Thoughts on Glory Hole Dwarven Mine
Yes, it's called the Glory Hole Dwarven Mine. Get yer laughs out.
I ran Judge's Guild's Glory Hole Dwarven Mine by Edward R. G. Mortimer for my Arden Vul party as a diversion from the main mega-dungeon. It kind of ended up diverting the campaign for a bit. Woops.
The Story
I had a map to the mines jotted down as one of the potential treasure maps that could be found as random treasure in Arden Vul (alongside another Judge's Guild product: The Book of Treasure Maps), and the players found it and forgot about it for about a year. But one day they decided to go for it and headed out to the old mining town of Deepton in search of gold and gems.
They found there multiple parties converging. A dwarven emissary commanded the mine to be shut down, and disgruntled miners were looking for trouble. Several adventuring groups, good and bad, were exploring the mines hoping to take advantage of the chaos. Lastly, a small army of dwarves was marching to the mines to inspect it and shut it down if the reports of demons in the lower depths were true.
The party explored the mines over about 10 sessions, fighting many goblins, prospecting for ore, making friends and enemies, helping a bigfoot avenge his wife, saving a dog, playing poker with redcaps, falling victim to nasty traps, and eventually finding some great caches of treasure. As the dwarven army marched closer, they made a mad dash to try and claim the mines for themselves, hoping that if they could slay the demon below the dwarves would have no reason to seal the mine.
Tragically, the demons were much to strong, and multiple high level PCs sacrificed themselves to keep some of the party alive. The party was so weakened by the deaths and the loss of magical items that we had to divert to low level adventures for a while and say goodbye to Arden Vul.
My Thoughts on the Adventure as Written
This is a pretty fun adventure. It is very Judge's Guild-esque, with genuinely very funny NPC names (like the dwarven party of Bipper, Bopper, and Bapper), and oddball encounters like a drunken two-headed ogre (he just got back from a whiskey drinking contest). Many of the rooms are simple at the top, but do get much more interesting lower down.
Instead, the module relies heavily on random encounters to provide the spice. It goes hard on this, with very high rates, up to a 4 in 6 chance per turn on the first level! And while some entries are as boring as 4-9 goblins, others are entire detailed adventuring parties with their own hidden motivations, or even nested tables of further detailed groups of dwarves.
As an aside: I really like juiced up encounter rates. As written, 1 in 6 every 2 turns translates to random encounters happening quite rarely. I really like how bustling with activity this place feels, and it adds a constant friction to moving around (and exiting!) the dungeon.
This does lean hard on the DM's improvisational skills, but it was fun to run. The only sticking point with them as written is that you're going to get specific adventuring groups over and over again. My party was very used to hearing the cheerful whistling of Jolly Naben and his beautiful daughter Sabra echoing through the halls. After a while they just started nodding and walking past each other.
The high encounter rate is exacerbated by the map leaning very heavy on long hallways. The map itself is very maze like and does not conform to right angles. It does make more sense as a mine, but it looks like a slog for players to map.
My favorite trap, and one that my party fell for hook line and sinker, is a simple bricked up passage, with the words "TREASURE VAULT" written in Common and Goblin. Obviously a trap right? Well let's carefully remove a brick to check it out and... the wall collapses from the subterranean lake on the other side, washing the party down into a subterranean river and out to the waterfall in the adjacent hex, killing several and sweeping away several magic items.
In addition to the standard dungeon monsters and traps and treasures, the module has a whole ore prospecting system, which I really didn't get how to use. We had fun prospecting just to see what ore there was, but unless the party is planning on taking over the mines themselves (easier said than done) mining it is kind of out of scope of the adventure. The system for how much ore is mineable and how much that's supposed to be worth is very confusing and I never really understood it. Luckily for me the party was never really able to engage in any serious mining.
The adventure starts of doable for parties of levels 2-3 maybe, but the lower levels are brutal. This isn't quite a mega-dungeon really, only having 115 rooms, but it would take a while to explore, and it has a high level range. The module is written to be slotted near The City-State of the Invincible Overlord (though it's easy to use your own city, I used Newmarket in Burdock's Valley). It seems like the best way to use it in your campaign is a side dungeon that can be revisited multiple times, over the course of the adventure as they level up more and more.
My party tried to take on the lowest levels, but were absolutely destroyed by the hordes of powerful demons and the big boss Myreautog at the bottom. The most powerful PC in the party had to sacrifice himself to let the others even attempt to run away, and even that planned relied on some generous DM fiat.
But with that, the party had no interest in ever returning, and took their loot and skedaddled to recruit some fresh level 1s and take on level appropriate dungeons.
In Conclusion
Glory Hole Dwarven Mine is an oddball for sure, with its corny jokes and wild balancing. But if you're a Judge's Guild fan, I recommend keeping it in your back pocket. It's a wild ride with the right group.