Dungeon Delve (D&D Adventure Series) by David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek

Versatile and Fun!by Jay_Laugh

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November 23, 2009: After struggling to get all of our gaming members together again for the next installment of our campaign, we decided to take a break and jump into a couple of dungeon delve sessions. Also, to give our usual DM a break (and a chance to play a character he created) I took the helm for the delves using this book. End result, we had a great time and I was very pleased with what WoTC put together for this product.

This was my first DMing experience in over a decade and I found that the way Dungeon Delve is constructed is ideal for those who are new DMs or who want to give DMing a go. Each of the 30 delves (one delve for each level) has three encounters that get progressively more difficult. They also have a very basic story context (though nothing like a campaign arc). The introduction gives a lot of ideas on how to adapt these delves to your needs incase you want to use one of the delves as a quick drop-in for a current campaign.

The concensus of our group was that the delves were a lot of fun and challenging. There are plenty of standard play monsters and also a number of monsters with tricky tactics that add a sometimes chaotic element to the encounters. Another benefit to running the delves, if you're not running them as an insert in a campaign, it gives players an opportunity to try new characters. If these characters aren't what the players expected (happened in our game) then there's no long term investment in the unsatisfactory character as there might be if the same character was introduced into a campaign.

One warning though: Dungeon Delve is designed to be used with the dungeon tiles products produced by WoTC. As far as I can tell, they used just a handful of dungeon tile products. However, one of those products is

Halls of the Giant Kings: DU1 - Dungeon Tiles (D&D Accessory).

I was disappointed to see them use this product only because I think it is now out of print. What this means is, the price has gone up significantly for what's still left on the market (when I searched this product again on Amazon today, the prices ranged from $36 into $100plus! . . . this, for a product that was originally $10!) Not cool . . . but this is really a complaint that this series of dungeon tiles is no longer in production. So if you happen to be one of those who don't necessarily buy dungeon tiles frequently and missed this series (like me) you'll be left recreating these dungeon maps by hand. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I enjoyed creating them personally, but it will add some time to game preparation.

I Also Recommend: Revenge of the Giants.

Great additionby Themindtaker

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April 28, 2009: This is a superb choice for anyone looking to DM 4th Edition D&D games. The battles are challenging and intricate enough to flex just about every skill at both your disposal and the players'. It provides enough detail for all the applicable monsters and maps that tweaks for hombrew campaigns and unconventional party compositions is easy-peezy, lemon-squeezy. After the core books, this would be the first supplement I would recommend a beginning DM purchase.