How to Run a Maze (Warning: This May Kill Your Game)

So, you've got this maze in your game. You've mapped it out as a node-diagram (which must have been painful - a good maze will have lots of nodes, lots of connections, and very few encounters), and then turned that into a real map.

But there's a problem with mazes - if you use minis and a battlemat, they quickly become trivial. If you use descriptions, your players are rapidly going to get lost. So, how do you do it?

Well, much as I prefer the "mind's eye theatre" form of D&D, I think this is an area where you do need some sort of props. Specifically, you need to have a set of dungeon tiles, each showing a single segment of the dungeon. You don't actually need minis.

As the PCs proceed through the dungeon, start laying down the tiles as they go. That's rather obvious and barely worth mentioning. However, what you should also do is remove segments as soon as they drop out of line of sight. Further, every so often (and certainly every time there's a change in elevation), you should rotate the entire map through 90 degrees in a random direction - specifically to mess with your players' orientation on the board.

Oh yes, and one more thing - don't build your maze all on one level. A two-dimensional maze can generally be beaten with a simple brute-force approach - always go left before right, exhaust those paths, and then start working through the stack. But if you build your maze with plenty of loops this becomes harder. When you include two-dimensional constructions, preferably including two-dimensional loops, it becomes that much more difficult. (And if you include a teleporter as well, or a one-way transition, or...)

Of course, there's a real good chance that your players won't realise they're in a maze right at the outset. There's a good chance they'll go wandering for a while, possibly picking directions at random (or using the brute force approach), and then realise that they're lost. At which point they're likely to start mapping... when if you start mapping once you're already lost, you're already up against the wall. And that's when it really starts to mess with them...

There is a terrible danger to all of this, though, which is that as time ticks on the players are likely to get more and more frustrated. And the better the maze, the worse their frustration. Eventually, they may even start trying to dig their way through the walls...