Dungeon of the Mad Mage Review

Comments, Criticism, and Questions are highly appreciated. There's no D&D without a party.

A Warning for prospective adventurers:

This review contains spoilers for Dungeon of the Mad Mage by Wizards of the Coast. Those interested in playing this adventure spoiler-free should steer clear or risk opening their mind to the Madness of the Mad Mage's subterranean super-complex.

The Don of Dungeons

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is Wizards of the Coast's follow-up to Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and is intended to run players from levels 5 - 20. The adventure's path follows the group of player characters as they descend from the famous Yawning Portal into the depths of the Undermountain - dwelling of the Mad Mage himself: Halaster Blackcloak. This adventure contains floor after floor of dungeon-delving goodness meant for a party of 4 players to fight, sneak, talk, and plunder. The multilayered content and straightforward design truly makes Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage the "Greatest Dungeon of Them All".

Mad Mage opens with an Overview of the Undermountain, listing off the names of its levels, general features, how magic works inside the dungeon, and some things players may encounter in their delve. There's also a section detailing the goals of the titular Mad Mage that you may or may not wish to utilize in your players' adventure. 

My personal favorite from this section are the "Starting Quests" given as Adventure Hooks in the Overview, just to give players side-goals and objectives as they naturally pick their way deeper and deeper into the Undermountain. Not only do these side-quests give the players optional goals to pursue, they the purpose of giving the players a reason to explore each floor to its fullest, rather than blitz the content like in, say, Tomb of Annihilation. Secondly, they encourage the players to return to the Yawning Portal now and again, as new quests may open up now that prior quests have been completed. 

The Yawning Portal in Dungeon of the Mad Mage is like Tristram from Diablo. Start, pick up some quests, dungeon, return, repeat. Plus, a few floors in the Undermountain contain their own quests that ask the players to involve themselves in the ecosystem of each floor to complete.

Diving into the Delve

Let's get down to Brass Dragons: the Levels, the meat, sauce, and sides of the feast that is the Undermountain. 

The Undermountain is divided into 23 dungeon levels and the infamous town of Skullport. It's less like the Undermountain is a 23-level dungeon, and more like the Undermountain is a stack of 23 different dungeons. Each level's chapter opens up with a brief "What Dwells here?" overview with a brief history, what lives, and whatever features it has. I love these. As I read each chapter in preparation for this review, each "What Dwells Here?" was like a fun-sized snack on Halloween, and I had my arm in the candy bowl. 

In addition to "What Dwells here?", each chapter has an entire page dedicated to the map of each level with marked with 10-ft units. If you were hoping for the detailed maps of Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, and Tomb of Annihilation, you're out of luck, because these maps follow the style of the simplified maps from Dragon Heist. But, each map contains "empty" connecting corridors that allow creative and enterprising DMs to add their own home-brewed additions to Halaster's madhouse.

Most floors in the Undermountain have their own unique challenges, themes, gimmicks, and characters, with some even being a throwback to to older published content. That's an accomplishment, but what really struck me were just how fun a lot of these floor concepts were. Here are some examples: 

• A Wipeout-style obstacle course including live commentary
• A network of tunnels with a 1/12th scale-model of a castle at its center that you can explore Honey I Shrunk the Kids style.
•  A wizard academy mired in intrigue, as if everyone was a Slytherin.
• ... and so much more!

The wide variety in dungeon types keeps the players from feeling like they're spinning their wheels. What's the goal? Get to the next floor, and eventually to the bottom. How are we going to do that? Figure it out on each floor, because sometimes there's no clear path to the exit, but when you get there, the level will definitely not be the same as when you arrived.

Every level's chapter ends with an "Aftermath" that accounts for the actions the players take on each level in regards to the quests and subplots introduced on each. Characters have the opportunity to change the Undermountain as they work through it, but without DM's worrying about the continuity of a complex overarching plot, or worry about players losing their way in an amorphous blob with no clear objective. It's kind of like Curse of Strahd in a way: you know where the Big Bad is; the adventure is getting there to punch his nose in.

Sounds pretty great so far right? But is it all unicorns and rainbows? Not exactly.

Don's Dirty Laundry

Unfortunately each chapter's layout leaves much to be desired, following the dungeon layouts of previous modules for each level. Navigating back and forth through the chapter to read a numbered blurb about a room makes it cumbersome to account for a level's exact population. What I would have liked to see is maybe a smaller form of the pre-dungeon text box from Storm King's Thunder that lists off the exact number of creatures in a room at a glance. I can't help but feel like it was a missed opportunity to improve on the layout that Wizards has been using for years. Or, you know, you could use DNDbeyond.

Talking about missed opportunity, I feel like Wizards of the Coast missed a good opportunity to include some interesting magic items in the Mad Mage's dungeon from a variety of different realms. The monster variety is superb, pitting players monstrosities from all walks of life (and un-life), but it seems that monster representation Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes or Volo's Guide to Monsters is conspicuously missing, and a few floors could be greatly enhanced with the inclusion of some critters from Mordenkainen's menagerie.

Conclusions

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is like a nice sandwich in a lot of ways. It's a straightforward adventure module with a clear purpose that's easy but together and understand. But in its simplicity you can find complex flavors and ingredients layered on top of each other that you can remove, exchange, and improve at your leisure. There's a lot to consume here, like Wizards of the Coast said: maybe like 8 months of content. But I can't find much to complain about here. It's refreshing to have an adventure with oodles of depth (no pun intended) instead of a massive adventure with the depth of a wading pool. What was that saying? "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." If that's the case, the Undermountain is like the gods damned Mariana Trench: the deeper you go, the weirder it gets.