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So, I’ve had a hard time figuring out where to put/how to use the Spire, since it’s a bit more fantastical than my otherwise down-in-the-mud setting. As it happened, we had our first PC ”death” last weekend, after almost 2 years of weekly games. The party mage had a magic mishap and rolled a 66... Thing is, it was a really small/easy encounter and really not that dramatic, so it felt kind of cheesy. Now, another of the PCs tried to rush after his friend, throwing himself into the portal before it closed. He did not succed. During the session, I thought: the druid is experienced enough to cast resurect and therefore, the party has the means to bring back a dead character. Now, would it be too easy on them If I actually let them attempt to rescue their friend?
The result on the mishap table states the character returns after a while, different in a way. Thing is, my mage player has spoken to me about having a character arc which would make the PC become darker, more sinister... even evil.
I could let them go on an epic quest to free the mage... AND! Get a chance to use the Spire of Quetzel, making her be the one who brought (or had someone bring) the mage. I could put the Spire in that other dimension!
So, now I’m writing rules and setting on how to travel between dimensions, using the portal spell.
Naturally the mage will have been altered and he will also have to pay the EMPATHY cost of being resurected.
If they succeed, I will lose the opportunity to use him as a NPC. I’m ok with that though.

Now, has anyone of you run the Spire already? Do you have any good suggestions on how to make the maze or garden come to life? How do you handle them, ruleswise? I want this to be epic and memorable. And take a few sessions without being boring. I also want this to be more on the naration side than combat focused. Since there are no actual location maps, I’m a bit worried narating the sites will make for fairly short encounters and I don’t want to fill the sessions with prolonged combat encounters.
Any suggestions?

I have not played spire yet.

BUT, I did come up with a system for running a maze/labyrinth/whatever location where getting lost is part of the environment. Maybe this will help.

So what you do is draw yourself a small chart. In the simplest version you would have a box at the top labeled "entrance" and a box at the bottom labeled "exit" or "center" or "goal"... whatever the point of the place is. Between them create a number of boxes for any "landmarks" you would like. A fountain, a statuary, whatever. Draw lines connecting any place in the maze to any other place in the maze that it is POSSIBLE to get to from the other location. Again, in the simplest version you would have one line from entrance to center. But you could have 1 line from entrance to statuary. From statuary 2 lines extend to the center and the fountain. And the the fountain will also have a connecting line leading to the center. How exactly the players CAN get around is up to you and your maze. Give each of these landmark locations full room descriptions. Create traps/encounters for them like you would any other adventure site.

Give each line a numerical value that is equal to the number of successes the players need to reach that location. Give the players a +1 to the roll for any creative or useful navigation tools. Do they have a piece of a map? a clue? Chalk to mark where they have been? All of that is a +1 to the roll when going from the entrance to the statuary. They only get that bonus ONCE when traveling from one area to the next. This is an opportunity to treat chaulk, rope, string, etc... as a resource that is being diminished too. The more they get lost the more food/water/other supplies become a concern.

Side Note: Keep in mind that the players might not know they are going to the statuary. The players are moving through the maze. You are making a roll for some kind of pathfinding/scouting/navigation/luck as they move through the corridors and dead ends. It is important that YOU the GM make the rolls because they should not know when they fail. The point is they CAN get lost and not know it.

So lets say we give the path from the entrance to the statuary a value of 6. Each roll represents 15 minutes (or more.. you decide!) in the maze moving around. When the players accumulate 6 successes they have found the statuary. Give it a number of exits equal to the paths they can take. Note which paths CAN lead to which locations (with an understanding that they could also lead to dead ends or circle back to where they came from).

Each time a roll is made to move forward you also roll on a small table of events you will create. These could include dead ends, combat encounters, traps, odd corridors, whatever. If the players successfully complete a random encounter give them +1 on progress. If they fail, give them -1 to -3. If they roll a dead end give them a -1. If they roll a combat encounter and they beat the monsters then ask them which corridor they leave by. Do they remember which way they came from? Did they get turned around in the middle of the fight? Roll Wits for each character, success means they KNOW which way is the right way, failure means they KNOW the wrong way is the right way. Let the players fight it out and see which way they go. Go in the correct direction and it's +1 progress. Go in the wrong direction and it's -d3 progress. Lose enough progress to reach 0 and they end up back at the statuary.


I came up with this for a few reasons.
1) Mazes have not been fun in dnd traditionally.
2) The point of a maze is the risk of being lost and the drain of resources that represents. If you were to give them an actual map then they cannot become lost. If they start making an actual map off your descriptions and that map becomes wrong because of mishearing information (very common) it's not fun it's frustrating.
3) Skipping over a lot of boring description to talk about highlights. Think watching the movie Labyrinth. Shes in there for 13 hours. But we only see the big parts, not all the left and right and left again in winding corridors. Your making a table top version of that experience for the players.
4) Minimalist prep. All you need is your "map" of landmark boxes and lines with travel values and a small encounters table and you are good to go.
5) Versatility. I can use this for sewers, deep forests, ruins, actual mazes. Anywhere where I want the potential of becoming lost to be a part of the adventure.
6) If I tell they players they come to a T section and they can go left or right they have no agency in that choice. They don't KNOW if left or right is correct and so it's not a fun thing for them to figure out. So I remove all the arbitrary no real choice decisions and put them into the "travel roll" and only give the players a decision when it has real consequence and some measure of agency to it.

Wow! I can see you've put a lot of thought into this. I really like these ideas. I agree on the risk of turning what could be an interesting site into an endless argue about turns, misunderstandings and metagaming notes on a map. And at the same time, half of the players are checking their phones or laying down on the couch hoping for the other players to take them to the next interesting part...

I'll make sure I'll continue developing your thoughts on this. Thank you for taking your time sharing this. Much appreciated.

Glad you like it. If you end up using it or improving on it in any way i would really love to hear about it good or bad. The more testing and feedback i get the better the system can become and we all win.

Also, some notes about the version of this I developed when testing.

-When I made a sample dungeon for this to test it based on the classic minotaurs labyrinth I had a map with the entrance, the center, and 5 land marks. The map can get as big or as small and as straight forward or complex as you like. You can connect EVERY landmark if you want to. Or 3 locations from the entrance that then connect to each other but only one of which leads to the center. The complexity of the maze is wholly in your hands.

-BUT, I would keep in mind both how well supplied the players are and what kinds of supplies can be found in the maze and based on that build it's complexity. If there is a fountain room, or a river or stream or something then the players have a supply of water. If that is the ONLY water in the maze and they spend days inside it then they have to keep circling back to resupply.

-Once they keep making trips back and forth between 2 landmarks start giving them inherent bonuses to the roll so the trip gets faster as they memorize the way.

-When I made an encounter random table I made a d6 table of rooms (circular chamber, dead end, straight hallways, etc...) along with a d12 table of events (starting with finding supplies left by a previous adventurer (maybe on their corpse) and moving to traps then on to monsters and ending with reroll twice and do 2 things I.E. if I rolled 12 I would reroll 2d12 and if I got a 3 and a 7 then maybe a trap and a d2 monsters. Finally I made a small table of d8 monsters based on the labyrinths ecology with 8 being like the 12, reroll twice.

-For the "minotaur" (in actuality a creature I made myself that hunted them) I waited until the players found the second land mark (and thus were both deep enough into the maze and used to the mechanics of it) before I started rolling for the creature to hunt them. I gave the creature inherent bonuses to navigate the maze in general, then gave it a bonus to it's next roll if the players did anything particularly loud that would give away their position, and I had it move from location to location trying to catch up with them. Occasionally they would find signs of it or hear it's roar echoing through the chambers but never really knowing where it was coming from. I just kept track of it's successes on scratch paper and moved a small dice/token I had from landmark to landmark on my lil map behind the dm screen to keep track of it's progress.

So, would you show some kind of picture, the abstract map of the maze or some such? Do the players see up front how many landmarks there are? Or do you do this strictly as a theater of the mind kind of thing? I’ll be running this on a VTT so I could have a few setting or flavour images but when you talk about the fixed number of exits from each landmark, would you abstract that as well or let them start to take note of which exit actually leads to the next landmark?

I ill try to upload the abstract map (which they do not see).

I run all my games strictly theater of the mind with a couple fun handouts here or there.

The Landmarks have full room descriptions like you would typically do in a dungeon. So their number of exits are described. "You turn a corner and find a large open room filled with statues. Unlike the squat square corridors you have been traveling through for the past (x time) this room has a large domed ceiling. The walls are featureless except along the left wall you can see two open exits free of any doors."

Unless they had some kind of knowledge going into the place they don't know whats in there.

So, If you describe the two exits, the next time the PCs get there, If they take the same exit, would you say they’d end up in a place they know of or would you still roll the dices but with a bonus?

I would only give them the bonus for familiarity with that section of the maze after repeatedly successfully navigating back and forth between 2 landmarks and only for that section of the maze. It was more an idea I had about a maze large and complex enough that the players are stuck in it and might die of starvation/thirst. Sort of how this idea could become part of a mega dungeon or a mega dungeon in it's own right. I never formalized it but I have had the idea floating around that like... from the statuary they make it to the fountain. Then the fountain back to the statuary, then back to the fountain, and finally back to the statuary. Then In effect they have traveled that same path... or at least A possible path between the 2 landmarks 4 times. So they get a cumulative +1 to the roll each time they make the trip starting with the 5th and increasing each new time. They know that part of the maze so they are less likely to run into dead ends or be slowed down. The chances for more successes increases with each passes and eventually they might be able to make it back and forth in a single 15 min trip no events.

I would probably indicate this on the map itself by making a little note of +I, +II, +III, +IIII etc... next to the line they have the bonus for.

Ok. Thank you for taking your time describing your thoughts. There are lots of good advice here and I’ll do my best to keep on tweaking this till we run the session. Really looking forward to this now... Thank you.