Return of the Monster Games

Board wargamers have enjoyed monster games for years. These are games that are so large in scope that just getting the game set up is a Herculean task. Lou Zocchi did a version of the Battle of Britain that tracked every single plane involved on its own control sheet, quite a task for the largest aerial campaign in history! Campaign for North Africa is another that the wargamers mention when discussion turns to the monster games. You essentially need two teams to manage this "two-player", each team basically representing a high command. According to reports this game tracks things like when was the last time you change the oil on your troop transports. Italian troops are penalized on water usage, because they boil pasta for meals even when fighting a desert campaign. My brother-in-law has the maps for DAK, another Rommel in Africa game, on his game room wall. I believe the overall map measures about 36 inches by eight or ten feet long. I think the battefield for the First Battle of El Alamein takes up something like six hexes on that map.

Role-players have long enjoyed big projects like the monster games. Even today people are still gaga over playing T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil followed by A1-4 Scourge of the Slavelords and topped of by GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders. That's approximately eighteen levels of adventure in 3 big fat supermodules! Time for that disjointed and flawed (but still classic) series to step aside for the new kid on the block AEG's World's Largest Dungeon.


The 16 poster-sized maps make quite an impressive display, eh?

This puppy is over 800 pages long, over a million words of text! It contains nearly every monster in the SRD! Even a Terrasque! This huge and mighty tome has an MSRP of a cool one hundred bucks, but Amazon will part with one for only $68.

I'm not a huge fan of the current incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons, but holy crap does this product get my blood a-pumpin'. It's like WLD is the Mount Everest of dungeoncrawling. I want to tackle it just cause it's the biggest, baddest dungeon around. I'm not sure I could DM it, but I sure as hell would love to be a player in a campaign that focused exclusively on tackling this module. One of the things that has fallen out of D&D for me is a sense of purpose. Back in the days of 1st edition Advanced and especially the Basic/Expert era every campaign had an implicit goal: Level up until you build a kickass castle and retire surrounded by minions and henchmen. Maybe you fought some wars or something but basically your adventuring days were supposed to be mostly over at that point. If you played the Mentzer edit of D&D or was a big Deities and Demigods fan you could tackle the more ambitious project of achieving divinity. Either way when playing earlier versions of D&D it was always easier for me to see a clear victory condition that I could strive for. Whether I suceeded or not was secondary, I needed an overall challenge to test myself against.

For much the same reason I've always been drawn to the idea of a campaign centered around looting one exceptionally large dungeon, whether it be the originals (Castles Blockmoor and Greyhawk), my own meager efforts (particularly my Dungeon of Doom) or this new World's Largest Dungeon. Unlike the boilerplate "what is an rpg" text I've always felt as if a good role-playing campaign ought to have a goal. Just buttknockering around a large campaign map getting into trouble seems insufficient for me these days. "Here's your mission this week" gaming seems equally incomplete. I guess maybe I let superhero games slide on this count, because superhero comics are so darn reactionary in nature. Apart from supers though I tend to favor building a winning condition into a campaign, if for no other reason than to give the campaign an endgame, a limit, a sense of closure.

One way to construct such a game would be to focus on one mega-dungeon and when that dungeon is cleared the campaign is over. If you're going to play the kind of campaign in which dungeoncrawling is the main activity of the group, why not make that activity the centerpiece of the campaign? I tend to suspect that a lot of groups engage in what I might call "abashed dungeoncrawling". These folks construct elaborate plots which inevitably lead to some form of dungeoncrawl. Find the Dingus quests are often like this. By having an elaborate backstory on hand the group can convince itself that they're not really dungeoncrawling hackmonkeys. "After all, we are only going into this ruined temple because our intricately crafted plot demands it. Not because we like hacking orcs for dollars. No, that can't be it. We're grown up gamers."

Well, funk that. I like measuring my D&D success by killcounts and gps looted. And few things feel better in a game than discovering that you have successfully cleared another level and found the stairs down to boot. I want to descend into hell, kick some ass, and win fabulous prizes. Maybe that makes me a hack-n-slashy munchkin, I dunno. I'd like to think that it makes me a Gamist. Either way I know that it would be about the coolest thing ever to be able to some day say "World's Largest Dungeon? Been there, done that."