Hi all,
I'm currently building an adventure path for my players designed for level 6 to 9, with a theme of mazes and fey.
I'd like advice or guidance on how to build an interesting and fun series of encounters inside a maze without having the party get bored of exploring or feel like it's too generic.
Background: The players will learn that three days ago a nobleman's manor was surrounded by a hedge maze overnight. No contact has been made with the inhabitants, and the few who've gone to investigate have returned to report that the entrance was guarded by a half-man, half-bull creature. Our adventurers are tasked with finding out the fate of the noble and his household.
Behind the scenes: A gateway to the First World recently opened near the manor of our missing noble. A Blodeuwedd has taken up guarding this portal, and erected the hedge maze overnight using her at-will Plant Growth SLA. A Stroke Lad and Huldra have replaced the Lord and Lady of the house, disfiguring the servants into hideous monstrosities. Meanwhile, a Blackwood Satyr and his cronies have kidnapped the most attractive females from the manor, taking them back to the First World as their playthings.
The intent I have is to have the players traverse the hedge maze to reach the manor house, then discover the truth of the events from the Stroke Lad or Huldra, rescuing the noble and his household. From there, they can optionally pursue rescuing the kidnapped women as well.
In order to make the maze portion interesting, I'd like input from both DMs and players. What have you found that works well when playing through a maze in Pathfinder? What strategies keep the experience interesting? Also, what have you found makes the game boring our tedious, or what doesn't work well?
Eh....I wouldn't make it too complicated.
As a player, I see a maze and I'm going to brute force my way through it.
And I don't mean going through every hallway till I get to the end. I mean brute force.
Cutting through shrubs, burning them down, breaking down walls, etc.
You can lead your players to a maze, but you can't make them traverse it the way you want.
You also mention players are levels 6-9, a simple dimension door will take them to the manor house if they can see it. Bypass the whole thing.
I've been working on a large-scale maze that's all laid out with specific encounters, but I aim to use (basically) the maze rules/formula/setup/whatever from Bastards of Erebus. I'm thinking I'll let them choose to go a general direction and hit the encounters as they go. Provide a general map along the way. So they don't have to real-game-time twist and turn down every corridor, but I'm hoping to get the same effect, pretty much, and to have them have a sense of the spaces covered.
How much do you actually want players to play the maze as a maze, and how much do you just want the maze to be there as an obstacle? I'd second Kayerloth's planar realm suggestion, but emphasize one specific point - don't railroad the players into playing the maze. The best way to keep it fun is to make any one method optional.
Allow at least some areas to be "skippable" through combat, destruction, skills, more open areas with traps or other environmental hazards, short-term hops into damaging areas (essentially lava equivalent), puzzles, whatever you can think of. But for the entirety of the maze, enable or at least allow at least one alternative besides simply traversing the maze as intended. Feel free to make these quite difficult at times, as long as they're doable.
(Bonus points if you have the maze spell out a clue, or something of the sort, if properly mapped.)
Any maze worth its salt would have anti-magic/permanent abjurations preventing the use of short cut spells like fly and dimension door or consequences/reactions such as confusion or misdirection magic in response to attempted short cuts. I wouldn't worry about players trying these methods. It is natural for them to try and they shouldn't be prohibited from trying, but with clever use of GM fiat about "dungeon design" you can gently nullify their attempts with predictable roadblocks and put them back on track inside your labyrinth.
It is difficult to immerse players into an imaginary maze in a tabletop setting. Without the concrete visual offered by a real life maze, a video game screen, or a movie, the challenge lies in keeping the feel of a maze while still keeping it down-to-earth and viable conceptually.
I would be very descriptive with visual details to keep them in the mood and vibe of a labyrinth, but keep the challenge in a series of events for them to overcome. Maybe offer some riddles, both verbal and figurative. You could have a little troll or big Minotaur offer a verbal riddle. Then you could offer them a choice of direction (left or right, for example) with some little tidbit of detail that ties back to a clue given at an earlier junction. Things like mapping can become tedious at the table when the maze turns the players round and round -- which it should in my opinion! Have the players overcome a series of milestones/challenges but phrase and describe these milestones as points in your maze to keep the vibe.
This sounds like a fun and interesting challenge. I might give this some thought and try something similar for my players.
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edit - I just posted and saw Kaladin's post. I certainly agree that you should give your players some options here and there but I would personally limit the more obvious ones like cutting through walls or flying over them. You can avoid the railroad and give the players options while still preventing them from marginalizing the theme of your adventure theme.
Back in the old days (70s) we were keen on mapping dungeons and the "maze effect" often dominated play. But hey, we didn't know any better, we had vast timeslots in which to play, and I suspect we were very easily amused.
These days, I would deal with the maze in a more abstract way, like with a flowchart linking a series of combats and non-combat encounters. Some places in the maze might have clues to be found, whereas others will simply be deathtraps.
Of course, be prepared for players who want to hack their way through maze walls, climb or fly over them, teleport past them, and so on.
If it's going to be a hedge maze, then I would try to make sure any enemies you add should naturally be appropriate for the maze, either thematically or mechanically. One thing that particularly comes to mind is the tree walk ability. While it technically says tree, I doubt anyone would argue if a user of this spell were to meld with a tall shrub or some such. A few monsters get this innately, like dryads and hamadryads, but I imagine a few minions with limited uses of the ability would work just as well. This would add some fun challenges to any fights, since the enemies could essentially teleport anywhere in the maze. Some other obviously thematic creatures would be sentient plants, such as assassins vines and the like. As far as static traps go, such plants can also be incorporated as a substitute for the usual stuff. Instead of a dart trap, the part could be caught by a colony of archer bushes, or fall into a pit containing a dire flytrap. I'd also expect any player who's played pathfinder before to try and cheat the system and hack and burn their way through the maze. A good effect would be for the maze to reform around any attempts to break through it, or even punish players by attempting to take an weapons being used to hack through it. That and all the plants can add a great "It's almost like the maze itself is...alive" vibe to their trip through the maze.
There are other ways to try and cheat the maze, like the fly spell, but those are kind of a problem with any sort of maze. If you want, you could find a means to prevent obvious means like magical travel, but that's up to you.
Ultimately though, I'd moderate the size of the maze depending on the types of players you have. I'd personally wile away hours and hours traversing and plotting a well constructed maze, but some players will start banging their head against a wall after more then an hour long session on it. As such, adjust the size accordingly, or add combat encounters or puzzles often to try and break up the boring bits as much as possible if your players are the impatient type.
As far as puzzles go, I'll leave this up to you. There are a few obvious ones, like some sort of riddle from the Minotaur gate guard (I'm going to assume it's a Minotaur) or a a number of branching paths with subtle hints about the fates of those who walk down each, but you said yourself that you don't want it to generic, and the best creative ideas for a scenario like this often come from the person who comes up with the concept in the first place.
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There a few spells you could work into your setting- Mind Maze and Illusory Maze can screw around with player...
Or you can have a high level caster, and just drop a player into a Maze (via the spell)
I had plans for my PCs in my short-lived home game to wander through a fog-shrouded ruins of a town
The problem with a flowchart approach is that you don't really use the idea of a maze, which is: A closed-in space where you risk getting lost, and have no idea what else is in there with you. So... Put in others who have gotten lost. Have the heroes hear rumours about it beforehand and let them meet someone who tried it before them. Give them information that can be important if understood, especially if seen in the context of being there yourself. Tie various features in it to the creatures found there. Let them bully information about the maze from its inhabitants. And, of course, eventually let them understand that they will need to go to the center of it after all.
Totaly agree with the fact that you must prevent the player to use teleportation spell. Also make flying dangerous (maybe make the atmosphere after 2-3 meter is poisonned ....)
You should also find a find to avoid a player cutting/ burning the hedge (or make them re growth really fast).
You could also use fey who attack everyone who don't respect the maze (try to fly or cut the hedge).
Be sure to have a map of the maze for you, with correct scale and try to describe correctly the distance. If the player don't like drawing the map while they explore (but it's fun !) you could try another approach :
Draw the full map on a big (like, really big) paper. Cover it with something (eg : playing card) and uncover portion of the map when the PC explore it (if the PC are distracted, eg if they run or move during combat, you can cover again some portion of the maze because they didn't memorize it). This ask more preparation time for you, especially if you want to do it perfectly.
I haven't any specific idea for the encounter, but some fun things is to try to scare the PC (it doesn't work with everyone). You could leave hints of really dangerous monster, maybe use illusion spell. The pc will probably loose time making plan, and maybe even casting some spell. Then you keep the tension for some time but nothing happen :)
Thanks to all who took the time to make suggestions! I really appreciate the help!
Regarding the concern that players may try to use brute force to solve the maze, I already considered that possibility. To address this concern, I planned to have a few surprises in store for them. The Skeptical Gnome came quite close to the method I decided to use.
Entering the hedge maze, I'll tell them something along the lines of "You hear whispering and the sound of things moving inside the nearby hedges." If they try to push through the hedge, burn it or cut it down, it will trigger an encounter with either 50% chance of 1d4 Twigjacks, or 50% chance of 1d2 Living Topiaries. Since both of these creatures have a teleportation ability that works inside hedges, they should be enough of an annoyance that it will quickly become clear to the players a brute force approach will cost a lot of resources. On the other hand, this offers the players the valid option of simply bypassing the maze through brute force to avoid railroading them into solving it.
If they do choose to attempt to bypass the maze with teleportation, I'd allow it as well, for two reasons. First, at this level, with the party of 5 players it would mean they'd have to use three Dimension Door spells. This would severely reduce the ability of the party spellcaster in upcoming battles, since they've either spent most of their high level spell slots or a big chunk of cash on consumables. Second, it would mean they're giving up a large amount of experience and treasure from the skipped portion, and I trust my players to have enough meta-game incentive to clear out that area for the phat lootz. If they attempt to fly over? Well, similar outcome, but additionally two Sprite Swarms to harass them along the way.
I like the idea of some form of timer on the maze. Since we're dealing with fey, I'd probably have something like an event that occurs at midnight releasing something nasty. Any suggestions? With the theme of fey, there's a lot of cool stuff to choose from. I could just release a Bogeyman to chase them and call it day, though perhaps something more creative might be better.
Thanks Marvin Ghey for the referral to check Bastards of Erebus! I'm reading through it now and I'll include anything useful in my campaign. Any suggestions from anyone for other published adventure paths that use mazes?
I really like Kaladin the Radiant's suggestion to have the maze shape spell out something useful! Maybe not a whole word per se, but possibly a clue to some future puzzle in the second part of the quest arc. I'd guess, however, that anything of that nature would be visible from the manor during the middle of the arc, so I'd need to come up with some method that gives a bonus for completing the maze that isn't possible just by skipping it.
I also liked Kayerloth's note about Illusion and Enchantment being favourites of the fey for both thematic reasons as well as pure shits and giggles. Any suggestions for specific examples of how you would use these in practise to increase the fun of playing a maze?
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One problem with mazes is that you typically have to get some person to be the "mapper". This often creates a situation where they are the only one actually engaged in the maze, because they have their graph paper in front of them. And everyone else just tunes things out. So it is very easy with a maze basically to limit your number of engaged players to 1.
I think you could ameliorate this by being the one to map out the maze yourself, possibly on a huge (again, it had better be big, or no one else will really be able to see it) mat. Ideally :D you would have a large (10 foot diagonal) computer screen that everyone could see that just slowly updated itself.
In all seriousness, mazes are often the cue for everyone except one guy to start looking at their cell phone.
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Mazes are cool in theory, tricky in practice. I agree that the idea of players mapping out the maze is classic, but probably not going to fly anymore nowadays.
Cheating/cutting to the end of the maze is something to beware of, and not that hard to stop; simply move the goal. Instead of sending your players to the manor in the middle of the maze, tell them that the manor has been sealed up, no frontal assault (that would leave the manor standing) can get in there. Maybe the entire manor is fake, just a single solid block of stone painted to look like a manor. But there's supposed to be a backdoor hidden somewhere in the maze, that leads into the real manor. (The real manor might have been shifted into the First World.)
Cutting apart the hedge maze is obviously going to occur to your players. And it would work against a mundane maze. Luckily, your maze is fey. The whole thing could be one enormous creature. Normally it's quite sluggish and content to lie there sleeping. But if you attack it, it starts thrashing and trying to fend off the attacker. Imagine when a PC hacks at a hedge, and suddenly all the vines sprout thorns and the whole thing contorts like you're in a giant spiky esophagus. Because the whole maze is a magical creature, it also confuses divination spells. You might be able to look through a single row, spot lurking enemies; but getting an overview isn't going to work.
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As I said before, we don't really want to map the whole maze. And this is a few maze, so it being mappable would actually be rather banal. Let's just say that most branchings in the maze are completely unimportant. If you tried to walk the same route, you'd find the hedges had moved and your old path doesn't exist anymore. The only constants are the choices that really matter.
Now and then you'll come to an open-ish space where there's an Interesting Thing (tm) - a creature, chasm with jumping stones, two doorframes leading in different directions etcetera. These are the branching points that actually matter; they're the places you'd put on a map, saying "when you get to the red and blue doorposts, the red doorpost will lead to the Moaning Cave and the blue one goes to the Swings Across The Lava". Here players need to make a choice of direction. Which choice to make is something they'll need to figure out; perhaps by conversing with creatures they encounter, or by solving puzzles. The whole thing should have a sort of rhyming logic to it, not a hard glare of bright daylight logic.
Instead of trying to map out a hedge maze, you get a flowchart of the actual maze, which is lines between encounter areas.
Any maze worth its salt would have anti-magic/permanent abjurations preventing the use of short cut spells like fly and dimension door or consequences/reactions such as confusion or misdirection magic in response to attempted short cuts. I wouldn't worry about players trying these methods. It is natural for them to try and they shouldn't be prohibited from trying, but with clever use of GM fiat about "dungeon design" you can gently nullify their attempts with predictable roadblocks and put them back on track inside your labyrinth.
As a player, if you put in antimagic fields, and magic to prevent teleportation, divination, dimension door, etc that would allow for quick and easy bypassing of the maze I'm probably going to conclude that such a place is no place I want to enter, and that I'm probably not strong enough to get through. You're talking about high level and powerful magic, for a group of 6-9th level characters to encounter.
Things that block teleportation magic over such a wide area and permanent antimagic are high level very powerful abilities.
I would honestly just nope away from the entire thing and say "We'll come back later when we are ready for such an encounter." And if the GM tells me that its okay we can beat it, then I'm suspecting that he's just trying to railroad me through the maze. It's unfortunate, but if you cut out all the avenues of easily bypassing the maze as a player it kind of pisses me off when it isn't appropriate to the level and encounter. You're basically forcing me to go through the maze because you want me to.
That is the point in an adventure where I will go completely off script and just jump town. I don't really like it when you shut down my abilities and try to force me to go through an encounter in the 1 single approved way.
Edit: I will say Ascalaphus idea of misdirection works well. They teleport/DD to the manor. It's not actually where they needed to go. They want to fly above? 80% of the maze is covered by obscuring mist floating in and above the maze. These are ways to not shut down player options without them being as helpful as they imagined. Players cut through shrubs? They regrow 1d4 rounds later. Walking through the straight cut through they look back and realize the walls have regrown. Have they been keeping good track of where they are?
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I have two thoughts about players who would want to simply fly over the maze.
First off, if they are flying high above the maze, it might actually be hard to see what they're looking for, especially if its something small, like a trap door, or maybe a building with a roof covered in plants. Remember, there is a -1 penalty to Perception checks for every 10 feet of distance. Add in a layer of fog (which is more realistic than an anti-magic field or a layer of poisonous air), and it could be virtually impossible for players to find what they are looking for from the air.
The second thought is that a flying character is easy to see, and would make an easy target for archers. Once again, not a high level work around, and it could be enough to convince players that their best option would be a ground assault.
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Let the players solve some of the mazes with a skill challenge, instead of a literal mapped maze. 4e does this really well and the change of pace is nice.
Essentially, the players roll certain appropriate skills to gain successes in finding their way through the maze. Enough successes before enough failures means success. Enough failures has a consequence, like a vicious combat encounter. Perfect or near perfect success can yield a hidden treasure room.
Let the players solve some of the mazes with a skill challenge, instead of a literal mapped maze. 4e does this really well and the change of pace is nice.
Essentially, the players roll certain appropriate skills to gain successes in finding their way through the maze. Enough successes before enough failures means success. Enough failures has a consequence, like a vicious combat encounter. Perfect or near perfect success can yield a hidden treasure room.
Just my 2 cents, but rolling a couple of dice to overcome the maze is a super lame cop out that completely misses the point.
Many posters above have mentioned the players drawing out the map as they go along, and the pros and cons of using this method. I would point out that many labyrinths alter their pathways to actively discourage mapping, which again highlights my preferred in-game ideal of focus on theme instead of practice. I would rather my players focus on the experience of being in a maze rather than trying to map it out.
@ Claxon,
I don't disagree with you, per se. Your observations are fair. I think that what you're describing is one possible player reaction to assumed stimuli, but I can tell you my players trust me enough as a GM to not throw an adventure theme in front of them that is beyond them. Generally speaking I avoid GM-cheese that trumps player problem solving because that is just bad form - but, in this case the OP is asking about mid-level characters in a maze. The foregone conclusion is that mid-level characters have some damn powerful magic and therefore if you want them to actually experience the maze itself, there are going to have to be "compromises." If the players were lower level I wouldn't bother with such counter measures as mentioned in my previous post.
There are areas of the game world that could have anti-magic zones or have powerful enchantments that aren't necessarily high level oriented, and so I don't think it would be too outlandish to have some "guard rails" on your labyrinth to prevent the mid-level party from marginalizing the adventure.
But Claxon, your point is well taken.
As maligned as it is, Wrath of the Righteous' Book 5 (Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth) presents a number of solutions for making mazes more fun. It definitely helped out - having mazes the size of entire planes and high level players made for unique problems.
For your instance, I'd determine how much of the hedge maze you want players to focus on. If it is a bigger portion of the adventure, I'd only worry about mapping out encounter areas (making them look maze-like enough to fit in the overall theme) and then using skill checks to work your way through the maze. It cuts down on the 'dead table time' that mazes have a tendency to create.
There are some areas of the game world which have things like you describe. The Mana Wastes are one area, which is where Alkenstar (the place that invented guns) is. The whole area is one of magical blight, there is no magic to be had. Another is demi-planes with the dead magic quality. But for the most part, on the material plane, there aren't many places of permanent antimagic/dead magic. Antimagic field is tied to a specific creature (can't be placed on a location) so it makes it hard to come up with a viable reason that an antimagic area would spring up overnight without an obvious way to get rid of it (like killing an individual or getting away from them). As for interfering with teleport....I have house rules for it actually that I tell my players up front. Which are:
Teleportation magic is blocked by 5ft of earth, 1ft of stone, 1 in of metal, or a thin sheet of lead.
But this is a rule known an in place before the start of the game. If you go about randomly putting in restriction on teleportation as a player I'm going to think it's things like teleport trap or dimensional lock. And if it's not then I know you're basically forcing me to go through this because you want me to experience it this way, and not have the option to bypass it using the abilities my character has acquired.
Basically in my mind, the OP has missed his chance for it to play out the way he wants without being heavy handed. The players are too high a level. If they can see the target they can bypass the obstacle of the maze. Using GM fiat to deny the players their abilities is bad GMing. Instead, you need to expect what players will do, and instead of shutting it down make it not work out they way they would want.
Teleport or dimension door to the manor? That's fine, the actual location to the source of the McGuffin or whatever is underneath the statue in the middle of the maze, a search of the manor indicates this in a diary entry. Player's try to fly to spot the statue? Fog covers most of the maze making it impossible to locate anything by just flying above.
Making things attack the players if they try to fly or outright banning teleportation is just too heavy handed, and as a player I resent those kind of actions, especially when you can provide more creative response that don't actively deny players abilities.
I like the idea of some form of timer on the maze. Since we're dealing with fey, I'd probably have something like an event that occurs at midnight releasing something nasty. Any suggestions? With the theme of fey, there's a lot of cool stuff to choose from. I could just release a Bogeyman to chase them and call it day, though perhaps something more creative might be better.
This is taken from an old 3.5 D&D book where they used a hedge maze. In this case the hedges had an iron fence in the middle, so they couldn't just cut through the maze, and there were monsters. The accompanying monster was a Displacer Beast, or a pair of them. A similar creature in Pathfinder terms would be the Kamadan, I think. They are CR4 like the Displacer Beast was in 3.5. They could easily take that spot and/or you can modify them to run in a similar way.
The beauty of the Displacer Beast was that they knew the maze and they could use their tentacles to attack from the other side of the hedges. PC's attempting to retaliate would need a reach or ranged weapon; not only would the enemy get cover, but the 50% miss chance on top of that made them hard to kill. They would harass the party and whittle them down before going in for the kill. Just a thought.
Right now I'm designing a large scale attack on a town with a variable/random set of encounters. The feeling I want to create is an organic, randomised chaos but with tailored encounters.
The way it plays out is like those "pick a path" stories.
Basically I'll be writing several encounters of different sorts from both trivial to story changing (examples being save a woman from bandits, house on fire, aggressive dog, lost child). Dealing with encounters in most cases will be as simple as a diplomacy/stealth/intimidate roll, rolling saves, etc
Then I will shuffle the cards, deal 6 of them face down in front of my players.
One at a time, each player will have to choose two cards to flip them over and either choose to (or be forced to) deal with the encounters. Once those encounters are dealt with, they are removed from play and then new cards are dealt for player 2 to choose two. Repeat as desired.
This way I can create a randomised set of encounters that is interesting, compressed (rarely need to draw maps) and exciting. Using this model I'm sure you can create a maze players are traversing without actually having to draw or create any of it :P
Encounters could be:
Dead end
Rope bridge over chasm
Locked door
Trapped hallway
Fire pit floor
Treasure room
key
Mimic!
Empty hallway/room
Monsters easy/medium/hard (roll d6, d4 or 1)
Trap sprung
etc