Any ideas for making a labyrinth exciting?
So far I feel a labyrinth needs to meet at least two requirements to qualify as exciting:
- It needs to be of a manageable size; and
- It needs to be a puzzle, not just a mass of faceless rooms and corridors.
I was thinking of using a simple 3 by 3 matrix of rooms that take each other's place via a complex scheme of rotation as the players move through them. I would leave the players an ambiguous diagram of the matrix and its rotations and then have them explore. It would require a very particular path of movement to get to the exit. The idea is that the maze was created by a powerful illusionist as an expression of his power.
Any ways of making this idea work without it becoming overly tedious? Any labyrinth ideas totally apart from this one?
A labyrinth is a single, convoluted pathway that is traversed from its beginning to its end.
Tip #1: Don't make a labyrinth, make a maze.
Tip #2: Don't make a maze, either. A maze is only even slightly interesting in reality, endlessly tedious in person-to-person games. There's a reason it's now considered inappropriate to put mazes in text adventure games, even though they were a staple of the genre when it formed.
Tip #3: If you must put a maze in your game, make sure it can't be defeated by following one side of the corridor until you get to the end. This can be accomplished by ensuring that the walls aren't continuous.
Have the maze/labyrinth be the backdrop for interesting encounters and discoveries, but don't try to make the process of traversing the maze/labyrinth interesting because that is very unlikely to actually work and requires tons of additional work.
Alternatively, if you have players that actually find mazes to be fun, print them out one and time them completing it, translating their time taken and the times they pick the wrong course and have to backtrack into in-game time spent and backtracking, with any encounters or discoveries they would have come across - but I find that even players that like solving mazes don't like doing so through hearing a description of the maze (which can be miscommunicated or misunderstood) and describing their actions.
Melend wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
I'm DMing a campaign with a shrubbery labyrinth. The labyrinth is 4 layers deep and players start in the middle with one open path. They will go one way until they hit a dead end, but when they turn around and backtrack a different path than before is open. This is possible because I have awakened shrubbery making up different sections of the labyrinth, which will eventually corner the adventurers and open so that a minotaur can charge them. Just one way to do it.
Use a skill challenge, not a map. Have a list of stuff that happens if they muff a roll, and some "cookies" that happen if they succeed.
failures:
- Easy combat. an insect swarm or an animal
- you find a trap the hard way.
- you triggered an alarm. Now the labyrinth-maker knows you are here.
- somebody else is lost in here, too. He attacks on sight; he is half-mad and thinks you must have a map to the way out.
- you step on a trigger plate, bringing down a portcullis behind you. Just ahead and around a corner is a dead end. STR 35 (total) to pick up the portcullis enough to climb under it.
- Rat swarm comes down the hallway the other way, pursued by (something). The swarm pauses long enough to take a bite out of you, then flees when the (something) arrives and attacks all of you.
- find an inanimate zombie / mummy, which exposes you to mummy rot / flesh decay.
roll a 1
- the labyrinth-maker sent a squad of guards in to capture you. This is a Hard combat.
- encounter a Grimtooth Trap (see the supplement of the same name).
successes:
- a skeleton / mummy of a previous adventurer, has a stick of chalk in his hand. You may re-roll any one future roll in the challenge and use the higher result.
- a section where the wall is partially collapsed allows you to climb up and get a view over the top of the walls. This counts as 2 successes.
- the builder's patrols got lost once; you find a canteen and some trail rations in a dead-end.
- you remember the description of a famous labyrinth which is laid out a lot like this one. +1 to all future rolls.
roll a 20
- find where the construction force was slaughtered to keep the secret of the maze. Their undead spirits act as a guide from here on. The challenge rating lowers by one level (Hard to Medium, &c)
- find a skeleton / mummy. He has a map of the part of the labyrinth you haven't been in yet. Each future success counts as 2.
I happen to be working on a simple maze for an adventure game right now, so I have my own thought about this issue. Yes, just exploring a maze is indeed not a whole lot of fun in a tabletop roleplaying game. You need a way to make every room interesting, and there shouldn't be that many rooms to begin with. It also shouldn't be a matter of simply hugging the right wall till you reach the exit. As suggested above, I would include dozens of hazards, traps, enemies, lore, puzzles, and interesting encounters. I'd also have npc's that they meet in the maze, some trust worthy, and some there to deliberately get them into trouble. The maze itself should be a puzzle, that is perhaps not solved simply by moving from A to B. I'd include multiple points of interest that they need to locate, in order to open the exit. I'd also make every single room unique in its own way. You could also provide the players with a simple map, which they can fill in themselves, and which simply shows the rooms, but not the connections. This makes it easier to focus on the story, rather than having the players draw their own map and making mistakes.
For my own game I'm using a maze that exists of 9 unique rooms (plus a start and end room), each of which has an alternate version with different connections. So the player has to switch between the different versions of the rooms, to traverse the maze. The maze also has secret doors, and locked doors. And each locked door requires the player to solve a puzzle somewhere in the maze to acquire the key (or to activate a mechanism that opens those respective doors). There's also a malevolent entity hunting the player, which needs to be avoided (my version of the classic minotaur concept). Basically if you count the start and end rooms, that means the maze is made of 11 rooms, which makes it very easy to comprehend. Well 22 rooms if you also count the alternate versions.
I think the idea behind a Labyrinthe is it keeps shifting... To re-create that, I would not use a map at all. Just literally make stuff up as you go along. IF they draw a map and it doesnt match up.... perfect. If they go backwards and get a different place...perfect. Keep pretending that they *can* figure it out to keep them invested. Have the encounters you want, and at some point they 'figure' it out, and get out.
Just wanted to chime in with the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed the thread you link. I lost it at "King Neckbeard the Wise" !! LOL
Great thread.
iserith wrote:
7he_professor wrote:
I think the question to ask is "How does this Labyrinth serve the game?"
If the idea is for the PCs to feel a little lost while running into a series of encounters then focus on the fun part (encounters) and hand wave the tedious (being lost).
In saying that I think it's a great idea, and I'll definitely be stealing it at some point.
I'd follow Imaculata's lead and make an entrance and exit, plus approximately 9 rooms which contain encounters and recognizable features. Groups of pillars, a fountain, an unexpected garden, a clockwork guardian, some funhouse mirrors etc.
The area between any of these rooms is abstracted as just 'The Maze'. Whenever the PCs try to navigate their way through 'The Maze' they make some kind of check (Probably insight/perception/investigation, maybe even history/religion) failed checks result in the PCs arriving in a randomly selected room. That way they'll occasionally find themselves in places they've already visited, which should give that lost feeling.
You could even take it further and say that the DC to find the exit (their obvious goal) is high and out of reach but that revisiting rooms grants a +2 or +5 to any following check, as the PCs have started to solve the maze. This also ensures that at least a couple of the rooms will need to be visited before they can escape.
Throw in some time pressure (the dark magus has almost completed his rituals!) and we've got an adventure.
haw1343 wrote:
Magical hedges! Easy solution.
I like Varden_Khol's funhouse mirrors idea. I think a few clear glass panes mixed in would work great, and the character's speeds through this section could be 2 squares + Int mod (minimum 1). Particularly devious would be throwing in a gelatinous cube in this confusing area.
I haven't finished my idea, but it was indeed a labyrinth with 1 path, but there were some interesting features. A deep fountain/pool built into a wall that if explored reveals an underwater passage to another part of the labyrinth. A chute into a large room (to combat a large creature!). Grasping vines in one corridoor that concealed a secret door (3 round par, getting birdie could result in a time gain; a bogey resulting in a time loss). Lion (or whatever) statues that animate. I saw some other ideas here that I had in mine as well.
Basically, I think the key in translating a labyrinth into a table-top game is in creating a sense of wonder. Don't feel bad about mining the David Bowie movie either!
The idea of having glass walls could be very interesting, if the walls reflect spells. Players would have to be really cautious that when ever they encounter enemies, that there are not any reflecting walls in between.
The glass walls could also be imbued with illusion magic, causing relfections of the players to come alive and attack them.
The more I think about it, the more ideas pop up.
Very disappointed it took so long to get a Bowie reference in a thread about labyrinths. You guys are too serious and helpful.
Lotsa good ideas here. Keep it up.
transcendantviewer wrote:
I suppose you could also make the navigation through a labyrinth very abstract. Rather than having the players navigate each and every corridor, you could treat each section of the labyrinth as a seperate location that the players have to navigate to, through skill checks. If they fail their navigation, they may get lost, and end up in a different section. Much like traveling through a desert, you could use navigation checks to skip the time in between finding points of interest. You could represent the maze as a board with overturned tiles. Each tile represents a series of tunnels with a point of interest, which is face down as long as it hasn't been explored. When the players reach that section of the maze, turn over the tile, and reveal that part of the maze.
Magical events in the maze could cause some of these tiles to shift positions, much like the boardgame "Labyrinth". The only difference being that only the tiles that players have visited will be turned up.
* The maze could contain several key locations that the players must discover, in order to open the exit (a key or a lever that opens the exit).
* Some locations may contain traps, or treasures, or npc's, or of course monsters.
* Some mechanisms that the players activate could open short cuts all over the maze, giving them a +2 to their navigation checks.
* Solving a puzzle, might reward the players with helpful arrows all over the maze, for a further +2 to their navigation checks.
* They may discover a scrying stone, that allows them to overturn one tile of their choice, that they have not visited yet.
* They may be faced with a riddle from a talking statue, and when they answer correctly, the statue could reveal the location of one of the key points of interest that they must find (a key or a lever for example). If they answer wrongly, it could open a trapdoor, and drop them into a random room of the maze.
* Some traps may affect the entire maze, and unleash monsters all over the place. Or a special guardian may be released that starts wandering the maze randomly.
And as for the Bowie reference, I think the movie Labyrinth provides some really cool ideas regarding how the maze itself can erase or alter any clues that the players leave on the ground.