2025 Reviews: Tomb of a Thousand Doors
UPDATE Since writing this review, the team running the kickstarter offered an opportunity for backers to cancel their pledges and actually receive a refund due to the large number of typos and errors in the final text. This is the first time I've ever seen a campaign do that, so I want to give them credit for making things right.
Hello again! Don't get used to these-- they will be very intermittent. Part of the reason for that is that I'm not running as many one-shots this year and instead am focusing on longer campaigns. However, I did just conclude a ~3 month open table using a published module, and I thought I'd share my thoughts. So without further ado, here is my review of Tomb of a Thousand Doors (hereafter referred to as ToatD) for Mausritter.
ToatD was a project put together by Matthew Morris, a frequent creator of Mausritter content. It was the result of a game jam that the community participated in, with members writing their own dungeon areas independently. According to the Kickstarter:
"...this project is the result of a game jam with 43 entries, all with their own flavor and style but when put together, though the content is there, lacks a cohesive flow and design. This campaign will reformat and elevate the project to new heights!"
While all of these disparate dungeon encounters/sites are now unified with a cohesive design and layout, I'm sad to say that they still feel like disparate and unconnected dungeon things that have been grouped together with no thought as to how they would relate to each other. It looks like it is more cohesive on paper, but in practice you may as well have just picked an encounter at random from a list, because the actual progress through the dungeon felt arbitrary and immaterial. They are all connected on the same map, but they're just "there".
Why is This Here?
There a few points where there is a gate to progress for one reason or another, but there was little reason for there to be a gate because in most cases the party could bypass it easily-- nothing would be gained by having that spot opened as a shortcut. This was particularly evident in area 16, "The Bastard Princeps Encampments". Here we have three factions that claim the birthright of the Mad Mouse King, and they are spending their time crammed into three rooms, struggling to get through a magical blue barrier that "blocks their progress further into the tombs". The problem is, the way it's added to the overall map makes the magical blue barrier likely to be the first thing that players will encounter from this area as they explore the dungeon-- the barrier is not blocking the factions' path deeper into the dungeon, but rather it is blocking the most direct route to the most commonly used entrance. The players will most likely gain absolutely no benefit from figuring out the puzzle of the magical blue barrier, because in order to meet the factions they will have already discovered an alternate path that completely bypasses the encounter area.
Grab Bag
Another issue I ran into while running this for my group was a serious roller-coaster in terms of the quality of the different encounter areas, both in terms of the interesting gameplay provided and the information that would be required for the GM to make the encounter interesting and fun for the players. Some of them were great! One of the first spots my group encountered was area 8, "The Cavern of the Fountain Beast". Figuring out how to deal with the Plague Ratz and the giant toad disrupting the water supply was a fun session, and it led to two new areas, one of which provided an alternate entry point to the dungeon which would actually save the party time if they wanted to go to a particular area.
However, one area in particular completely caught me off guard in two ways-- first, how boring it turned out to be at the table; second, how little necessary information was given to the GM, while at the same time a tremendous amount of useless information was included. This was area 25, "The Chambers of Flames". On paper, this was a labyrinth of thirteen octagonal rooms lined with mirrors, with trapped archways that shot jets of flame that reflected off of the mirrors and into adjacent rooms in unexpected ways. At the table, this was a single path (hardly a labyrinth) through thirteen rooms with the exact same trap in every room. By the time my players reached this area, they had become quite seasoned and cautious, and they discovered the trapped nature of the first arch, and were thus able to avoid all of the identical traps with a little caution. Rather than playing out the same procedure thirteen times as they progressed through the single path that they could follow (seriously, look at the map-- there is only one branch point at the very end of the sequence, and it immediately goes to a dead end), I just ruled that time passed and rolled a couple of times on the encounter table. But here's the kicker-- even if they hadn't been cautious and the trap had been triggered, the encounter area doesn't give the GM any information about what the trap does in terms of game mechanics. No damage, no effects, nothing. The only thing that it does say is that the flames will be "released in a diagonal through the nearest archway (see example below)." No example was included. Adding insult to injury in this particular area is the fact that only a quarter of the text on the spread contains actual gameplay information.
All of the sections crossed out in red contain information that is either irrelevant because it contains background information that the players will never have an opportunity to learn, or because it describes in loving detail a being that will never be encountered. The last section on the page is even an annoying bait and switch-- it starts out be describing the hideous monster that protects the treasure vaults, only to conclude by saying "by the way, this monster is only a legend now because nobody knows where it is." The inscription that was meant to describe the trap to the players was equally irrelevant, as it didn't provide any clue as to how it could be avoided.
In the same category of "lack of necessary information" was the huge variety of new magical items. There were some really cool and creative things that nailed the Mausritter setting, but there were also some that had descriptions that were very vague and did not entirely explain what the magic items do. In most cases, I was forced to make a quick ruling on the fly as to how they actually function, or else I needed to interpret some unclear writing. For example, the "Overwhelm" magical item's description reads:
While wielded: Gives the Frightened Condition at sunrise, removes the Frightened Condition at sunset.
This is pretty close to meaningless in the context of Mausritter. Gives it to whom? Removes it from whom? When doing what? Does it just go off randomly at sunrise and then do nothing until sunset? How long does it last? When I'm running a pre-written adventure, I don't want to have to rewrite the magic items at the table in order to make them make sense.
Connective Tissue Failure
Part of the pitch for this one was that all of these dungeon locations created by a variety of different authors would be unified and connected into one overarching megadungeon. In reality, they're just plopped down on a map and connected by tunnels. There is nothing that creates any sort of unification or logical connection between any of the areas. My players, bless them, were always on the lookout for connections from one area to another, and were thinking about other things they had seen when trying to solve puzzles, and it was very frustrating to have to tell them that no, the solution to a particular problem would not require a clever assembly of various clues from different parts of the dungeon. That would have been nice, and if I hadn't already grown frustrated with the adventure I could see myself reworking it so that there was some kind of connection between one area and another. Additionally, the full dungeon map has several discrepancies with how the areas are presented in their zoomed-in depictions next to the area keys, which caused several hiccups in my running of the adventure.
Another feature of megadungeons that can tie everything together is the smart use of encounter tables that change depending on where the party currently is in the dungeon. Potential encounters will change as appropriate, with certain factions having a stronger presence near their lairs, for example. This was not the case here, unfortunately. The concept of the overloaded encounter table system with its alarm die was good on paper, but in practice it felt very "samey", with similar results coming up no matter what the PCs were near. Indeed, sometimes I would have to ignore the results entirely because it would not make any sense for a particular encounter to occur-- there are certain parts of the dungeon that would be entirely blocked to the Plague Ratz faction, but they are a prominent and common entry on the table.
What Worked?
- Some great little encounter sites, with engaging problems and situations for the players to interact with
- Outstanding art
- Creative new creatures and items
What Didn't Work?
- Doesn't work as a cohesive whole
- Insufficient information for the GM to run the adventure in many instances
- Numerous proofreading and editing errors
The last point I want to talk about was the errors. One frustrating trend that I've been seeing in the world of indie games is the tendency for creators to ask their backers for proofreading passes, many times in place of hiring an actual proofreader. I don't know if that was the case for this project, but there was definitely a Kickstarter update that sent out early proofs of the PDF and asked backers to look for typos and errors. Your average Kickstarter backer is not a professional editor or proofreader, and while they may be able to catch some typos, that's not the only thing that needs to be looked at. There were so many errors that weren't typographical, but rather gameplay related. One example would be from "The Chambers of Flames" where the "example" promised was not delivered. There were no typos here, just missing content. Another was in area 21, "The Temple of Emmental Evil" (fantastic name, by the way). The room key did not match the numbering on the map, plain and simple. Everything was jumbled up, and I had to stop running the adventure and let my players talk amongst themselves while I read things over and tried to figure out what description was talking about which room on the map, and then had to ret-con some things that had already happened based on the wrong area descriptions. Again, no typos! But someone carefully checking to make sure that the text was performing its duty from a gameplay standpoint would have found this.
The worst part about this is that I was running the adventure from the final PDF version, and I am currently waiting for my physical copy to be delivered. No further edits are going to be made to the book, because they've already been printed. It's a very disappointing feeling to be waiting for a product that I know is full of errors.
While I and the other backers wait for our rewards to be delivered, the PDF version is currently available to purchase via itch.io, but I would not recommend getting it with the intention of running it as a megadungeon. I think it is only really usable as a collection of dungeon adventure sites (mostly).
Thanks for reading!