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In Greek mythology, there’s a story about the labyrinth, an elaborate, one-entry-one-exit maze constructed by the architectDaedalus to contain King Minos of Crete’s child, the terrible minotaur. While this story is by no means the origin of the trope, the maze is a classic theme in fantasy— but it can be hard to implement intoDungeons & Dragons!Mazes can be tedious.
Many players find them frustrating, and doing them without maps can border on mind-numbing, especially if theatre of the mind isn’t the Dungeon Master’s strong suit. So, how do you run a maze, with tedium stacked against you?
How To Make A Maze Map
Firstly, think of building your maze like adungeon, butdon’t treat it exactly like going through one!Build it the way you’d build a crawl and settle on an environment, a story, and a reason for the maze to exist, butavoid creating expanses for your players to move about.
Constraining them in narrow pathways can help your players create unique formations that they may not have accomplished before.
Mazes are also great ways to includesecret passagesthrough crumbling walls andillusory pathwaysdesigned to get them off track.
Is it the BBEG trying to trap them in the confines of their minds, or is your party lost in an ancient ruin? A story element will invest your players in finishing the maze.
Secondly,decide whether the maze is labyrinthine or not.
A maze has multiple exits and entrance points, whereasa labyrinth only has one.This can help you build the maze itself. you’re able to draw inspiration from all sorts of things, but one of the easiest ways to help create a maze is to find children’s puzzles online.
You may have heard the community joke about children’s riddles stumping players in dungeons. Well, it works the same with mazes.
While small and simple, drawing inspiration and building outward from little mazes you find on the back of children’s menus or from online daycare worksheets will give you a good building block for the rest of how the maze will go!
A labyrinth gives your players a bit more of a challenge, but it will also be easier to run!
Another idea might be toassign each die in your dice hoard to a section of the maze.For example:
d4
Treasure hall
d6
Dead end
d8
Other maze-goers in this area
d10
A warded area
d12
Mimic hall
d20
The heart of the maze. The Big Bad is here.
percentile
Environmental hazards (crumbling walls, quicksand floor, sticky walls to glue trap your players).
After you make your table,throw the dice onto a piece of paper and draw boxes where they land.Connect them with lines to get yourself started, or use them as guidelines to build and branch out from there.
This common method of creating world maps for homebrew games can be repurposed with a little imagination! While not completely foolproof, it can be a lot of fun to try.
Materials
Consider getting access to a Virtual Table Top.You can control your players' lines of sight on a lot of programs, and they’ll have access to a map independently. This can let youslowly revealwhere they’ve gone already, so theydon’t fall back onto things they’ve done.
If you can’t get a VTT (which, to be fair, is reasonable),then drawing out your maze and gradually revealing the sections as your players go can be a great way to maintain the same suspense. This can be achieved on paper or with a whiteboard.
How To Work Without A Map
While many tables rely on handouts or VTTs,some tables work better solely using theatre of the mind.“Theatre of the mind” is using your narration skills to create an image or stage for your players, which quite a few Dungeon Masters do, especially those who prefer improvising to meticulous planning!
The thing about working with a map is that sometimes Dungeon Masters can get over-reliant on it. This sometimes doesn’t mesh well with whatever untamed chaos players bring to their sessions and can leave you high and dry.
Working without a map means that you should ideally have a couple of ideas written out for story beats or pathways your players could hit, but everything else is more flexible.
You can make up the maze as you go along, gauging your players' interest and working off their abilities.This works better for more story-reliant parties, and you should take care to brush up on your narration!
Using narration primarily can help youlead them directly to encountersand interesting halls without worrying about your players seeing you cheese the maze on paper.
Use Skill Checks
While in dungeon crawls,you do not want to gate progressbehind skill checks,mazes are a little more reliant on this particular mechanic.Navigating the maze willrequire your players to make checks to ensure their survival.
Lighting a fire under your players, so to speak, canhelp turn up the pressure.you may achieve this by creating tense chase scenes that can only be run from upon successful Dexterity checks, spurred on by hazards like a particularly large boulder.
Consider not letting your players know if they rolled above the DC to create conflict. Suck in your breath, shake your head once, grimace, and whisper “Well, this is still salvageable…” before telling them what they learned. Or, you know, text them privately.
How To Create Encounters
Set up more than just enemies throughout the maze. A minotaur at the heart of the maze is all well and good, but itcan’t be your only source of conflictor the only roleplaying opportunity throughout the maze.
If you’re not using a map,create an encounter table and roll on itwhen your players have a lull in adventuring.Encounters will keep the maze fresh!
If isolation is your primary objective, though, in the maze, thenencounters can come in the form of illusions, traps, and environmental hazards.
Your skill checks can help inform these, too! If your players roll low, they may advance the storyline by “failing forward.” Not finding one path means another may open up.
