REVIEW: “DUNGEON DELVE”

D&D Rules Supplement Dave Noonan, Bill Slavicsek

Dungeon Delve provides the DM with an array of small, easy-to-run dungeons each specifically designed for a night of gaming.

This book is designed for groups looking for an exciting night of monster-slaying without the prep time. It contains dozens of self-contained, easy-to-run mini-dungeons, or "delves", each one crafted for a few hours of game-play.

The book includes delves for 1st- to 30th-level characters, and features dozens of iconic monsters for the heroes to battle. Dungeon Masters can run these delves as one-shot adventures or weave them into the campaign.

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It’s not often that I review a book without having read it cover to cover- this may be the first, in fact. But Dungeon Delve is a product that doesn’t require much explanation, and should be easy to figure out if this is something you need or not.

The book’s concept is simple. 30 short adventures, one for each level, consisting of 3 encounters per adventure. If you’ve read any of the published 4e adventures, you know how the encounter blocks look.

Each delve goes as following: an explanation of the background of the delve, story-wise. Then there’s some advice about how to expand the delve into a longer affair or tie in other adventure hooks. Every delve can be done with dungeon tiles, and they tell you right at the beginning what dungeon tile set they need: DT-6 are the oldest used, and most adventures use only one set, though some require multiples of the same set (and the level 30 delve uses two different sets). The delves also contain a variety of helpful sidebars- for example, there’s one that gives advice on how to use minions effectively, one that tells how best to move your bugbears, and one that contains goblin taunts.

As expected, most of the encounters are hack and slash fights, with occasional traps. No skill challenges that I could find, though of course dungeon-friendly skills like Perception and Athletics come in handy. If you drop one of these into your game, you should know that you’re adding some fights. I didn’t find the terrain setups particularly inspiring as far as cool places to fight go, but there’s a pretty decent variety between the 30.

The book opens with an introduction of how dungeon delves first started at GenCon 10 years ago, what defines a delve, and who should use delves (if you want to take a break, if you’re new to DMing, etc.) There’s also a page on running delves as very specifically a DM vs. the players type thing that is specifically called like a board game. There is advice on how to adjust delves, either by expanding them, changing the monsters, adjusting for more or less than 5 PCs, adjusting for PC level, and changing the features of an area. There’s some notes about the monsters in the adventure, which include some new ones, and some that have appeared in other sources, but all the information you need to run them is contained in the book. Then the 30 delves begin.

I confirmed with WotC at Comic Con that the delves contained therein have not been duplicated elsewhere (even the game store delve nights), so you won’t open it up to find you’ve already played that particular fight.

That’s the entire book. Either you’ll want it for the reasons they list to run a delve or to get some inspiration for your campaign, or you don’t need the book. Without cutting and pasting exact text, I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you about Dungeon Delve.

By Dave Chalker