While it is certainly interesting as art/fiction, and while the overwrought aesthetics which lured me to this mess in the first place still provided a few fair few monocle-popping chuckles reading it, running it is an entirely different sort of activity, and unfortunately, the activity it is allegedly intended for. There are plenty of adventures so trash that I don't even deign to say they suck, they just get wiped from my memory, and while this is not one of THOSE dungeons, it's definitely not as high above the trash tier as one would hope. (unlike ur favorite anime which is definitely at the bottom of the trash bin)
1. Map Sucks
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| this is the sort of thing I see in fever dreams about running D&D late at night. Yeah sure lemme just flip to 3 different pages at once every time the players look around a corner |
Maze has really complicated, in depth rooms(in description at least, but more on that later). It also has these open ended 'rooms' that seamlessly merge into other rooms. So what happens fairly frequently is the players are standing somewhere and there's like 3 circus attractions visible and possibly raring to throw clowns at them and my sorry ass has to describe all that and no one really cares anyway. The gallery area is especially bad for this- some complicated magical trap painting and then some cannibal critics standing around having highfalutin conversation about art, and there can be like 4 paintings with line of sight to each other. I run a text game, so players can just look at the chatlog to review information, but I can't even imagine trying to keep all this straight in a voice game or a live table where words get talked over and forgotten (actually I can imagine, I was in in a voice game for one session where the forest was constantly missed for the trees and we only got to the 'your fear becomes a scribble on the floor you must walk' room)
As another problem, I've been running and rekeying this place for months and I still have no clue what 90% of the 'secret/hidden/otherwise doors are. They're sometimes just not described on the room they're on for whatever reason so I had to make them up on the fly or make them regular doors.
2. Rooms Wondrous Only In Theory
Someone made a complaint about Death Frost Doom (I think) that as everything is a horrible cursed item, there's no incentive to poke stuff, and the ideal player behavior is shuffling through politely not touching anything like they're on a museum tour. Well MotBM is like that too, only it's literally a museum.
Here's how a few rooms went.
Wizzz (GM)-The next room! has a glass vase, surrounded by what looks like a ribbon of dust wriggling in a circle around it
Blix:Magic?
"Wizzz" (GM):ye
It blocks access west, but you can go north, your intended path, without issue
Thirbaek Merrymace:"Looks like a horrible magical trap. Let's not bother it."
Blix:"As you can probably guess, it is indeed magic"
North it is
"Wizzz" (GM):North- there is an iron grille that peers
down into Chronia's room. This window was too high to see from below.
There's something that looks like the rainbow swirl of a bubble instead
of glass in the window.
Thirbaek Merrymace:(Everything being worthless** has had the unfortunate effect of really dampening my treasure lust.)
"Looks like a horrible magical trap. Let's not bother it."
Scribe Elmyr:"Yes, horrible magic. Agreed."**Also re: everything being worthless- it's astounding how true this is. I was running a game where 1 copper piece was worth 1xp, so finding a suit of plate mail, which RAW is 300gp was a whopping ~3000xp. Magic items were worth AD&D values if recovered as well, and yet, the players were still largely unable to collect satisfying hauls from the place to the point where I suspect the place wasn't designed with xp for treasure in mind. The dragon Crucem Capelli who serves as a buyer for art is said to 'pay you' but not with what or how much, which seems a sorry bit of lip service to the idea that the players are primarily treasure hunters.
3. Room Key Hard To Consult, Not Worth Consulting Most The Time Anyway
Here's what the room fills the players skipped above actually read as. Amazingly, the players still aren't going to touch idiot-bait even if I describe it as "Idiot bait with the form of a 4-dimensional, open-work diagrammatic fluctuating construct, like an amoeba in a broken kaleidoscope"
I find it telling this entry assumes the players would try to cross the room with a saving throw instead of just poking it with a 10 foot pole first. Maze assumes a lot of 'roll to do thing', which I hate.
pentagrammiC WardThe Pentagrammic ward on the floor to the west is a ribbon of magical dust endlessly rewriting itself into the ground like the tracks of a snake. Also in the corridor, a table; on the table is a jar of glass and under it a note. You catch slight letterforms on the white paper.The wardIt traps evil people who try to walk across (save to leap away, leaving you back outside the corridor which-ever way you came in). If it holds a party member, it will slowly and fluidly move across the floor without breaking its pentagrammic shape. The party member will still be trapped inside as it moves and must move with it. It takes them all the way to Torgos Zooth in Almery 256. It moves at half walking speed.The noteIf you unfold the paper, it won’t stop. Unfolding and unfolding without end, cramped black handwriting on every page. Surface area doubles every round. It is a love letter. Picata Pleshenka writes to Psathyrella Medusae (Cells 304), listing all the reasons they should be “as one”. It won’t go back in the vase, no matter what you do. It does burn, though.
WarpWalloWThere is torn cast lead fencing across the threshold of the southern entrance; it is burned open and easy to step through. A room-filling, 4-dimensional, open-work diagrammatic construct fluctuates constantly like an amoeba in a broken kaleidoscope.It measures the ebb and flow of entropic time distor-tions due to Chronia To r n’s (Halls 27) movements and tempers. The basic pattern is simple: it moves violently when her time distortions are at their maxi-mum and it pulses quietly when she is restraining the effect.A magic user may discern the subtleties of her current mood by passing both a successful INTand CHA test. Psathyrella used to come here and just stare for hours.If touched (save to avoid doing so if you cross the room), the construct is actually made of entropic distortion, so it snags spacetime, causing a tear in reality. The effect of a tear isAny spell effect introduced into the dungeon for the next hour “echoes”—the spell repeats itself in some distorted way. Every time a spell is cast, roll d4:1. The spell repeats in a way harmful to the caster2. The spell repeats in a way inconvenient to the caster3. The spell repeats in a way helpful to the caster4. The spell repeats in a way extremely helpful to the casterSo, for example, on a roll of 2 for Magic Missile, a single new missile might appear and strike the cast-er’s ally, on a roll of 4, all the missiles cast at the origi-nal target might be launched again.
Naturally, despite these rooms being right next to each other their entries are far, far apart. All the 'woaaah this would be so cool to look at' grew tiresome. If I wanted to appreciate shiny pictures, the surrogate activity of staring at a pimply dungeon master as they describe shiny pictures gets real old when, as Thirbaek Merrymace so succinctly pointed out, it's mostly better to just avoid stuff. Little of all that tl;dr is actually gameable. The Warpwallow is a save to avoid touching or have wild magic accurse the dungeon for a bit, and a magic user can 'discern the subtleties of her current mood by passing both a successful INT and CHA test.' Rolling to see if you roll is not agency, not to mention, why would anyone roll such a thing when they can walk like 2 rooms over and just talk to Chronia? Why didn't the medusa pick up on 'Chronia is high on crack beasts' if this thing can detect Chronia's subtle moods and the medusa used it all the time? So yeah, I described it as a weird window and let the players walk past it, because they'd have no interesting decisions to act upon even if I did spout forth the full description.
Strawman MotBM Fanboy- "Oho, but you're forgetting the two core tenets!"
Never read text out loud word-for-word, it’s too dense and only terrible GMs do that. Just use the general impression to shape your own description.
&Random encounters are very important—many of the rooms in the Maze are mere curios unless activated or interacted with. Without Random Encounters, the party may find themselves simply sneaking past lots of things they’re scared to touch
Yes SMotBMF, I am aware of basic gming procedure, the problem is that my 'general impression' of most of these fills is 'hollow aesthetics the players will swiftly tire of that provides neither actionable information nor gameable decision making.' And frankly, what, precisely, are these random encounters going to do to solve this? After all, one must assume that, in reaching the players, those wandering encounters ALSO must be sneaking past lots of things they're scared to touch and interacting politely with dangerous maze inhabitants. Should the players just rely on judo-throwing enemies into art installations while trying to avoid the same done to them, every single room, just 'exploit da nearest killer art' again and again? Is that what you think random encounters are, SmotMBF, just obligate combat scenes to add excitement to those endless killer paintings that sane people wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole? Ever heard of a reaction roll, where immediate attack is a mere 1/36 chance, you leering smurf, you ignoramus gretchling, you, you FOE GYG SMotMBF!?
Anyway now that that strawman is thoroughly defeated and it is clear that my brain is the big brain, I want to share an example of one of the 'interesting situations' that the author was presumably hoping for, like the random encounter of, I dunno, Torgos Zooth(Sir Moy, for my players) in room 85, where he and the players are forced to roleplay worrying about local schools at a dinner party due to 'boring hallucinations.'
The game says if they don't, they lose a limb. I decided to go for the carrot rather than the stick and offered a reward instead. The players just sorta sat around dumbfounded by the attempt to make them roleplay something so blatantly boring and time-wasting until I declared the duration was up, and that was that. Would it have been better if they had lost a limb, or if they had actually played along? Would they have shared nostalgic stories afterwards, of 'remember when we were put on the spot for boring improv acting like this was acting 101?' Would Sir Moy become a character-favorite NPC due to his opinion on local schools teased forth by this subtle phantasm?
But this is like LotFP compatible, OSR-adjacent material, not Fate or PbtA. MotBM would, I believe, be considerably better in a storygame, bizarre as that seems.
4. Characters Out of Storybooks
I could not bear to use many characters as is, and so they were replaced by past NPCs of my own campaigns or original creations who were of similar bent, had connections to the player characters, and roamed outside the maze in the Gardens of Ynn(warped) outside. Frankly, the more mortal a character became, the more popular and empathized with they were. As a rule, players do not view immortal, nigh untouchable beings with a great deal of fondness coughELMINSTERcough as the usual best practices of interaction tend to be 'act polite and then get away asap.'
It's certainly fun to read and imagine the convoluted interactions between the quirky characters of the maze, and the maze does a relatively decent job of providing hooks and miniquests and so on for them as a way for characters to get to know them. But. Their convoluted psyches are all self-referential, their histories storied but thousands of years stagnant. Where is the room for the players, here? There are, broadly speaking, two types of player characters- empty vessels for the will of the player, who develop depth over time but are ultimately puppets for interaction with the game world, their actions retroactively forming a character when viewed with 20/20 hindsight. Then there are characters who really are 'role-played' as following motivations and backstories that they have earned or started with. Both characters are good. Neither of those characters have a place in the central dramas of the maze save as errand runners and messengers. They gaze upon the room of love letters from Xanthoceras to Zamia and it is a passing amusement at best, like a heart carved on a tree with X x Z, seen while hiking. There are no personal stakes there, and it's frankly hard to get involved when so many characters are immortal superbeings in stasis. Which leads into the following...
5. Dictating Roleplaying
There are too many examples to list, but this module has a great love of 'and then you gotta act like THIS because I'm writing like an playwright, not a GM.' The above example of 'act like you're worrying about local schools at a dinner party' is not an unusual thing- it's everywhere, constantly trying to get the players to act out zany surrealism, or even worse, forcing them to mirror the drama of the static superbeings of the maze, like the painting that makes you hate the killer of one of the sisters. Like really, did the author think a silver-tongued asshole who tries to betray the players and victimize women would be so popular that extra incentive would be needed to ensure the players have the 'correct' response to Milo de Fretwell? It's like the 'show don't tell rule' was never learnt with this place- if you want to have players fall into a pirahna tank, put some gold at the bottom and a greased ramp at the top, don't make magic hypnotic pirahna that make you save vs magic or jump inside (that's a butchered memory of one of the room fills). That's not a clever trap, that's just 'roll dice or suffer lmao,' a test of your character's saving throw, not a test of lateral thinking, observation, and ingenuity.
I hate dictating player behavior. I don't even like fear and charm effects, having used them in the past and finding the experience utterly boring for me and the player who no longer gets to play their character. I, the GM, am here to adjudicate decisions made by other minds, and they to make decisions. For me to make their decisions for them is to make the game closer to a lonely single-player game or even a novel, and as such I find the attempt to create interesting situations by turning PCs into Non-Playable Characters is utterly at odds with the fun of gaming.
Bonus Round: Lion in Lapis Lazuli might be a punch down at trans people, or maybe it's just shitty representation, or maybe it's pure coincidence(see "Doubt," above). It's a tiger statue labeled and shaped as a lion(or maybe vice versa) and it is endlessly touchy, self-obsessed, and eventually, inevitably, violent. It was not me, but my players, who picked up on this possible interpretation of the symbolism of the creature's struggles and interacted with it in that lens, and, my mind blown by this fire-hot take on what I thought was just another killer golem, I had to abort the 'inevitable combat encounter' the RAW suggests. Read-As-Written, the creature is basically depicted as trying to get offended so it is then justified in attacking you. With the context of how the players were interpreting the encounter and actually trying to be supportive, punishing their actions via inevitable combat was not an acceptable outcome to me
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if I get something that walks and talks like a fairy tale parable, it damn sure will have a fairy tale moral about kind deeds being rewarded, RAW be damned |
SHOULD YOU BUY
No because one of the authors has disavowed it and the other one is canceled
SHOULD YOU ADOPT FROM SOMEONE WHO WOULD OTHERWISE TOSS IT IN THE TRASH DUE TO MORAL OUTRAGE
Sure, if you're a snobbish aesthete like me with a strong belief that art=/=artist, but there's a lot of interesting and more easily useful stuff on OSR blogs too, jus sayin
SHOULD YOU ACTUALLY RUN IT AS-IS
Nah, though with some work stuff like the reptile archives or golden wedding or an unpetrified prison area could work as sub-levels in a megadungeon.
SHOULD YOU RUN IT IN STORYGAMES INSTEAD OF OSR
I think there's a lot more potential for deep narrative character arcs about healing yourself by healing others, perhaps playing as depetrified prisoners who aim to redeem themselves by restoring a smile to everyone's faces (save for the irredeemably wicked, or perhaps rewriting them to be less irredeemable).
But you could do that elsewhere, without the massive overhaul conversion that would take too, so.
IN CONCLUSION
Did I even run MotBM, or was this all, in the end, just my warped interpretation, the Nightmare House of The Naughty Noures? At what point does adjusting and tweaking and reskinning stray too far to be called running a module?
Ha. I dig it.
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