OPD Review 6 - The Ancient Academy

The Ancient Academy by Stuart Robertson

39 room dungeon level. Reminds me of the Lost City (B4) for some reason. Clearly a low level dungeon with pretty mundane low level encounters. This is another abandoned monastery (like the sample dungeon in the DMG).

Organization: A place for everything and everything in its place. Flow is good (standard).

Clarity: Needs bolding or highlighting or underlining or SOMETHING to make the important elements of the areas stand out. The map is crisp and interesting enough for what it is.

Usefulness: Here's the thing. I keep wanting to say that this is a solid enough dungeon but I keep feeling like I have to write "for what it is." What is it? Well... I guess this is kind of the epitome of what I think of "Old School" dungeons. It's solid, has reasonable "ecology" I guess. Just nothing about it that I would remember the next day after adventuring in it (well, maybe the kitchen... or the debris clearing...). That said, the map is interesting enough to me that I could drop it into that fictional OPD megadungeon I sometimes think about. I'd want to put some kind of anchor encounter here so the players could say, "Let's go back to that place where the... something memorable... room was."

Subjective: Usable if not interesting.  If I had a megadungeon or for some other reason needed a quick low-level dungeon, I could see pulling this out but without some kind of hook, I'd probably pass.

Affiliate link to the 2009 OPD Compendium