I discussed using it to create the great labyrinth at the heart of a quest in "Actual Test: Better Labyrinths by Graphite Prime" - this post is about the experiences at table running it. Practically - it was a single page ref sheet with two tables - locations + encounters.
Each session was run with that single page plus the log of the players actions plus some external events stuff for when they scryed out.
The background was that the creator-god of the giants, Annam, had turned his back on his creations due to their pride and hubris and left behind this labyrinth around his temple so that only those giants that humbled themselves would bring back his attention to the world. It was located at the heart of a city beneath a glacier, the temple core surrounded by the dimension-defying labyrinth. The part sought the place to re-seal a fraying peace between giants and their dragon-blooded realm, a task set by the storm giant king to stave off his cloud giant rival who was threatening his rule - only if these small-folk showed themselves favoured by Annam himself would he deign to support their request - and his rival would be unable to challenge that holy writ either. Some questing for the lost city later, the players find themselves on the threshold of the labyrinth.
They ended up spending five nights inside, making 6 passes through it, two short-cutted by fortunately rolling the site they were looking for on the hourly encounter check.
How it played out - each 'pass' through the labyrinth was run as 3 search checks each hour, looking to get to 10 successes. At the end of each hour, we rolled on the locations table to see where they had found themselves. Sometimes, the place they found was where they were looking for, which short-cut that particular pass.
- Enter, wandering, find the Orrery
- Onwards, short-cut to find the Fertility challenge
- Onwards, long slog to find the Fate challenge
- Onward, slight short-cut to find the temple core
- Exiting, head for Fertility challenge to camp
- Exiting, make it all the way back out
Things they encountered included - a giant skeleton, a trapped floor where gravity shifts made the walls and ceilings 'pits', a giant-hand crawling-claw, a fissure through the whole labyrinth that allowed greater progression but was also the lair of something grim, a non-euclidean droplet lake with skeletons within it, zero-gravity gaps, shifting corridors, doors in the ceiling, steam elementals, water-flooded slopes over significant drops, shredded corpses of some of the foes they knew were in here too and shapeshifters mimicking the party.
This certainty of an encounter after every hour made the search checks feel costly and when the successes did not come, made the wander through this labyrinth feel long and disorienting and made finding respite feel like a triumph. The second table, of mobile encounters, could be attracted by significant noise or disturbance, or when the party rested. They mostly made a point of resting within securable rooms but still fun was had with the encounters by things peering in through the windows, undead pounding on the doors while they tried to sleep and gelatinous cubes squeezing under the doors on multiple occassions and sneaking up on a notably un-perceptive party. There were some tough combats between big foes - giant skeletons, giant spiders - but the sneaking, paralysing oozes came the closest to inflicting TPK's while the party tried to rest.
The searching the labyrinth was mixed with the challenge rooms - each reflecting an aspect of Annam that his faithful ought to understand - which provided a nice mix. For the first time it also drove the party towards the limits of their torches and, for a bunch that spent a great deal of in-game time at feasts and soirees, day upon day of cold hard-tack and trail rations. Classic dungeon elements like the isolation, inability to resupply and need to continue come what may came into play with a vengeance.
I missed a trick on water: I did not think (and should have) to squeeze the party on water; while they had iron rations for 10 days, did they have water for the same time? I should have pushed on having to search for water, ensure it was safe and leaned into that as a survival element. There was water within the maze that they did encounter irregularly but I should have remembered to keep it front of mind. [Edit: it has since been pointed out to me by the cleric that they had 'create water' as a cantrip so water would not have been a significant problem. They remember light as the big issue.]
I also got to deploy an old school Petty God - the god of forgotten knowledge - which seemed appropriate for this lost site, and also a monster from Fires on the Velvet Horizon filling in the eldritch intruder role. This abandoned temple of one of the original creator gods was found not to be standing idle.
All told, this mazes method from Graphite Prime gets you almost all the juice of a fully fleshed out dungeon with a fraction of the squeezing - no need to map out rooms or key things or keep strict track of who is nearby to hear things in which location - you have the static table that the players stumble across, you have the mobile table that are the wandering encounters and between those and the Maze procedure, you have your dungeon. As I said, I got a ton of use out of the single A4 sheet that was my prepped maze - 8 sessions, 24 hours at table, not so long that the players got frustrated, long enough that if felt epic to get to the core and escape again. Inter session prep was really light, only figuring out what was happening in the world beyond as they spent days inside the maze.
This of course bypasses entirely the map-making element of dungeons/labyrinths so if your party particularly enjoys that, this is not the technique for your table.
If you are going to do this yourself; keep your list vague enough that multiple rolls on the same element are fine - the general elements of a trap, the type of monster - as some of the things came up multiple times. Because it was vague enough for me to adapt, those encounters went very differently - first was a giant skeleton encountered as the party came down a shifted-gravity wall - the cleric rolled amazingly on turn undead and it cowered in a corner as they passed by. The second time they encountered a giant skeleton while they were beating a hasty retreat away from shapeshifter pursuers and could not avoid. That became a knock-down fight with the cleric taking some big hits and things getting very serious, very quickly. My advice is keep the encounter table loose and combine that with your general notes on the style of the labyrinth to spin up each encounter as it gets rolled. Similarly, multiple rolls of gelatinous cubes on the wandering encounter table did not get boring but left the party twitchy and unnerved at these silent killers they just could not seem to spot until they were pummelling and paralyzing them.
A definite recommend, check out the method on Graphite Prime: Mazes: The Monotony or How to Run an Actual Maze
No comments:
Post a Comment