Well, you do get a ton of dungeon jam packed into this product. Unfortunately, it's not particularly inspired, evocative or easy to use. Indeed, mega-dungeons like this help give the whole genre a bad reputation. There's just not much here to get you excited about running it. The back story is vanilla and cliched. The maps are fine, but nothing special. Most rooms have virtually no description; just a name, which more often than not simply describes the contents such as "Skeletons," "Orcs," etc. Any tween from the 80s could come up with that. Even worse, there aren't full stat blocks, just lists of hit points. So you'll need whatever old school monster book/stats you rely on to run encounters then have to calculate all the XP yourself.

As for the dungeons themselves, they're just okay. There are feeble attempts at creating factions, but much of it doesn't make much sense. And he doesn't really lean much into the Mad Archmage trope with a few exceptions. Traps and tricks tend to be underwhelming too. There is a lame effort to insert orc "work crews" into the dungeon that I just ignored. The sample rival NPC adventuring parties are a bit better done and showcase some of the character classes created for Adventures Dark & Deep, the author's OSR imagining of what 2nd edition AD&D might have been. I also like the "Dungeon Dressing" tables, though they could be expanded.

There is a book of illustrations, but they're pretty amateurish. Better than nothing, but since the room descriptions themselves are generally so lacking, cool images would have helped immensely. There are some new monsters and magic items, but again, nothing especially interesting or inspiring.

All of this is disappointing because in watching the author's youtube videos I was really excited to get this product. But it's just kind of meh. You can at least crib thre maps and adapt the dungeons for something else, which is what I'm doing, basically linking this to the far more interesting Undermountain.

So if you want to put in the work, you do get a lot of potential with this for a decent price. But if you're looking for something exciting to run right out of the box, there are far better megadungeon options out there.

Been a long time since I ran this, and I had to go back and skim through it again. You'd be surprised how much you can forget after a year or so -- especially when one has a castle & dungeon THIS large.

It's safe to say that you get a LOT of replay value! It's also safe to say that you'll get a good strong feeling of everything which worked in 1975 - without much of the ambiguity of Those Original Rules. In short, there is both meaning and madness in this setting, and each player will be rewarded for playing in character AND using player strategy. GMs will be rewarded if they study the background and extrapolate further developments - and plant many rumors.

PCs should learn of the rumors, especially, of the creator of this place. This can give them the advantage of guessing (it'll be no more than an educated guess) the meanings and motivations of the designer: the Mad Archmage. PCs should realize that madmen have reasons for what they do - even if the reasons make no sense to sane characters.

For instance, in a nod to That First Dungeon, the dungeon (and maybe the castle?) is still under construction. Signs of the construction crew's work - and maybe the crew themselves - may well hinder the players' characters.

Read the background, take plenty of light sources, and find places to sleep every night (or day) and your PCs may well finally meet that Mad Archmage. And if he makes any sense at all, I would like to hear about it.

This is a good solid adventure or series of adventures, which would easily get 5 stars. One star is deducted for not having the maps included withing the book. I have no problem with purchasing the maps separately (though I have, at other times, run games without using maps...let the PCs deal with the confusion and get lost) but it does annoy some young GMs. But they didn't live in 1975, when the gaming worlds in which we played were more dangerous and, frequently, unknown to even the gamesmaster.