I've just started reading through my copy of "Barrowmaze Complete" and am loving it an highly recommend it (as well as it's successor mega-dungeon "The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia" which I am enjoying even more") but I have a couple of questions.

   1) Is there any guideline (I must have missed if there is) as to what levels roughly the PC's should be in particular parts of the mega-dungeon? I know that's more 5E thinking than Old-School, but at the same time it isn't.

I realize it's a sandbox and just the players go where they wish and run from anything to powerful for them, but still it would be nice to have a rough guideline.

   2) Has anyone read/played through it, and if so what was your experience. Did you enjoy it? Hate it? Tinker With it? etc etc.

This is one of my favorite dungeons for any edition or OSR variant - just love it. I've run it 3 times. It isn't the kind of thing you should expect to run to completion; rather, in my experience it is a huge environment that parties dip their toes into and then escape when they find they've gone too far. One of the times I ran it, I was feeling like a real bastard and had the party land inside in a random room after they all stupidly climbed into a well that was obviously some sort of gate or portal. They arrived in an unknown part of an unknown dungeon, with minimal gear and no light sources, and happened to arrive in a room containing several beast men, so they suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives in pitch darkness. It was awesome. Maybe a quarter of the party lived long enough to escape the dungeon. Anyway, this is an awesome product with terrific maps, writing and overall design. Do yourself a favor and buy it.

What exactly makes it special? Is it just a big swampy dungeon?

I played in a long-running Barrowmaze game using a B/X clone, and in two years of weekly play we still didn't clear it.  I had a lot of fun, of the particular kind that comes from eventually overcoming difficult challenges, but at the same time I considered it D&D in hard mode.  We had several tpks and even more character deaths before anybody survived to level and we started to get our feet under us.  

There are a lot of undead and vermin down there, which tends to limit the ability to negotiate rather than fight.  Ironically for an avowed old-school adventure, a randomly stocked dungeon might have more opportunities to parley.  Other things will talk, the beast-men and the rival treasure hunters, but we got unlucky in that regard as well - apparently we blew the first few reaction rolls against "treasure hunters", leaving the party convinced in and out of character that they were hostile brigands.  Which later led to us slaughtering a sleep'd group of them after they'd tried to surround us.  (The GM kept a poker face rather than explaining out of character for quite a while.)

Given the frequency of undead, if you do run it you may like this table from Delving Deeper for spicing up some of the undead encounters.

I do have a copy now after the Archaia kickstarter, but I actually still haven't cracked the book, so I can't directly answer your question about difficulty guidelines.  I know our GM presented it as a challenging adventure for characters starting at 1st level, getting harder as you traveled farther out rather than deeper, and with the assumption that you might want to try cracking some of the surface barrow mounds for gold to level before going too far in the 'maze proper.  (Though some of those are challenging as well.)  With or without explicit level guidelines I formed the impression the dungeon is meant to be "too hard" if a party tries to solo it; they're better advised to hire henchmen and mercenaries, buy war dogs, and team up with anybody or anything they can parley with.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;996940What exactly makes it special? Is it just a big swampy dungeon?

Well, it's a well-executed big swampy dungeon.  A best practices mega-dungeon.  It's both coherently themed, and has a lot of interesting tricks, traps, secrets and challenges.  There's a couple of factions down there as well; though we didn't stumble across them until near the end, it might be possible to do so earlier depending on routes.  But ultimately you're going to spend a lot of time dungeon crawling and fighting undead if you run it.

Quote from: Larsdangly;996937This is one of my favorite dungeons for any edition or OSR variant - just love it. I've run it 3 times. It isn't the kind of thing you should expect to run to completion; rather, in my experience it is a huge environment that parties dip their toes into and then escape when they find they've gone too far.

The thing is massive that's for sure. I've just started reading the entries in the main dungeon section and my eyes are already starting to glaze over with the sheer amount of rooms.

Quote from: Dave R;996951I played in a long-running Barrowmaze game using a B/X clone, and in two years of weekly play we still didn't clear it.  I had a lot of fun, of the particular kind that comes from eventually overcoming difficult challenges, but at the same time I considered it D&D in hard mode.  We had several tpks and even more character deaths before anybody survived to level and we started to get our feet under us.  

There are a lot of undead and vermin down there, which tends to limit the ability to negotiate rather than fight.  Ironically for an avowed old-school adventure, a randomly stocked dungeon might have more opportunities to parley.  Other things will talk, the beast-men and the rival treasure hunters, but we got unlucky in that regard as well - apparently we blew the first few reaction rolls against "treasure hunters", leaving the party convinced in and out of character that they were hostile brigands.  Which later led to us slaughtering a sleep'd group of them after they'd tried to surround us.  (The GM kept a poker face rather than explaining out of character for quite a while.)

Given the frequency of undead, if you do run it you may like this table from Delving Deeper for spicing up some of the undead encounters.

I do have a copy now after the Archaia kickstarter, but I actually still haven't cracked the book, so I can't directly answer your question about difficulty guidelines.  I know our GM presented it as a challenging adventure for characters starting at 1st level, getting harder as you traveled farther out rather than deeper, and with the assumption that you might want to try cracking some of the surface barrow mounds for gold to level before going too far in the 'maze proper.  (Though some of those are challenging as well.)  With or without explicit level guidelines I formed the impression the dungeon is meant to be "too hard" if a party tries to solo it; they're better advised to hire henchmen and mercenaries, buy war dogs, and team up with anybody or anything they can parley with.

Do you think you would have had more fun with a more traditional kind of campaign?

Quote from: Dave R;996951and with the assumption that you might want to try cracking some of the surface barrow mounds for gold to level before going too far in the 'maze proper.  (Though some of those are challenging as well.)  With or without explicit level guidelines I formed the impression the dungeon is meant to be "too hard" if a party tries to solo it; they're better advised to hire henchmen and mercenaries, buy war dogs, and team up with anybody or anything they can parley with.

Absolutely that is re: the surface burial mounds, looting as many as you can before heading down into the dungeon proper, as that probably will give the players a level or three of experience, (level-ups) before descending towards their deaths.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;996953Do you think you would have had more fun with a more traditional kind of campaign?

Not at all, I'm just saying it's a thing to be aware of.  It helped that the GM had expressly billed it as and recruited for a dungeon-centric game, so everyone who played was there for that.

Too, in twenty years of off-and-on roleplaying I hadn't previously done a true mega-dungeon focused game.  I got started with a more quest plus small dungeons crowd, so this was somewhat new to me.  I'd have happily played that character and game longer, but when the same GM later tried starting Stonehell from 1st level it didn't catch as much enthusiasm.  With a longer break it might have, but I think because it was too close on the heels of the first for those of us who did both.

But the gameplay challenges, and the accomplishment of overcoming them, felt very different in an uncaring mega-dungeon than in a "solve the GM's quest" game.  So it's a kind of campaign I'd recommend playing at least once to everyone in the hobby.

Quote from: Gwarh;996954Absolutely that is re: the surface burial mounds, looting as many as you can before heading down into the dungeon proper, as that probably will give the players a level or three of experience, (level-ups) before descending towards their deaths.

Until they TPK coming out of that one barrow with all the gems, and the halfling torch bearer is the only one to escape alive, and he's not even anyone's henchman, just a party hireling, so he retires wealthy in a distant town, and the whole party starts over at level 1 with half the available gold gone.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Oh, I never thought of that.

So what happens if all the early levels already got cleared out, TPK happens, and the new level 1 dudes only have super high level monster areas to deal with? Isn't it basically game over at that point.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;996991So what happens if all the early levels already got cleared out, TPK happens, and the new level 1 dudes only have super high level monster areas to deal with? Isn't it basically game over at that point.

That is what happened with the final TPK two years in, and the logic to restarting with another dungeon.  But the final one wasn't the halfling incident, which we did recover from.  There really is a lot of gold hidden around, enough to level a group even after a few TPKs at the start.  It's hard, but it's not in any way a nega-dungeon that can't be beat.

That does make me wonder if the inevitable fate of any sandbox hexcrawl is to suffer depletion of gold and thus not be able to level. (If using gold=xp). Those games tend to be very lethal and that means you'll probably have a few TPKs, at which point all the easy resources are gone.

I guess it's up to the players at that point.

It also makes me what happens to the town when you suddenly show up and dump 10k gold into its economy.

Anyway, so far you've made a convincing case that this could be good so I'll probably buy it.

Quote from: Dave R;996951I played in a long-running Barrowmaze game using a B/X clone, and in two years of weekly play we still didn't clear it.

I have Barrowmaze and really like the concept, so I am glad to hear you haven't "cleared" it after a couple of years of play. I want to fold it in as a sub-level of my own megadungeon, which has ~300 rooms on level 1, ~300 rooms on level 2 and 1,000+ rooms on level 3 (have not needed to draw out level 4 yet). How often and for how many hours at a time did you play? Monthly all day Sunday? Weekly on Friday nights?

Separately, in my mind, a true megadungeon is the mythical underworld and shouldn't be clearable, but rather be a virtually endless stream of tunnels and rooms, always being restocked. It's a place the party or multiple parties can explore and plunder over and over and over again, if they want, or just visit periodically when they're between other adventures. As a result, I always viewed Barrowmaze, and would likely view virtually any published megadungeon, as a just really big dungeon rather than a true megadungeon. It only becomes a megadungeon, the mythical underworld, once you make a decision to expand it as much as necessary to make it virtually or effectively unending.

Quote from: Chainsaw;997045It only becomes a megadungeon, the mythical underworld, once you make a decision to expand it as much as necessary to make it virtually or effectively unending.

Some "restocking" could happen naturally as it became empty and a nice home for things that dwell in those type of places.
Replacing undead might be a stretch but natural creature tend to multiply on their own and expand into available spaces.
Humanoids might find them more defensible than exposed villages.
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Quote from: Greentongue;997081Some "restocking" could happen naturally as it became empty and a nice home for things that dwell in those type of places.
Replacing undead might be a stretch but natural creature tend to multiply on their own and expand into available spaces.
Humanoids might find them more defensible than exposed villages.
=

Oh, I don't care too much about explaining why new undead or any monster shows up in my megadungeon. In the mythical underworld, there are always deep, undiscovered recesses that spawn new and horrible creatures that wander up through the tunnels and rooms (and through locked doors) finding new homes. It's a strange, dark, magical place that defies the logic, reason and conventions of the above-ground world. Remember, we're not talking about some shallow, ten-room humanoid burrow two miles west of town next to farmer Jones' pasture.

I agree with the above: I find it hard to take seriously any dungeon that can be 'cleared'. The concept of the game as I learned in in the late 70's was that each DM had at least one dungeon (and surrounding environment) that was their main vehicle, and the thing just grew and grew over time, basically without limit. Players could try to wrest control of parts of it and maybe stage raids into other parts, but the idea that it could be somehow emptied was contrary to the whole concept of what a dungeon is. So, if this is your idea of a 'dungeon', a 'megadungeon' better be fucking huge. The problem with commercial products is that it is rare for anyone to invest enough time and money to put out what I would consider a standard DM's home brewed dungeon - it just takes too much time and paper to present it in a cost effective way. So, we almost never see a proper dungeon as a commercial product. Instead we usually get little pocket dungeons that are suitable for a convention tournament or one of the satellite sites in a conventional home brewed campaign. The only commercial dungeon I know of that is really the full-on serious thing is Rappan Athuk. That is a dungeon. Barrowmaze is cool and definitely big enough for a commercial product, but it is still basically a starter kit.