Lost my original source but when I went looking for 'how to do labyrinths' either OSR discord or the blogosphere tipped me off to this hidden gem by Graphite Prime - Mazes: The Monotony or How to Run an Actual Maze from 2018.
Their moment of enlightenment was that for most mazes, we don't need to draw the maze. We need some mechanics to reflect that navigating is difficult and some tailored encounter tables and good enough.
The article is great, laying out the elements you need and then pulling it all together in a sample maze. I needed a labyrinth for a major quest site in my current campaign and after stomping around trying to figure out how to get what I wanted down in maps, this handy system tossed all that requirement and just solved it.
All your strange inspirations either go into core descriptors of the maze itself, the sites or the encounters - no need to injure your brain trying to figure out how to map 3D mazes or non-euclidean angles.
Picked my themes for the whole thing, drawing on memory of a source I lost which had dungeons built by different forces:
- original builder intent (creator god leaving puzzles for worthy to herald his return)
- environmental factors, original builder power manifestations (using non-Euclidean Gravity from Goblinpunch)
- volcanic damage
- current resident + forces (lifting in an interesting monster from Fire on the Velvet Horizon)
- intruders from surroundings (lost or undead members of the local populace, from the city surrounding this place)
Once I knew what had created the place I filled out the descriptive elements of the maze - what a standard corridor length is like, its illumination, how far to a turn, etc. then the d100 table of 'locations you can find in the labyrinth' and the encounter table for what finds you if you stop in the open labyrinth. All this was far easier than trying to create a map that expressed variable gravity, inter-cut levels, and other things that are hard to express on graph paper and would have been a nuisance to try and use at the table.
The core mechanic of how it all works is players roll Search (3.5e, what we use), Investigation (5e) or Save vs Spells (OSR) against a DC as an extended skill challenge; there is no 'fail' point but after 3 x checks, they run into something on the way - rolll on the sites list. Should they stop to rest, roll on the encounters list. Some sites or encounters may bring or cost additional successes - and that is it. You get in there and you search, defending yourself against whatever else is in there until you find your way out.
There are some additional elements like what happens during a chaotic retreat, where some members of the party become lost in the maze only to be found at certain site encounter roles, that I think would be grim should they come to pass but still flavourful and a nice coherent mechanic.
At table this has played out brilliantly. The party has searched away, run into numerous weird and hazardous things, had fights ranging from the dangerous to the easily overwhelmed but it feels nice any pacy going through it. Since we are running 3.5e and short rests do not matter, they pushed on, eating on their feet for a full days exploring until they got to a specific location, barricaded themselves in and worked on what they needed there. Their actions triggered a bunch of random encounters but because they had secured the perimeter, it ended up being a bunch of unnerving noises they refused to investigate and creepy glimpses out through a massive stained glass window into the rest of the labyrinth.
For me as a DM, setting this all up and letting the dice unfold the story has been a great old school refresh - some major events happened so quickly one after the other that they players got paranoid about 'this was too easy' which was fun. The fact that things are being encountered and yet there is an uncertain amount of encounters still ahead really has the dice reflect the atmosphere.
I really like how this all wraps up in a coherent ball. If the players just attack the maze straight on, that is clear. Use some sort of spells or wild ideas to bypass bits? Great, tag on an additional success per good idea. Rewards the players without trivialising the maze. Anyone thinking of running mazes should give this one a look. Not your classic dungeon crawl, which it is not supposed to be, but I think a really elegant solution for a particular case that should be more widely known.
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