Stonehell (Shadowdark)
How does one review a megadungeon? And how does the experience of reading it differ from actually playing it? A great deal. Stonehell reads and presents itself as interesting place, an abandoned prison social experiment that has gone off the rails. Written by Michael Curtis of DCC fame and hallowed by the OSR community as one of the great megadungeons, this module had a lot to live up to.
In play though it emerges as a fairly vanilla megadungeon that justifies some aspects of its 'monster hotel' vibes through its particular history. The play experience exposes though, how the distinct 'quadrants' house particular factions and species and make the exploration process more akin to advancing through video game levels rather than through an organic living and breathing world operating under its own logic. Room descriptions are mostly terse and broken up by references to the preceding chapter introductions for the more interesting sites on a floor. These have been mostly great, as for example the statue of an elephant spurned exploration of the dungeon for a means to unlock its secrets. But in between these highlights there is an awful lot of very (too much so) traditional dungeon crawling, with few moments of wonder and surprise in between. The players lost interest in the dungeon on the fourth floor, an experience I would bet is not atypical for this module. There is just very little that motivates deeper exploration of the dungeon, and the players, very much in charge of driving our sandbox campaign, plainly lost interest in delving deeper. An aspect could have been the somewhat limited social interactions that are possible in a dungeon and simply the sense that what was outside the dungeon was more interesting than what was inside.
Shadowdark worked well as a dungeon crawling engine, however, I think player power ramps up faster in this system than BX does, thus the lower floors we reached did not feel particularly threatening to the players. I would recommend to not go with the classic formula of dungeon level equates PC level, but stretch Shadowdark PCs levels across 2 floors, which would align the level maths more to BX power curves.
All in all, we had a fun time in the dungeon and it was suitable for our open table group, but it fell short in holding the players interest for an extended period of time. For my personal taste it was just a little bit too bog-standard D&D and lacked moments of surprise and wonder during explorations, which is the thing I value most in TTRPGs. 6/10