know how reliable the review can be.
Click to expand...
There seems to be a general consensus that Bryce Lynch's reviews are solid.

I agree that rando reviews can be unreliable but if I see a recurring complaint in almost every review I start to pay attention. In the case of Dwarrowdeep the complaint is an over-reliance on RNG to generate critical content. I really loved the barrow generation in Barrowmaze but that was complimentary to a fully developed, hand crafted mega-dungeon. I am hoping a Pubber who has bought the product can weigh in on this.
 
Sable Wyvern said:
It is my understanding (based on previous discussions on the topic) that students do need to purchase and review, but they are not expected to post the reviews publicly. At least one student has posted a public review complaining about him, but it appears this was of their own volition.
Click to expand...
Going by the student reviews (I know of two) I cautiously think that's correct here. Neither of the students have said they were made to post reviews publicly. And on a cynical level, I don't think Gillespie would gain anything by getting negative reviews put up.

I still find it pretty skeevy though.

Gillespie's argument is that he's hardly the only professor to put one of his own books as a set text. While this is true (and I do think this is an issue in academia) there's several elements that stand out for me.

I'm not quite sure why his work should be a set text in a popular culture module anyway. I'm not even convinced they're justified specifically for a class on RPGs Whatever you think of the quality, they're not academic studies. And they're neither historically significant nor commercially significant. I'd like to see the defense for why this work was chosen to the exclusion of others.

I know a lot of academics. I know academics who have their own work as set texts. I have never heard of another academic who requires proof of purchase. Shared copies, library copies, (shh) pirated versions are all absolutely standard on this. The only logical reason to require proof of purchase is so Gillespie makes as much money as possible.

On current evidence I don't believe that students are forced to post reviews to pass the course, just to write them. However, I question the objectivity of the marking when we are talking about a man who replies to bad reviews with comments like:

Everyone is welcome to an opinion. You’re right, you don’t get it lol
Click to expand...

I’m not TSR and have never made a claim to be so. Compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges.
Click to expand...

So the content has no redeemable value whatsoever? Ok lol
Click to expand...

Those comments do not suggest a man who has the detachment required to assess fairly in an academic context.

For that matter, I'm not convinced anyone would actually be able to mark reviews of their work fairly. I know my old music journalism tutor certainly showed us his past articles. But he wouldn't have dreamed of asking us to review them, let alone doing so as part of a formal assessment procedure. It's simply professionally beyond the pale.

All that said, lots of people seem to like Gillespie's work and I have no reason to doubt them on that. So while I'd certainly tell them not to go near him in an academic sense if you want an OSR dungeon they've been well received. Having poor academic standards isn't necessarily something that would affect someone as a RPG designer. I'd merely say that his sales figures are completely untrustworthy and his reviews should be taken with at least a pinch of salt. And that his general professionalism would mean I wouldn't personally enter a business relationship with him, not that there was much chance of that anyway.
 
Allen Varney said:
Greg Gillespie's titles always sell well about this time of year, because he's a professor at Brock University and he requires his students to buy copies of his books and leave good reviews on DriveThru and Amazon.
Click to expand...
I know it's a totally different field but skimming the student reviews makes me want to never buy anything from him. Average review of 1.6/5 and multiple students mention being forced to buy his products. He sound like he'd be the type of DM who laughs when he kills your character.
 
Stan said:
I know it's a totally different field but skimming the student reviews makes me want to never buy anything from him. Average review of 1.6/5 and multiple students mention being forced to buy his products.
Click to expand...
It's a "can you separate the creator from the art" question for me.

He doesn't sound like someone I would let into my house, but nothing he's doing is obnoxious enough to put me off buying his products (if I cared about megadungeons).

Different people draw the line in different places there, obviously, It's a personal judgement at the end of the day.
 
Black Leaf said:
Different people draw the line in different places there, obviously, It's a personal judgement at the end of the day.
Click to expand...
Agreed, but the price tag can tip the scale for me. I had fun running Barrowmaze, but I won’t spend that much for a PDF again.

…but the high price tag makes more sense now that I know he’s a prof.
 
Necrozius said:
Agreed, but the price tag can tip the scale for me. I had fun running Barrowmaze, but I won’t spend that much for a PDF again.

…but the high price tag makes more sense now that I know he’s a prof.
Click to expand...
It does the opposite for me. The reason for the high price tag of most academic books isn't down to the professors, it's the publishers.

(Protip: If you ever see a really interesting academic article outline and you can't afford it email the academic privately. About 95% of the time I've been sent copies regardless of the wishes of the publishers. With academics I have a personal relationship with I've been sent whole books before they go to press).
 
At first sight, what put me off was the name... it seems like a parody.
But reading that he makes his students buy and review the book... which I thought was a joke when I first read that... that's bad practice IMO.

Might be that I'd love the book... but the other stuff (and the name) might be lurking over my shoulder as I read it.
 
Black Leaf said:
It does the opposite for me. The reason for the high price tag of most academic books isn't down to the professors, it's the publishers.

(Protip: If you ever see a really interesting academic article outline and you can't afford it email the academic privately. About 95% of the time I've been sent copies regardless of the wishes of the publishers. With academics I have a personal relationship with I've been sent whole books before they go to press).
Click to expand...
Woah. Noted! We need an “informative” reaction for posts.
 
I picked up Barrowmaze because of how well regarded it is , although it turned out to have some philosophical design decisions at odds with my personal style.

I grabbed Caverns of Archaia because it sounded perfect for chopping up and scattering around my wilderness, and it seems to be serving that purpose well so far, even though at this stage it's only been informing the rumours and information the PCs are gathering.

I do get the impression that the author is probably a bit of a tosser, but if he releases something else that I feel will provide me with value for my game, I'd be willing to pay for it.

To the actual purpose of this thread, I have nothing meaningful to say about Dwarrowdeep, sorry.
 
I had no idea Gillespie was such a twat in the meat world, and that might have deterred me from buying any of his stuff at those price points, but I'll give him credit, he does know how to write a good megadungeon that is actually usable at the table and has great production values. The only negative thing I can really say about Dwarrowdeep is that it's almost formulaic at this point, and clearly hits almost all of the same beats as Barrowmaze -- a sort of madlibs for megadungeon design that prof. Gillespie seems to have stuck on.
 


Perhaps this will give you a hint as to why it's on the bestseller list on DTRPG...
 
Sable Wyvern said:
Care to summarise for those of us who can't or won't watch a Youtube video hunting for what you're hinting at?
Click to expand...

I have to tiptoe around the "no politics" rule. Let's say Gillespie is more on the Pundit side of things than the Fred Hicks side of things. He made a statement on a KS update that got the Twitter mafia riled up, so the reactionary element is buying his new book in response. Obviously that's not the entirety of it. Some people have enjoyed his work in the past, me included.
 
"To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when we went into the Anamalous Subsurface Environment, and some clowns killed the entire party."
 
Grelan said:
I have to tiptoe around the "no politics" rule. Let's say Gillespie is more on the Pundit side of things than the Fred Hicks side of things. He made a statement on a KS update that got the Twitter mafia riled up, so the reactionary element is buying his new book in response. Obviously that's not the entirety of it. Some people have enjoyed his work in the past, me included.
Click to expand...
Ah, ok. Thanks for the additional info.:thumbsup:

I did come across that controversy, and spent a bit of time reading TBP and the Site being entertained by everyone on all sides being all outraged.
 
Gringnr said:
"To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when we went into the Anamalous Subsurface Environment, and some clowns killed the entire party."
Click to expand...
Clowns have been scary to me ever since my uncle explained to me what they really are...
 
To be fair to Gillespie, I think his book was funded prior to the controversy, so I'm not sure you can put his sales down to people spite buying. Unlike Venger or Pundit's products, this will actually get played by a lot of people. Gillespie doesn't need to lean on this type of thing for sales, as he has a solid rep where dungeons are concerned.
 
Black Leaf said:
It's a "can you separate the creator from the art" question for me.

He doesn't sound like someone I would let into my house, but nothing he's doing is obnoxious enough to put me off buying his products (if I cared about megadungeons).

Different people draw the line in different places there, obviously, It's a personal judgement at the end of the day.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's a tricky subject, and I certainly wasn't trying to start a political discussion. That can get off in the weeds real fast.

I tend to try to judge a product on its own merits. So yeah, I try to separate the creator from the art as much as I can. But again, better to digress from that line of thinking.

I was hoping to get an idea of the actual product, and I appreciate the input received, so far, in that manner. Is it worth the price tag? And my apologies if my thread had stirred up any unrest. :smile:
 
OK, I'm just going to stick to the book...

I am writing as a GM who has runned Barrowmaze, and who have Dwarrowdeep in the hard copy and plan to run it next month.

To preface: I did not run Barrowmaze "as is", and I am not planning to run Dwarrowdeep "as is" either.

The two campaigns have some parallels: both are "themed" megadungeons, with different factions occupying different sections of the dungeon. Although both can be played in sandbox mode (i.e. no scenario mission, just explore, kill, and loot), both come with an "ultimate goal" and a ticking clock: finding the MacGuffin before the bad guys do.

Barrowmaze is big. Dwarrowdeep is huge. There are 12 premade dungeons, each with 30+ to 150+ keyed areas (a rough count yields 970 total), some of which have sub areas. These main dungeons are connected by 37 secondary areas, which are NOT premade for you, but which you are expected to generate for yourself using a selection of modular dungeon maps, and tables for random monsters, hazards, and loot. Some assembly required.

Even if you play Dwarrowdeep without the secondary areas, you are still looking at a thousand "rooms", which is not something a typical gaming group can realistically clear.

I personally prefer Barrowmaze over Dwarrowdeep, as the scale of the dungeon and factions seem more manageable. While I can imagine a party of adventurers roaming the burials of Barrowmaze and running into the occasional cultist, Dwarrowdeep is supposed to have like entire armies of Duergar, Derro, Black Orcs, Trolls, etc. who have laid claims to different areas of the dungeon. Think Caves of Chaos, on steroids. Once they realise outsiders are horning in on their territories, they will be setting up blockades at choke points, making further incursions costly. Even if the party are able to "clear out" a section of a dungeon, they have no practical means of securing it, or preventing the bad guys from reclaiming the area once they run out of rations and torches and have to leave. When they return, they will have to fight through the same rooms again to reach new grounds.

I plan to approach the campaign rather differently, but since that is not the question here, I will not elaborate. Feel free to ask me about the book though.
 
Gringnr said:
To be fair to Gillespie, I think his book was funded prior to the controversy, so I'm not sure you can put his sales down to people spite buying. Unlike Venger or Pundit's products, this will actually get played by a lot of people. Gillespie doesn't need to lean on this type of thing for sales, as he has a solid rep where dungeons are concerned.
Click to expand...
Counterpoint: Kickstarter sales don't put you at the top of the DriveThru list (unless DriveThru is giving you credit for free download coupons as "sales", which would seem like a weird thing, but certainly not impossible).

So, essentially, both things could be true: He could have had a successful crowdfunding campaign and people who missed the campaign could be spite buying now that people they don't like are mad at him.
 
I have it, and I'm satisfied with it. It's not perfect, but I was very much in the market for a product like this and it delivers enough for me to be happy.
It's a huge dwarven hold, more Moria than Lonely Mountain. Probably the closest I've seen to a Moria in print. In my view, it's better than Gunderholfen, but it probably has a similar number of keyed areas?
The keyed areas are:
- The seven entrances to the megadungeon, which are each large complexes guarded by some monster factions.
- The 8 primary encounter areas. These are areas within the complex that are fully keyed, quite large, and are generally the headquarters of a faction. One of these is very large, and partially procedurally generated. Factions include Duergar, Goblins, Ice Trolls, Orcs, Derro, off brand Kuo Toa, and Black Orcs.

Along with this you get a hex map of the dungeon, with the primary passages, secondary passages and secret passages marked on it. So in that sense, navigation is pre-planned for you. There are 40 secondary encounter areas along with the 8 primary encounter areas that you've got to make yourself. If you didn't do this, the dungeon will be pretty empty. There's also a pretty comprehensive random encounter and random warband system to keep the hex crawl interesting. It's pretty similar to what's in Forbidden Caverns if you've seen that.

Now, I wanted a fully stocked and keyed Moria, but I've got to admit that such a thing is probably unpublishable. But compared to other versions of this fantasy, Dwarrowdeep at least provides a very robust skeleton for you to put flesh on. The random dungeon generation is done using geomorphs provided, so it is at least not going to be as tedious as rolling for corridors and so on like in old DMGs. It's relatively fast to slap together a level, and it's recommended to procedurally generate and then make the story after. However, I noted a few places in the map where I'm going to create the secondary locations myself along a certain theme. I think you probably cannot use this product to it's full potential without a significant amount of work creating secondary encounter areas. At the very least, you'd need to roll up a few around the various entrances to start with. That could be a deal breaker for people who don't want to do that. And geomorphs are quick and easy, but they could also end up really repetitive after 40 dungeons. He provides 36 geomorphs, but if you were gonna procedurally generate all 40 areas for sure your players would recognise repeated areas eventually. And I'm not sure the quality of the exploration in those areas would be particularly good if you didn't work to put something interesting in each and every one.

If it wasn't for the hex map, I'd have been really disappointed with this product. But the hex map and the fact that the random generation is not too onerous saves it for me. YMMV, and I can totally understand why someone might skip this for that reason.

Production value wise, it's got all the nice art you'd expect if you've seen barrowmaze or highfell or forbidden caverns. There's art for every single area, and it's really cleverly done. There are some typos that I've found, unfortunately. Nothing too critical, but some stuff definitely slipped through, which if you're paying full whack for the hardcover might be annoying.

As to the author, he seems pretty prickly from what I've seen online and I doubt I'd agree with him about much, but I've enjoyed running every single one of his dungeons so far and Dwarrowdeep is honestly a kind of product I've been looking for for years, so I'm fine paying for it. I'm sure lots of authors of RPGs I've played are people I'd disagree with on various issues.
 
@ E Eternal Chump Thanks for the review. I especially appreciate the level headed appraisal of the RNG.

I am not all surprised that Dwarrowdeep blows away Gunderholfen when it comes to production values and art. How do they compare in terms of value and bang-for-the-buck for "abandoned dwarven hold megadungeon"?
 
That's a good question. The biggest advantage Gunderholfen has is that it is complete, you can run it out of the book as is.
It's also a bit more wacky than Dwarrowdeep, which is more vanilla (being vanilla is a plus for me, but maybe not for others).
The Dwarven feel of Gunderholfen is less strong, because the hold was taken over by a bunch of different factions after the Dwarves left, so if you're really looking for strong Dwarven theming (which I am) Dwarrowdeep wins.
I think the maps for Dwarrowdeep are better, as is the writing quality in the book. But Gunderholfen is under a third the price of Dwarrowdeep, and it's certainly not less than a third as good in terms of quality. So for the price, I'd say Gunderholfen is quite well worth it if you just need an abandoned dwarf hold dungeon to drop into your world but if you want that specific Moria and very Dwarven feel, Dwarrowdeep does it better.
Gunderholfen is also a much more "traditional" dungeon, where the deeper you go, the harder it gets, whereas Dwarrowdeep doesn't really have that theme at all - there's elevation changes, but it's much more like hills, mountains and valleys in a traditional hexcrawl than descending a level in the dungeon. The difficulty broadly depends on which faction's territory you're wandering into. I like that, but it's not what everyone expects from an "old school" dungeon.
 
E Eternal Chump It sounds like Dwarrowdeep is akin to Barrowmaze, in that it is meant to be the foundation of an entire campaign whereas Gunderholfen can be dropped into a campaign with relatively little effort, to be ignored or pursued by a party as they see fit.
 
Hmm. I already have Arden Vul, Barrowmaze and ASE, none of which I've really run (mega dungeons being quite the commitment). I think I'll give this one a miss. Barrowmaze looks quite well done though, so I'd imagine Dwarrowdeep is similar. Also, given the cost of Arden Vul, I didn't even blink at the $35 price tag.
 
I've run through all of Barrowmaze once, and had players go delving in it multiple times (it's one of my introductory dungeons for my school D&D club). It's pretty great, if you like dungeon exploration. I've run most of Highfell (the floating dungeon) and I think it's also excellent, though not as well developed background wise as Barrowmaze. Lots of wacky stuff to find and things to do in Highfell, and it has that same "let's just do a barrow" feeling as Barrowmaze with the 20 mages towers. Going down into the dungeons underneath them is similar to descending into the Barrowmaze.

Forbidden Caverns is really cool and up my alley as a wargamer, but I think most of my groups wouldn't be down for the skirmish style play it encourages. You've got lots of warbands roaming around allied to a cult of plague, and some of the warbands hate each other. It's like Caves of Chaos on steroids. I've mostly taken the various monster lairs out and used them in other games, and they're solid.

Dwarrowdeep is more like Forbidden Caverns than Barrowmaze, but with the added underground exploration feel. By this I mean that there's not really any equivalent to the "let's just do a barrow" activity, and there are a lot of warbands roaming around. Forbidden Caverns has 54 different caverns to Dwarrowdeep's more modest 15 detailed ones, though I think many of the dwarrowdeep areas are bigger. It'll probably be a long time before I'm ready to run Dwarrowdeep, whereas you could run Barrowmaze immediately once you had the pdf.
 
Free League is supposedly still working on Moria for TOR 2e. Gareth Hanrahan has posted some references to it on Twitter, but nothing concrete. There was some speculation on their forums that it might be dual-statted for TOR 2e and AiME, which is also supposed to have a 2nd edition in the works. Obviously this doesn't help you out immediately, but it's something that might be on the horizon. Free League is spread rather thin these days though. :-/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top