This is a very high level adventure (21-24 level!) which takes the party into space to stop a dastardly plan to steal the collective knowledge of the world from a passing Great Beast that floats through the universe just watching what's going on. It's got hitchhikers, though, and these are the ones causing the trouble.

It all begins when the party encounters the Cult of the Forgotten Word, who are the villains in question. They are seeking to steal a particular tome... and the party has the chance not only to save that book, but to put an end to their schemes altogether, if they dare! The DM's background explains a lot more of what is going on, as well as providing a monster list, scaling information and several excellent ways to get the party involved in the first place. These primarily involve getting them to a place called Withers somewhere in your campaign world, as the sight of the cultists floating down from space to terrorise the local academics should be enough to engage their interest!

There's a section explaining how space travel works for the purposes of this adventure - it's all pretty descriptive and hand-waved. The cultists use Cosmic Eggs - translucent globes that just travel between the Great Beast and a nearby planet, without much need to worry how they do it. Going to the Great Beast is easy, they just do it. Coming back provides plenty of opportunities to land the party other than where they intended... even up to sending them to the wrong planet entirely if you're that cruel!

The adventure begins when the party arrives in Withers and find the town's Westphalen School under attack. Enjoy the chaos as they explore, rescuing frightened academics and students... and even encountering one student who's a "Demonology hacker" and has summoned up a devil he cannot control in an attempt to defend his school!

And this is all before the party use a Cosmic Egg or other device to get themselves to the Great Beast. Therein even more epic excitement awaits. As you'd imagine, a dungeon carved out of the living flesh of a giant immortal spacefaring creature is not your ordinary delve; but there are monsters to fight and traps to evade a-plenty, and a lot else to do besides and strange beings to meet.

There's no clear resolution to the adventure. Perhaps the party will seek to release the Great Beast from the cult's control. They'll still need to find their way home, of course. Or they might decide to kick out the cultists and keep it for themselves... Whatever they decide, this is Adventure on an epic scale, perhaps a fitting climax to an entire campaign. Or it might be a one-off, as there are some pre-generated characters provided, if you want to try a really high-level game.

Please!!!Please!!!Please!!!Please!!! MORE EPIC LEVEL ADVENTURE LIKE THIS!!!!<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

Dungeon Crawl Classics #33: Belly of the Great Beast is the sole epic-level adventure in Goodman Games?s DCC line. The zipped file is just over 4.5 megabytes in size, containing a single PDF which is slightly over 5 meg. The adventure is sixty-eight pages long, including two pages for the covers, one page for the credits/legal/table of contents, and half-a-page for the OGL. The adventure?s table of contents isn?t hyperlinked, but it does have full bookmarks.

The only full-color artwork in the book is found in the covers. The interior art is all in black-and-white, and while not too prevalent, there?s still a good amount of it. Sidebars and tables are all in grayscale, as are the various single-page maps of areas. In short, while there are no borders on the pages, a printer-friendly version of this adventure would have been nice.

The adventure?s premise is that there?s a giant, serene space turtle that travels through the cosmos. This titanic creature, however, has recently been taken over by a malicious cult that wants to destroy knowledge throughout the cosmos, and is using the creature?s body as a ship. The PCs encounter the cultists attacking a school on their world, and after chasing them off, must find a way to follow them into space to the Great Beast, where they have a chance to eradicate the cult once and for all.

The adventure is divided into three sections. The first two (at the Westphalen School, and the Moonleaper) are relatively short, being the means by which the PCs respectively find out about the cult and then follow them into space. The bulk of the adventure takes place inside the Great Beast itself. Note that, while this adventure is for PCs of 21st through 24th level, the Encounter Levels here range relatively far above and below those numbers. It?s quite possible for the PCs to get into Encounter Level 28 fight, for example, if they?re not careful.

The adventure does a relatively good job of maintaining internal consistency and handling itself well (it deals with moving around in the beast, covering things like the internal teleporting matrix, and what happens when the cult is on alert status). It also nicely gives us things such as information about the evil demigod the cult worships, two new epic templates (which are specific to this adventure), and a few new magic items and artifacts.

That said, this adventure had some downsides as well. It exhibits an odd sense of humor at various points, such as by having the method by which the PCs follow the cult back to the beast be a flying inn, or how the evil demigod has some rather inane titles. Beyond this, this adventure is also remiss in what it doesn?t talk about. No real discussion is given to PCs who use teleporting or similar tactics to bypass walls and obstacles (as opposed to the teleportation matrix in place) or if they use powerful divinations. Epic-level groups have myriad options, and this adventure should have done a better job of preparing the GM for how to handle them.

Ultimately, it was what this adventure didn?t have that caused me rate it as being a three-star product. Between the lack of a printer-friendly version, which is something fairly significant, and not discussing how to handle epic PC tactics, combined with the off-kilter sense of humor, Belly of the Great Beast is a good epic-level adventure, but one that missed out on being truly great. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: This adventure did a good job of presenting epic-level adversaries who will truly challenge the PCs, going over their options and tactics well.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: While it covered the NPCs quite well, this adventure doesn't prepare the GM for handling the tactics of epic-level PCs, who are capable of poweful divinations and transportation effects. It also lacked a printer-friendly version.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

Dungeon Crawl Classics #33: Belly of the Great Beast is a 68 page d20 pdf adventure, and the 33rd product in Goodman Games' very successful line of adventure products, Dungeon Crawl Classics. Each adventure aims to be a good, solid dungeon crawl, and Belly of the Great Beast does not disappoint. This adventure is for epic level characters, and one of the very few epic adventures out there, and in particular playable epic adventures. Belly of the Great Beast is suitable for 4-6 characters of levels 21-24. Pregenerated characters (at level 23) have been provided should DMs wish to run this with minimal effort in creating higher level characters.

Belly of the Great Beast comes as a single, full-bookmarked pdf file. The level of presentation in Goodman Games' products is high, and the product looks polished and professional. Artwork is good, not spectacular, but it's plentiful enough to enhance the feel and look of the product. The writing and editing is good as well, with clean maps, clear encounter descriptions, and enough detail to get most things working. Naturally as an epic adventure the statistics blocks will come under fire, though a casual look shows that Goodman Games opted to keep the statistics blocks simple, with easy class combinations and standard and few magic items, so the stats looks good. There are a few errors, as can be expected, but then again at this level of play errors are bound to creep in at some stage. Still, overall, I think they did an acceptable enough job of the statistics.

Given that this is an epic adventure, the characters are naturally expected to do something that can be considered epic or at least of global proportions. Belly of the Great Beast takes the adventure into space, journeying to the legendary Great Beast to disrupt the nefarious plans of a cult aiming to destroy not only their world, but the entire cosmos. This adventure combines heavy combat with interesting locations and space-faring to make a truly daring adventure that characters will not likely forget or have encountered before. While the focus isn't entirely on the space travel, but more on the various complexes occupied by the antagonists, there is a definitive space theme to some of the encounters and the creatures encountered.

The adventure starts by providing all the standard requirements for an adventure - background, synopsis, scaling information, adventure hooks, tables of encounters with brief descriptions and CRs, and other useful background information. From there it's straight into the adventure, and a meeting with the sinister other-worldly space-faring antagonists. The adventure is essentially divided into two parts - the first where they encounter the antagonists and learn what they're up to, and the second where they travel to the Great Beast in an attempt to disrupt their plans. Both parts of the adventure are location-based dungeon crawls, with some tough encounters and interesting combat challenges.

This is a long adventure with close to 70 encounter areas which will tax even the most hardy epic level characters. There is no immediate time-frame, so the characters should have ample time to recover if they can, and launch fresh attacks when they're rested. There are a lot of tough encounters, some ELs in the low 30s range, while most encounters are probably at an encounter level above the average level of the party. This should provide for challenging combats, though hopefully not too lengthy affairs since there's a lot of combat to be had, and one can easily get bogged down in the battle.

As an adventure this provides an interesting premise and location (the living body of the Great Beast), and some challenging encounters and scenarios. There's not much in the way of mystery or puzzle solving, and in that sense it's relatively straightforward. As an epic adventure it does well too - there's no limitation on the abilities of the characters, so they should be free to do as they please and act in whatever manner they require. There are, of course, some well-known problem areas of epic play, such as the blasphemy spell and high HD creatures, but most high level players should be aware of the dangers of high level play and powerful spells such as that.

The adventure provides a good mix of encounters - demons, dragons, devils, high level NPCs, constructs, undead and the like. The range is good and challenging, and the adventure even provides a number of new monsters - the sacrificial and avatar guardians. It is a combat heavy adventure, but epic characters should be able to find ways of avoiding or nullifying most threats. Overall, this is a good dungeon crawl even for an epic adventure. It doesn't necessarily highlight the full scope of epic play in general, but it provides a compelling plot nonetheless that should be something different and certainly something entertaining.<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: A good solid dungeon crawl adventure, and one of the few enjoyable epic adventures in the market. Interesting premise, challenging encounters, and an unique location for the adventure.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: The adventure won't give epic characters the ability to showcase all their abilities, being mainly combat focused. A little diversity in the nature of the encounters could've been added to spice things up a bit from the combat heavy encounters.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

You would think that all you have to do when your players reach Epic levels is to plop random god?s in front of them and trap them inside of inter-dimensional space. For all of us non-lazy DMs delving into the epic levels with their party ,there is Dungeon Crawl Classics #33: Belly of the Beast.

Belly of the beast is nearly 70 pages of engaging encounters leaning more on combat. The book is well bookmarked as well.

Belly of the Beast's plot involves a super alien intelligent race whom land to the party?s home world hellbent on preventing them from learning to read anymore. They feel that humans are not worthy of intelligence and are now raiding libraries to steal a book that allows them to evolve. The writing is tight, the artwork is great and the puzzles, though not tournament classics, are pretty good. The weakest part of the adventure is the plot. Those whom like their sci-fi firmly separated from their dungeons and dragons are going to be gravely disappointed. Sure the only difference between magic and alien technology is fluff, but that fluff helps me sleep at night. The two seem interchangeable throughout the adventure.

Also, with all the planes and portals in dungeons and dragons, that any party has obviously found by 21st level, aliens coming in spaceships does not seem to mesh, though the writers did a great job in the attempt.

Another pitfall of the book is its lack of handouts. This has the shortest appendix of any of the Dungeon Crawl Classics I have seen.

For the DM

Face it, there are not many epic adventures out there. Props has to be given to Goodman Games for just releasing such a niche product. I have said this in other reviews, but do not be afraid of Goodman?s faux claim of no NPC left alive that makes it appear to be only for hack and slashers, this adventure has a few keep alive good NPCs (heck one is plot important). Even if I did not plan on running anything epic with my party anytime soon, if I was running a party between 16th to 18th level, I?d put in some of the well thought out NPCs and places.

The Iron Word

This is a good epic level adventure if your party wants to open up the world to space travel and aliens. Perhaps at 20th+ level there may not be a whole lot out there left.

<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: - ITs hard to do epic adventures and this one is nicely written<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - lacks handouts <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br><BR>[THIS REVIEW WAS EDITED]<BR>