The Rotten Labyrinth Returns To Life Just In Time To Spring My First Trap

Part of creating this massive labyrinth has been coming up with a variety of encounters for the characters (and players) exploring the labyrinth. Some of this is basic traps, random monster encounters, and bits of loot spread around the labyrinth in as close to a haphazard manner as I can manage while still making use of the space properly. Other stuff is what I like to think of as “The Big Deals:” things that could have significant impacts on the group or that change locations as time passes (and, usually, could still have significant impacts on the group). So far, the party has run into one Big Deal of each type, but they only just achieved that in our most recent session when they found a trap that had the potential to slowly kill them while also giving them a chance to learn huge, significant, and important details about the world as a whole. It was a difficult trap to avoid once they (literally) stepped into it, but it was one with a bunch of red flags raised around it, there to warn my players about what they were going to find, so they would be in a position to choose whether or not to step in the trap. Like players everywhere, they still chose to step in the trap so I got to share some information about the world around them and they still managed to get out with only a single level of exhaustion rather than their entire life force drained away. All-in-all, I think it was a pretty successful session and an all-but-perfect deployment of the first of many Big Deal traps (though I suppose there is another Big Deal trap out there that they already tripped, but it only became a Big Deal Trap once they chose to interact with what was supposed to be a mixture of set dressing and world lore). Coincidentally, it was also the first Big Deal anything that I made when designing this labyrinth.

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