I a have party approaching the ruined castle of the minotaur king. It's basically a maze that the group will have to fumble around in until they find the princess. The story is loosely based off beauty and the beast.
Any tips and ideas on the most efficient way of running this? I fear letting them walk aimlessly about can get tiresome and tedious.
I guess. I mean the "paint job" is different...
There are books with stuff like crossword puzzles and in some of them are mazes where you have to draw a line from one end to the other.
Take one of those and treat it as a maze ofcorridors, removing some parts to generate rooms.
In some rooms are traps, in some are guards in one is the princess.
The party has to enter via the entrance which closes after them so that they have to find the exit. Retracing your steps to the entrance will not help.
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It depends on how you normally run dungeons. Personally, I have an erasable grid on which we draw rooms and terrain. I would hate to have to draw out a labyrinth manually, since there is a big chance of me making a mistake and in the best case, it becomes a "solve this puzzle" game which has the players thinking like players instead of like their characters.
I suggest treating the labyrinth like wilderness exploration. Have them tell you how they are navigating, and then roll random encounters as they move deeper into the maze.
For example: say you have the following major rooms planned for your maze:
1. Guard room -> an encounter with some animated objects
2. Dining hall -> A room with hundreds of doors that are linked in non-euclidean ways
3. A dance hall -> Filled with ghosts, haunts and moving animated curtains.
4. Throne room -> Here the Minotaur king
So you think of the maze as a dungeon with three rooms that looks like this:
R1->R2->R3->Boss
The "->" represent rooms. Except here, the "doors" are substantial fragments of the labyrinth that the characters must navigate. Navigation can involve almost any kind of check the players can justify. Don't give them a list of options, because that is boring. Have them tell you how they will solve the labyrinth and then adjudicate the result. It is best if the nature of the labyrinth changes as you go deeper.
Here are some random concrete ideas for how to run this:
Low Levels
The party must succeed on 3 checks at a DC set such that a character focused on that skill at that level would need to roll a 17 or 18. This is the base check. After 3 successes they reach the next major room.
You tell the party that they can use Survival for the base check, and that it is a very difficult task. The party can suggest other skills to navigate the maze. If they give you a good justification, don't dismiss it. But some skills that work for sure are: Knowledge (geography), Knowledge (Engineering), Knowledge (dungeoneering)
Only one person can lead, so normal aid another rules don't work. Instead, you can assist with certain interdisciplinary abilities. These can be skill checks (with a more reasonable DC) or spells or tools. Each valid method of assisting the leader grants +2 to his checks, and can be used only once per maze segment.
Some possible ways of assisting are:
- Having navigation tools, like a compass
- Knowledge (history) to remember a quirk of the builder's style
- Survival to notice where dust is disturbed by the inhabitants (use track DCs)
- Casting Locate Object on an object the princess has in her possession
- Talking with the princess through sending (maybe from a scroll) and getting some clue as to what path she was taken through
- Scouting with Arcane Eye
- Sense motive to determine how the builders would have built it.
As the party goes deeper into the maze, space begins to twist and bend in subtle and maddening ways. You could walk in a straight line and find yourself back where you started. Now, the checks are slightly different. The base check becomes harder, also new options for assisting become possible and some old options don't make sense anymore. For example you could use:
- Spellcraft to grasp the nature of the maze.
- Knowledge (the planes) to learn something of the metaphysics that govern the geometry here. Instead of giving a bonus to the base check, this reveals that:
-- The maze responds to the will of the travellers, and you can use a concentration check to stabilize it.
-- If the leader carries an object that contains at lest 5lbs of cold iron, the maze will be more stable.
Finally everyone who attempts to consider the nature of the maze (the leader and most of the assistants) needs to make a will save to avoid taking 1 point of wisdom damage.
Each time the PCs fail a check, they lose valuable time. Each base check take 1 hour. Each check also means there is a chance for a random encounter. For random encounters, you should have a set of interesting rooms prepared, much like you would in an ordinary dungeon. After a room is used, ignore further results that roll that room. You should have a different set of random encounters for the deeper parts of the maze. You should not tell the PCs if they succeeded on a check or not. Just describe what they see. Maybe give an indication of being deeper every 2 or 3 successes. You want to make the characters feel lost, not the players.
Depending on the level of grittiness of your campaign, the penalty for taking too long could be anything from the princess being moved elsewhere, to the PCs becoming lost and emerging 5 years later, to everyone dying of starvation.
Fair warning, adjust the DCs based on how creative your players are, and during the session try to keep things moving. If they start to run out of ideas, or are failing a lot of checks, it is ok to hand wave a few checks and tell them that "You feel hopelessly lost, you spend another X hours wandering the maze until you get back on track." Then you can just tell them that the party must divide X points of damage and Y spell levels lost among themselves to represent the random encounters that happen "off-screen."
High Levels
High levels are when the PCs can throw around Scrys and Teleports. The important part is to not trivialize these abilities.
You can proceed in a similar way to low levels, except now you need a better idea of how the metaphysics of your world work. For example, maybe the labyrinth is actually several demi-planes linked together by gates and filled with a labyrinth. The exit of each plane would be controlled by one of your major rooms. This way, a teleport would only bypass one room. It really depends on how high-level your party is and how many casters you have.
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I hope this wall of text was helpful :)
Thanks! Lots of inspiration here.
Remember, this is inspired by beauty and the beast. His "Belle" became very ill and dying. The Sumaire offered eternal life so they may be together forever. The original princess refused in disgust. She would take her own life in her chambers that night.
The minotaur king has found a perfect replacement in the young princess Rosabella. She will not fall for him but sympathizes with him and may even try to protect him against the PCs.
Any ideas or suggestions greatly appreciated
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If your players actually want to solve a labyrinth with its twisty turny passages, all alike and you need a handy labyrinth generator, you can't beat donjon's tools:
Pick a dungeon layout and size suitable for your needs (colossal is INSANE), set Peripheral Egress? to Multiple and ignore the exits/entrances you don't want, Add Stairs? to No, Room Layout to Sparse, Room Size to Small if you want lots of little rooms or Medium if you want few larger rooms, Doors to Standard or None, Corridors to Labyrinth (of course), and Remove Deadends? to No.
It'll even generate monsters and traps that you can use as-is or modify as you deem fit.
If you want to skip the boring maze exploring bits, just use the generated maze as inspiration and just run them through the rooms and trapped corridors.
If your players actually want to solve a labyrinth with its twisty turny passages, all alike and you need a handy labyrinth generator, you can't beat donjon's tools:
Pick a dungeon layout and size suitable for your needs (colossal is INSANE), set Peripheral Egress? to Multiple and ignore the exits/entrances you don't want, Add Stairs? to No, Room Layout to Sparse, Room Size to Small if you want lots of little rooms or Medium if you want few larger rooms, Doors to Standard or None, Corridors to Labyrinth (of course), and Remove Deadends? to No.
It'll even generate monsters and traps that you can use as-is or modify as you deem fit.
If you want to skip the boring maze exploring bits, just use the generated maze as inspiration and just run them through the rooms and trapped corridors.
I haven't looked at that generator closely yet, but you may just have eased my dread of GMing considerably with that link.
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Any ideas or suggestions greatly appreciated
David Bowie. that is all.