I covered the first 3 boxes from Dungeon in a Box back in October. I don’t want to repeat too much from that review, but here are some quick highlights:

• I get the physical subscription. It also comes with digital assets for each box as well as access to their Wonderous One-Shot digital assets.
• The digital assets include a Pathfinder 2e conversion
• each box comes with a gridded map for the dungeon portion of the adventure, skinny minis, and 1 or 2 3D printed minis.

This post is intended for dungeon masters. There are story spoilers below.

The Content

Box #4 - Queen of the Rotting Jungle

The crew is shrunken down to the size of an ant. A star fragment has caused a spore growth to gain semi-sentience and you have to retrieve the fragment to save the island. It was funny that we played this box shortly after playing a Tales of the Valiant session that had spore infections taking over NPCs. The kids had fun with this map, although they didn’t take too much advantage of the “ant” city.

Box #5 - Leviathan of the Lich

Pinocchio meets Evil Undead Wizards. You’re swallowed by a Leviathan (along with one of your rivals for the star). You have to escape a MASSIVE dungeon that spans over 4 maps! (Their largest one so far) I thought this dungeon was quite impressively done. It was a very well-written adventure with lots of variety to the rooms. I really think this is the star (no pun intended) box of the whole campaign so far. My kids found it a little too large. (More about that in the DM suggestions section)

Read about all our sessions up to box number five.

Box #6 - Race to the Sunken Star

Your players visit some merfolk and finally get the star! (I know, I was surprised, too!!). This adventure was written so as to force the players to navigate the city and experience lots of the flavor written by the authors. I think it’s very well done and my kids overall enjoyed the variety of the tasks needed for the main fetch quest.

Recap of box 6 session here

DM Suggestions

I may have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but since my kids got introduced to TTRPGs via DnD Adventure Club, they are used to being able to complete sessions in an hour or so. I was striving to finish each of these boxes within a couple hours at most. However, starting at box #5, this became almost impossible. This is perhaps unique to my table (although maybe if you’re introducing adults to TTRPGs, they might not know it’s meant to take a while), but I would STRONGLY suggest splitting the later boxes up over a couple of the typical four-hour sessions. Especially if you have a table that likes to explore the flavor of each island that the authors pour their creativity into, you’ll be rushing things if you try to do a box within one 4 hour session.

In addition to giving your table more time for exploring the islands and the dungeons, as the players level up (almost once per box) the battles are also getting way more epic. If you don’t cheese the battle, it can easily take 30-60 minutes.

The Good

The writing continues to be solid. There are fun little bits built into the adventures. For example, box #6 is based on Aztec lore. If you know Spanish and/or anything about Aztec lore you get a little extra benefit in knowing what’s going on. The dungeons are getting very, very large and very interesting.

If your players were going along with the Magnus the ghost plot, it’s resolved at the end of box #6. It was very fun, added some extra story to the plot, and it gave the players some neat magic items.

The Bad

The books are very inconsistent on when your characters will level up. It will say that your characters will level up, but then they don’t. Or the next book expects them to be at the previous level. This makes it a bit annoying to know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

After making a big deal in the first book about which organization your group belongs to, it hasn’t come up except for a throwaway action to update your org back in box 3. So far most of the gold and other treasure seems mostly pointless as there hasn’t really been anywhere to spend it.

Conclusion

Annoyances with the leveling aside, this continues to be a great value for the money. We have amassed quite the collection of 3D printed minis, the campaign gives a good mix of structure and ability to be creative, and the dungeons are well thought out.

• Dungeon-in-a-Box
• D&D
• DnD
• 5e
• Pathfinder