Maze of the Blue Medusa is a 300+ room megadungeon module written by Zak Sabbath and Patrick Stuart, both acclaimed writers within the small, small world of tabletop roleplaying games. The book, which contains an elaborate painted map of the entire dungeon, received quite a bit of good press when it was first released, which is how I came to hear about it. Having purchased the module, and having DMed it to the best of my ability, I believe it to be almost unusable for the vast majority of DMs out there, and a strong example of the structural issues with RPG modules in general, particularly mega-dungeons and other large dungeons trying to maintain the feel of “the classics”.

I don’t mean to imply that Maze of the Blue Medusa ranks among the worst modules ever written, I have seen far, far worse. In truth, this article could have been written about almost any RPG module, as they all have very common issues. The sheer regularity with which I encounter modules with exactly the same flaws as Blue Medusa in the RPG scene astounds me, and is my primary reason for writing this post. It is certainly not to single out Blue Medusa as a product.

I use Blue Medusa as my primary example of bad module design for two reasons. One, because it has received quite a large number of glowing reviews, almost none of which seem to be coming from people who have actually played or attempted to DM it. Two, I have played it, in full, which is something that I suspect that only a handful of people have ever accomplished, with the designers themselves being the only group I know for sure have tried.

For those who want to know how my run through of the Maze went, I have a post that details just that. There’s nothing there that’s necessary to understand this review, but it’s there for those that are curious.

The Rorschach Medusa

There are going to be a number of times in this review where I mention things about the story, maps, and encounter design that may not gel with your experience, or interpretation, of the Maze. This is because the book itself is incredibly vague.

For example, what level is the Maze supposed to be run at? Zak S has stated on reddit that the Maze will function fine when ran at any starting level from the range of 1-8, and that the game works well with any form of D&D, but the monsters still have statblocks that heavily imply the use of LoFTP, and there doesn’t seem be understanding or acknowledgement of the world of difference between a level 4 character in OD&D and a level 4 character in 3rd edition.

The Maze isn’t “level-gated”, aside from starting at Chronia’s Halls the players can end up anywhere at any time, but the statblocks very obviously conform to a linear difficulty curve–the enemies get progressively more difficult in accordance with the order they are presented in the book. So what happens when the players go somewhere that’s level-wise, way out of their league? Is the GM expected to balance these encounters on the fly? Are the players supposed to run, come back later? I don’t have a problem with any of these options, what I have a problem with is that the book never explains what to do in these situations.

There is practically nothing in the way of designer intent within the book. Rooms will be filled with queer objects that connect to different rooms and the DM (and players) are fully expected to figure out for themselves what kind of circumstance the writers were trying to create. Encounter design is nonexistent besides a stat-block. Sometimes statblocks will include enemy behaviors that don’t rely on numbers but beyond that you’re on your own.

This even bleeds into the story, where the only entirely coherent information provided is that the three sisters of the fallen empire were deceived by their council and taken to the Blue Medusa. The only way this story can support even a hint of player motivation is to have the world of the Blue Medusa be the one the players grew up in, and for the players to have a pretty high level understanding of the patchwork world presented within. This requires the DM put more work into rationalizing the world than the writers did, since there is no real functional synopsis of what is happening or even what has happened (the timeline at the beginning of the book is laughably useless for anything beyond a vague sense of which NPCs are oldest and which are youngest).

Some key characters will have “motivations” listed, which I use quotation marks for because the writers of Blue Medusa did not seem to fully understand what a motivation is. The motivations listed fall almost exclusively into the “what I want” camp, while very, very rarely explaining the much more important “why I want it”. For example, the Blue Medusa has the following listed as her motivation:

To successfully sleep with Chronia.

Wouldn’t mind having the Liches removed from her dungeon. (Draco Scabra is ok.)

To know (but refuses to ask) why Chronia stopped writing to her.

Something new to read.

Some way to neutralize or remove the powers of the Torn sisters. (See above.)

Anything vibrantly new and interesting in Art.

Beyond the information provided above there seems to be nothing to her besides the fact that she is very bored and essentially runs a giant asylum (The Maze). She, like a lot of characters in the Maze, is extremely passive, both in nature and in a literary sense, which doesn’t exactly hype players up or provide them with reasoning to traverse through a 300 room deathtrap. There’s also no reasoning provided for why the Blue Medusa, an exceptionally powerful and gifted individual above the leagues of even the essentially god-like sisters, cannot simply tackle these tasks herself, despite being immortal and feared by literally everything in the dungeon.

There are people out there who like products like these. There are DMs who enjoy the challenge and freedom of putting a dungeon together from a mismatched framework, like it’s a puzzle to be solved. It is surprisingly common for RPG modules to be written as if they contain secrets even to the DM that can only be revealed when the time is right–for example, the well-acclaimed Shadowrun module “Universal Brotherhood” begins with a literary chronicle of the carnage within, without yet revealing the source of the carnage. Only by reading the module to the very end does the DM learn what the terror is. But Universal Brotherhood is at least layed out in full after a complete read, while, in Blue Medusa, one can potentially read through all 248 pages and not have the slightest clue what is going on or even why the module was written.

There is nothing wrong with treating Blue Medusa like a puzzle, or an incomplete framework, but understand that if you do so, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the use you’ve gotten out of the product and the use you’ve gotten out of your own ideas in interpretation of the product. When I ran the Maze, I noticed that the more I diverged from the product as written, the more the players enjoyed what they were playing. At what point does a DM go from running a module to using it as a point of inspiration? Isn’t the whole point of a module to provide interesting encounters and situations for DMs who don’t have the time to come up with them on their own?

The Map

I should probably dedicate some time to the map, because looking at the reviews, it seems to be the primary hook behind the product. On a purely artistic basis, the fully painted map is undeniably impressive. Without accounting for D&D products with a huge following like Baldur’s Gate, I have never encountered an RPG map that contains as much detail as Blue Medusa’s. If you run Blue Medusa and show players the map provided, they would have to be made of stone to not be impressed and intrigued.

Unfortunately, the map is all style and no function. The painted map shown in the previews is completely unusable in actual play for many, many reasons, but for the painted variant, I’ll provide just one especially pertinent reason: The map is essentially a spoiler. Both for the obvious reason that it shows you the exact route to the Medusa, no longer making it a ‘Maze’, and because you can tell which rooms are particularly important because they are given larger, more evocative paintings with more use of color. The module does provide you with an appropriate in-universe reason to use the map, that being a hidden map of the dungeon located about 3/4ths of the way through, long after the players will have encountered most of the major rooms. There is still ample reason not to use the map: for one, “most” does not preclude “all”, but more importantly…

Even if you use the spoiler-free map–the paint-less “function only” map on page one of the module, there are quite a lot of problems with the map design. The map is designed with very little regard for the form and function of the rooms within, resulting in many instances where a room’s scenario seems to be written with a large room in mind, but the actual room on the map is tiny, or vice versa. This sort of design creates a particularly large problem with combat encounters where quite a lot of the monsters can be lured, either intentionally or accidentally, into rooms where they simply do not function. The Maze, both narratively and by design, is hostile to essentially everything in it, there are very few NPCs within the map that have many friends and even they tend to have a lot of enemies. A smart player can easily cheese just about every combat encounter in the Maze, as written, by running from everything at full speed until encounters bleed together into a massive katamari ball of indescribable violence. Which might sound ok, until you remember how badly combat works in D&D with more than 10 active combatants.

There are a number of instances where a room’s size and/or location seems to be outright contradictory to it’s stated purpose. There’s also a fair number of instances where things like locked or secret doors can be very easily bypassed by going around in a different direction–I actually don’t think I can recall a single instance where a locked door ever meaningfully impeded progress, and this was DMing for a party that didn’t have a thief/specialist until half way through the game. Maybe this is by design, but it’s still weird.

The Bit Where I Rant About Published Adventures And Their Poor Sense of Challenge

To keep the designer theory nonsense brief and understandable, a “challenge”, in real life, is anything that tests your abilities. In D&D and many other RPGs, we have things called skills and attribute checks that are ability checks boiled down to the simplest, most boring resolution method possible, die rolling. Suffice it to say that an adventure that consists entirely of skill checks would be dull as dirt. “Climb that tree” is a fun challenge in real life, in an RPG it’s just a matter of number generation.

D&D is a “pen and paper RPG”, it must, by design, be simple enough to have all granularity fit on a few sheets of paper. This obviously isn’t to say that D&D outright prevents you from using a grid or a dart board or a deck of cards, but in general: everything in D&D is going to be something you can describe with words and numbers. In other words, a story.

Stories appreciated by the masses tend to either intentionally or unintentionally follow a narrative structure. That narrative structure is what gives the characters and their struggles meaning and context–essentially, it’s a format for challenging your characters. Those sorts of stories are what directly inspired D&D, and adventure writers know this, so they’ll usually try to mimic what those stories are doing and plaster it over the mechanics of a game. The good ones will have a better grasp of the mechanics than the bad ones. But in most cases, especially D&D, it’s the challenges they craft that make the module memorable.

Probably the most famous model of narrative structure is Freytag’s Pyramid, which divides a classical drama into 5 parts of rising and falling action. This model is almost useless for both modern literature and for RPGs, as Freytag’s model is centralized around the action peaking at the middle, the climax, whereas many stories and modules have no climax, or even really rising and falling action, they are “sandboxes” or intrigue stories. A much more appropriate narrative structure, one that is often utilized in JRPGs (video games, not the pen and paper stuff): Kishōtenketsu. Kishōtenketsu’s structure is as follows:

Introduction (ki): introducing characters, era, and other important information for understanding the setting of the story.

Development (shō): follows leads towards the twist in the story. Major changes do not occur.

Twist (ten): the story turns toward an unexpected development. This is the crux of the story, the yama (ヤマ) or climax. In case of several turns in the narrative, this is the biggest one.

Conclusion (ketsu), also called ochi (落ち) or ending, wraps up the story.

You can pretty much ignore the descriptions provided here, it’s best to think of all narrative tools in a nebulous sense. Just keep in mind: Introduction, Development, Twist, Conclusion. Take this approach to a boss fight, for example: Boss gets introduced, it has it’s basic moves, resistances and what have you, there’s a twist to the fight that gets introduced slowly or quickly (maybe the boss splits into two, or maybe it’s armor hardens to resist the damage type it was last hit by), and then the players either kill it, run away, or die. That isn’t to say that all challenges should follow this structure, it would get pretty tiring if literally everything you did got introduced, got progressively more difficult and tried to twist the script. That’s where pacing comes in–not everything should be a full-fledged challenge.

If you want an even simpler structure, the Introduction-Development-Twist-Conclusion pattern can basically just be boiled down to an Introduction and Twist, since it sort of goes without saying that all significant challenges need to be developed and all of them are going to end. Take this formula: “I need to do X, but Y.” The most cookie cutter challenge I could think of in D&D would look something like this: “I need to climb to the top of the mountain, but there’s monsters there.” That really isn’t that good of a challenge, especially in a published product, because there’s monsters everywhere, it’s D&D. But it’s good enough if you’re an amateur DM or playing with completely new players.

Some more examples of a decent challenge:

I need to find some buried treasure, but it’s hidden in a highly poisonous swamp.

I need to light up the cave, but the cave is enchanted and puts out any form of fire (magic or mundane).

I need to prove that the duke is up to something, but he won’t let me inside his manor and the guards will attack me if I don’t have an invite.

Most decent module writers are well aware of everything I just said. They know they need to provide a challenge, and they know that a challenge needs to have development and a twist. Where they commonly drop the ball is how they incorporate both of those things. What commonly happens is that they’ll drum up a challenge and then seemingly make the call to not even think through the solution. Take my “duke is up to something” challenge as an example. In most editions of D&D, that challenge is basically unwinnable for low level characters, because stealth is hot garbage in D&D. If the module doesn’t provide you with an invisibility potion or something, or makes all the guards deaf and blind, you’re never gonna break through the Duke’s manor without getting caught. Especially if no one you’re playing with rolled up a thief. To make matters worse, nine times out of ten, a writer for that scenario would gleefully make the guards several magnitudes of power higher than the PCs. You will not only fail, you will probably die.

To the designer, the challenge works like this. “They have to sneak through the duke’s manor without brute forcing it. They’ll have to be quick, but if they play smart, they’ll narrowly make it out, and get away with the proof they need.” To the player with anything less than a party thoroughly tailored for the adventure, that description might as well end at “They have to sneak.” Addendum game over. It basically comes down to a lack of experience with the system, and a lack of knowledge on how most players act. Adventure writers are usually hired for their skills with writing and scenario design, they aren’t hired because they DM the game on a regular basis.

Well…that’s how it works with, as I said, decent module writers. Who seem to be few and far between these days. Other modules, especially those written by amateurs, will be seemingly unaware that challenges even need to be structured. After playing through MOTB, watching an incomplete playtest, reading commentary of the authors, and reading the book cover-to-cover several times, I honestly think that MOTB’s production, or at least *most* of it’s production, worked like this. The writers thought of “interesting concepts”, like a lich consumed by love, or a dude who’s body is made entirely of knives, and haphazardly shoved them into a 300 room dungeon while making some attempt to present them in a manner that would present a compelling scenario.

What we get is a huge book of really compelling ideas and imagery with almost no information on how to use those ideas in any way that might even slightly resemble a narrative structure. I honestly can’t even say that these characters are particularly interesting in a *character* sense, that is, their actions and demeanor. The bulk of of the book is aesthetic pulp with no bite or practical use. MOTB honestly feels like a book of concept art presented as an adventure.

Aldia’s Maze

The Maze has a lot of rooms that are entirely keyed to poking and prodding. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say this. There’s two entire areas (The Art Gallery and The Cells) that consist entirely of rooms that only have events if they’re interacted with, and can be easily skipped. This being the case I’m pretty sure that the writers were well aware how much of the Maze can turn into a casual stroll (The random encounters are meant to fix this, but they don’t). I just don’t know why in the world it came out this way.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the rooms in the book and categorized them based on their content. If you’re curious, you can see the results here.

There are a grand total of 111 rooms in the Maze that only provide content if the players choose to mess with the contents of the room with little to no provocation. Already, we’re off to a bad start. But it gets worse. Let’s take that 111, and add to it the number of rooms that exist only as access (stairs, etc.), and then add the number of rooms with nothing of even minor interest to them. We arrive at a staggering 161 rooms that do not provide any sort of meaningful content to those of the “ten-foot-pole” mindset, and this is without even including the number of rooms that only include basic items, or the number of visually interesting rooms that exist for little reason other than ~lore~. That’s 161/304 rooms. More than half of the book provides rooms that are of no real interest to a cautious player.

This sort of thing is staggeringly common in module design, and I have no idea how or why people treat it as acceptable. I’d like to, for a brief moment, talk about something outside of tabletop games, because it’s the best example I can think of to illustrate why this sort of design is bad.

Aldia’s Keep is a dungeon in the action RPG Dark Souls 2. I use the term “dungeon” very loosely here because it is essentially just a straight line with rooms you can visit at your leisure.

The “straight line” I mention is just to the top of those stairs, at the centerpoint. If you choose to stick to the straight line–and why wouldn’t you, the camera and lighting direct you towards it–the dungeon will be over in less than a minute. The only challenge you will encounter will be ogres bursting through the walls in set places, which are basically just a cheap “gotcha” that you’ll fall for once and then never again. Once you know the ogres are hiding, you’ll approach the walls carefully, walk on by, and finish the dungeon, never once deviating from that straight line. There is no challenge here, especially since this is a late game dungeon–you are literally just walking from one area to the next while occasionally getting attacked. There is nothing you need to do except walk.

There, are, however, rooms within Aldia’s Keep that exist outside this straight line. There are hostile knights that break through mirrors from the inside. There’s a giant basilisk trapped in a cage. There’s a devious NPC that will ask you to free him, without telling you that he’s a dangerous psychopath. There’s an item hidden in some ooze, wading into it will break your equipment.

What do all these detours have in common? They’re all completely optional, and they’re all entirely rewarded with danger, violence, or otherwise negative results. Sure, you might get an item here or there and some souls, but you can get both those things pretty much anywhere, the world is bursting with them. If fighting the mirror knights, the ogres, or the basilisk were in any way engaging or different from what you’ve been doing for over 20 hours at this point, I might be inclined to say that the journey beats the destination here. But since that’s definitely not the case, and because getting through the dungeon is so effortless, why would you ever bother with anything outside the main path? Dark Souls 2 is a primarily single player game where death is practically meaningless and I still feel this way. Imagine how I would feel if I was playing with friends, who all came to be entertained, and my character’s singular life was on the line.

I think you get the point. MOTB is Aldia’s Keep stretched out to a 6-area dungeon. Either you act rationally, don’t randomly fiddle with things, and finish the module bored and confused without much happening, -or- you figure “well, guess I better mess with things, it’s clearly the point of the module” and do so for metagame reasons only to find yourself punished for doing so.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that all modules ever should adhere to a grounded, narratively structured and fully coherent challenge, or that all modules should be “fair”, or whatever. With something like Tomb of Horrors, you know you’re going to die and you know your characters would have to be insane to be this tenacious, because to even enter the Tomb of Horrors you have to go through an absurd gauntlet that is blatantly designed to kill characters arbitrarily. A good DM will have outright told their group that they’re probably going to die, but even if they don’t they’ll get the message long before they enter the Tomb, and adjust their playstles to extreme paranoia–the way the module wants you to behave. You have to think in a non-linear nature to survive the Tomb of Horrors, whereas in MOTB, you can just walk past almost every major threat. Why even bother?

“But, Treasure!”

We’ve established that the Maze is dangerous, offers little interactivity, has no plot, and is honestly pretty boring in general. Here’s what Zak S said when I asked him the obvious: why stay in the maze? This was his response:

“Why stay here?”

Because there’s treasure.

Like most dungeons.”

Zak, if this is seriously all you’ve got, that’s pathetic. You know what has treasure in D&D? Every location of interest. You’re going to have to do better than that, sorry. This thing we have called “plot” has kind of proven itself worthy, after of 26 centuries of preservation. People respond positively to it.

And before you go mouthing off about how old school RPG modules went plotless all the time–no, they didn’t. Not the good ones, anyway. Take Tomb of Horrors, for example, commonly considered to be one of the worst modules ever made by many people. Even in Tomb of Horrors, there is a reason to go through the Tomb, and no, it’s not the treasure that was promised–although even that is a vastly superior method of presenting treasure as a motivator because it is immediately stated upfront that vast riches exist within. Here’s what Tomb of Horrors presents as information available for players:

“Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt (Be warned that tales told have it that this being possesses powers which make him nearly undefeatable). Accounts relate that it is quite unlikely that any adventurers will ever find the chamber where the demi-lich Acererak lingers, for the passages and rooms of the Tomb are fraught with terrible traps, poison gases, and magical protections. Furthermore, the demi-lich has so well hidden his lair, that even those who avoid the pitfalls will not be likely to locale their true goal. So only large and well-prepared parties of the bravest and strongest should even consider the attempt, and if they do locate the Tomb, they must be prepared to fail. Any expedition must be composed of characters of high level and varied class. They must have magical protections and weapons, and equip themselves with every sort of device possible to insure their survival.”

There you have it, up front: The crypt contains riches, it’s guarded by a lich, you’re probably going to die. You’ll want magic weapons or you’re definitely going to die. That’s pretty much the Tomb in a nutshell, and provides everything players need to know in a no nonsense matter. Their primary motivation is not going to be the treasure, although that will certainly help as an added benefit. Their primary motivation is going to be to beat the odds. The tomb is a deathtrap. Only the most wizened adventurers will get through, it even says right below this: “THIS IS A THINKING PERSON’S MODULE. AND IF YOUR GROUP IS A HACK AND SLAY GATHERING, THEY WILL BE UNHAPPY!”

There’s not even any indication for players that there even is treasure in the Maze to begin with. I mean, realistically they will of course know that there is treasure in the dungeon, because D&D, but narratively speaking, the players are provided with absolutely no reason to go in.

But let’s assume a generous position. Let’s say that your group is thoroughly motivated by treasure. Let’s say that your group does not care in the slightest about plot, or that they’re going to be stuck wandering halls for the vast majority of the adventure, because they really want that sweet, sweet treasure. What does Maze of the Blue Medusa offer, in terms of treasure?

Well, if gold’s your thing, you’re set for life. There’s certainly a ton of gold in the Maze, I won’t deny that. If you’re playing with a ruleset that allows gold for experience, it’s very likely that a player who enters the Maze at level 1 will end up leaving it at level 8 or above because of the absurd amount of gold that lies within. If you’re insane enough to run the Maze with random encounters as written, they’ll probably end up even stronger than this. This is one of many reasons why I don’t consider this to be an integratable module–your campaign will start and will end with the Maze. So good for you, you’ll end up with a high level character that you most likely will never use beyond the Maze itself because it’ll steamroll any campaign. If you even survive–played as written, you most likely won’t.

If you’re not playing with gold for experience, the gold isn’t going to do jack squat for you. Like I said, you’re never taking that character out of the maze unless your DM decides to quit the module halfway through, and nothing in the maze accepts coin or acts as a vendor, so uh…hope you enjoy hauling around worthless pennies. If your DM decides to implement some sort of shop above ground or within one of the secret worlds, you might get some bang for your buck.

But what about things that aren’t gold? Well, to give the Maze some credit, there are a fair number of knicknacks and basic equipment lying around, like lanterns, skeleton keys, holy water, etc. The “I search the body” table actually does provide some pretty nice rewards, things that the players could always do more of. But treasure? Things of significant value? Besides gold, there’s almost nothing. There’s a shit ton of magic scrolls that are going to be absolutely useless to you if you don’t have a Mage in your party (which my group essentially didn’t–he died in the first session). There’s the magic swords that function as a reward for a puzzle in room 5, which are nice. The book goes out of it’s way to tell DMs not to tell players what they actually do, though, which is actually a lot nicer than what would usually happen; they’d turn out to be cursed. The lizardman in the Art Gallery actually has 7 pretty nice magic weapo–oh wait, they’re destroyed after he uses them. Nevermind.

I want to show you an excerpt from the book, because it’s absolutely staggering:

This gigantic orrery of alien worlds is activated by a visible central switch. When triggered, the planets swing and spin on their brass rails. Apparently made by the same hand as the Orrery of Spells in Almery 205. Dialing both orreries into an astrologically correct position for the current moment (needed: astrological almanac or other special expertise) then reading them both (needed: INT check) grants everyone present an advantage on their next three saves (roll twice and pick the better save), as they can hazily predict their future.

Wow, golly gee! You mean to tell me that if I happen to have a character specifically trained for this absurdly specific situation, or if I managed to grab an unmarked book after killing a crone (who is NOT EVEN IN THIS AREA) that does 5d6 fucking damage per turn to anyone who hears it, I can make a check to do this ridiculous tinkering maneuver that no one would ever be able to figure out, and then do that again in an area on the opposite fucking end of the maze, then if I do all that, I get advantage on my next three saves! Nevermind, this whole critique’s invalid, I can definitely see how the Maze is just brimming with reward for curiosity.

The Randomly Generated Elephant in the Room

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—remember to roll not only when the party is noisy but also every in-game 10 minutes. That means every time the players stop to do a thorough search of a room, for instance, or if they take their armor off.

That’s from the guidelines section of the book, which contains almost no other information besides “be intentionally vague” and “the Maze isn’t supposed to make sense, you gotta deal with it”. There you have it, random encounters will solve our “Maze Tourism” problem. As an aside, I find it amusing that the writers think that the players will have to “sneak past” things they’re scared to touch, as if players will really feel the need to tip-toe past inanimate objects.

Here’s the random encounter table:

You’re supposed to roll a d100 every time a “Turn” passes (10 in-game minutes). In OD&D, a “Turn” is basically a unit of measurement that means whatever the fuck the DM wants it to, but it’s usually used as a time requirement for breaking down doors or picking locks. Other than that, you’re kind of on your own when it comes to a reasonable estimate of when you’re supposed to roll. There’s a roll every time that the players stop to do a thorough search of a room, which is reasonable, and a roll every time that the players take their armor off, which is less so (I’m going to assume as a general sanity check that they meant heavy armor. Unless the authors honestly think it takes 10 minutes to take off a hide cuirass or brigandine garment).

You’re also supposed to roll when the party is being noisy. What “noisy” means, they don’t really say. The previous blurb about the players having to “sneak past” areas makes me wonder if you’re supposed to be rolling any time the players make a noise that would startle a librarian. To me, “noisy” would mean the sound of clashing swords, or the sound of moving furniture, or a character screaming at an NPC, and so on. Which isn’t something that’s going to come up very often. Not to mention, as soon as your players see you rolling dice in response to noise, they’re never going to make loud noises again.

Most of the time when loud noises are heard, they’re heard because something eventful is already happening. To me that defeats the purpose of an encounter check in the first place. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re not supposed to roll for an encounter during a combat encounter, so I’ll ignore the extraneous possibility of the players having to fight thirty-fucking-two birdmen at the same time. But it’s still quite possible to have an encounter show up during something that already constitutes a notable challenge, such as getting past the light-swallowing painting in the art gallery. Or it could be a player character that’s causing issues during one of the many, many sequences of mind control or magical compulsion.

Let’s stop dawdling and actually look at this encounter table. First thing to note is that there’s a 25% chance of nothing happening. Which gets pretty funny in instances where the book says there’s a 70% chance of a random encounter check, so you roll four different dice for what could potentially amount to nothing happening at all. There’s an 18% chance of some sort of light source being extinguished–I don’t know what it is about module writers and not knowing that light sources in D&D are stupidly easy to come across. Not to mention that most of the Maze is well-lit anyway, so this basically amounts to an additional 18% of nothing happening. On a 74 you get “a wave of unspeakable melancholy”…okay then…?

Another big thing to note is that a lot of the encounters are actual individuals rather than nameless members of a faction, which means that if they die, they’re gone for good. The replacement for these encounters are pretty much exclusively the Chameleon Women, which are a standard band of humanoids with abilities similar to the PCs. They carry barbed nets, which makes them pretty much the only encounter in the entire Maze that you cannot reliably run from (It is still quite doable as they move at human movement speed, but it varies by location).

Let me tell you: the Chameleon Women are going to get old. Fast. Encounters with small squads that have roughly the same degree of power as you are pretty consistently fun in D&D, but not when they’re the same group of humanoids over, and over, and over again. There are some exceptions, there are some pretty good encounters in the Garden area where the Chameleon Women set up some ambushes that put the PCs in a pretty tough spot, but most of the time, due to the “random” nature of the random encounter rolls, you get Chameleon Women showing up to bust the PCs as if they’re cops with nothing better to do. If you’ve gotten most of the major encounters in the Maze by the time you’ve gotten to the Cells, there is a whopping 39% chance of Chameleon Women popping up on a random encounter check. (I count the Negamancer as a Chameleon Women, because they’re basically just a Chameleon Sorcerer with some extra abilities.)

The second most common band you’ll encounter are the “Oku”. These are the birdmen I keep mentioning. The Oku are standard humanoid fighters, but a lot better than the Chameleon Women because they have names and more personality than just being faceless reptilian cops. But in a way, that actually makes them worse. Specifically because of this line:

The results of particular interactions with PCs are more powerful than the results of this table. If PCs make a genuine enemy, or friend, that particular “Oku” will act accordingly no matter what the table says.

Basically, treat the Oku as individuals. But somehow have them popping up everywhere as a result of a random encounter check? And then have them be vulnerable to diplomacy, when these checks are supposed to be creating tension and stakes? I’m not saying this is all bad of course. My party befriended the bulk of the Oku, as I suspect most parties would. It’s good for the PCs to have allies within the Maze, characters they care about. But it doesn’t fulfill the stated purpose of random encounters, which is to make the hundred+ boring rooms actually mean something. Most of the time the party is going to encounter an Oku, say hi, and move on. The best and most interesting part of the Oku’s behavior table is the 3/16 chance that they’re fleeing someone they’ve robbed, which can lead to interesting shenanigans. Which the writers, of course, made the least probable outcome of the table.

I really can’t stress how likely it is that, unless the DM almost never calls for a “Turn”, these random encounters will be occurring in a place that is clearly not meant for the occasion. Sometimes there will be encounters that are flat-out impossible by the Maze’s own “lore”. You get an encounter with some Aurum Specters on a roll of 11. The Aurum specters? The ghosts of the wedding guests within the Chapel, the Chapel that they are incapable of leaving until Sophronia’s curse is lifted? Yeah just throw some of those in the Garden, that’ll work.

Most of the “individual” encounters are taken wholesale from a more organic place within the Maze, meaning every time you use one of the encounters on a roll of 14 or less, the Maze gets a little less interesting. Most of these encounters will either be a complete joke or a total party kill depending on where and when you encounter them. You can potentially encounter Torgos Zooth’s hitsquad on a roll of 14, who has a minion that attacks D10 TIMES PER ROUND (this would be unacceptable no matter where and when you encountered it, really) plus a different minion with 19 AC and 10 hit dice, in the first area.

No, the random encounters don’t solve the problem of the rooms lacking challenge. Even if all the random encounters were amazing, it still wouldn’t solve the issue–you’ve still got the issue of a random location for each of these encounters. Area design is really the bread and butter of D&D’s combat–without it, you’ve just got a subpar war game. If it’s purely a matter of chance where you encounter something, there’s always a chance of a good encounter feeling wasted.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

A party is far more likely to starve to death within the Maze than die as a result of an encounter. The amount of food, or even edible creatures, that exist organically within the Maze, amounts to maybe 3 different snacks over a course of 304 rooms. There is a piddly 4% chance of finding a ration on a dead body. You honestly stand a better chance of surviving the Maze if you come in with a bag full of potatoes than you do bringing ropes, sleeping bags and torches.

Rules for starvation differ wildly with each variant of D&D, so experiences are going to vary on how miserable your hungry party is going to be. A common ground between most of these rulesets is that going without food and water for three days will leave you either way too fatigued to actually do anything, or outright dead. But even if you play an edition with extremely lenient starvation rules, or just flatout decide not to use them, MOTB has an area where they’re forced upon you:

Due to the mutant time leached from Chronia Torn and fed into the gallery in order to preserve the artwork, some aspects of time work differently for nonartworks here. All food and drink spoils in seconds. PCs will become hungry after about ten minutes and will lose d4 hit points if they don’t eat and drink something ten minutes after that. They then need to eat a meal every half hour thereafter or, again, lose d4 HP every 10 minutes. This is where the Cannibal Critics came from.

The addition of a survival mechanic within the Art Gallery was likely included to give the Gallery some sort of death-risk considering that the number of ways the characters can enter combat here are slim to none. If you’re familiar with the rules of D&D, you’re probably already aware of the insane problem presented here, but in case you aren’t let’s break it down.

You’re going to need to keep track of every Turn that passes. A turn, as described in the previous section, is ten in-game minutes. A short rest in 5th edition is 1 hour, or 6 turns. So if the players want to take a short rest, each of them need to have 2 instances of food on hand, because as described in the 5th edition manual, a short rest cannot be undertaken if they risk taking damage during the rest. 2 instances of food for each party member in an area where food and drink spoils in seconds. You see the problem.

You’re not gonna be able to take a long rest at all, either in the Art Gallery or anywhere else, if you play the Maze as written. A long rest is 8 hours, so the players would need 16 instances of food, and the food must be eaten and irregular intervals (the Gallery’s survival mechanics do not state that food can be “stacked”, i.e., that you can eat twice within one sitting and avoid the next two hunger checks), so it is literally impossible to take a long rest within the Art Gallery because you’re going to be sleeping instead of eating. Unless you have a race that allows you to ignore sleep or nutrition, which is basically god mode in this module.

Those turns I mentioned, that you’re going to have to make a very meticulous record of in order for this insane system to function? Remember that you’re supposed to roll a random encounter roll for every turn that passes. That isn’t me taking things out of context here by using the nebulous term “turn” either. The book states in no uncertain terms that a random encounter check happens every 10 minutes, and the 5th edition manual states very specifically that a short rest is 1 hour. Translation, you are making 6 random encounter checks every time your party stops to take a break. Functional!

This doesn’t become any less insane anywhere else in the dungeon. Every time your party stops to take a break, they’re going to be accosted by a random encounter. Some of which, as I’ve illustrated, will completely break your party’s kneecaps if they’re encountered at the wrong time. So, the vast majority of the time, your party just flat-out won’t rest. Or they will, at great risk to themselves. And because a long rest is practically impossible as written, any class which relies on such a thing i.e. casters is going to be completely useless for most of the dungeon.

To be fair, there is a way that parties can actually take a rest and grab some food without much risk to themselves. The stairs in room 14 will transport the players to a peaceful area with food vendors and sleeping areas, and the description states that it’s unlikely that any maze-dwellers would find their way in. It’s better than nothing, but: 1. It requires the players to find a secret just to make the module even slightly functional, and 2. It’s in the first area of the maze, and no such area exists anywhere else. Every time your players want to undertake a long rest they’re going to have to backtrack to the stairs, which is sometimes outright impossible due to some areas working better on the way in than the way out, or because the players have gone way too far in and forgotten their barrings.

Various Nitpicks

The very first thing the players will likely encounter in the Maze is a demonic woman with 20 AC and 14 HD that capriciously requests that the players fetch various curios and objects for her. If she sees the players again, and they don’t have anything interesting to sell to her, she will either ask them to find even more things, torture the players, kill them, or attempt to destroy the entire Maze. (The description, vague as ever, makes no statement as to whether she is even capable of burning it down.) Believe it or not, this is actually one of the most well designed encounters in the entire module, because it provides players with a reasoning to interact with things. It would only make sense at this point that the only thing to accomplish this is a vain god-NPC with no respect for the players.

There are many, many things that are seemingly connected in the Maze that have no explained connection or interactive properties. It would make sense for the Emperor’s Rose, which causes all around it to obey a leader, to be nullified by the Jacobin Rose, a rose that slays rulers. But nothing is ever written about this. It would make sense for the Medusa to have dialogue or motivations pertaining her deformed child in room 10, but nothing is ever written about this. You could argue that these things don’t need to be written down because a DM who sees the connection could choose to implement them themselves, but if they’re that obvious I don’t understand why they’re not in the book.

I don’t understand why the Medusa has “quests” and incomplete tasks for the players when the encounter with her is just her challenging the players to a duel to the death regardless of circumstance, thus ending the module.

The encounters with Zamia and Chronia Torn are so out of the way and obtuse that they are essentially secret. It’s very likely that players will end up never even meeting two of the four major players of the Maze.

It’s very strange that not a single inhabitant of the Maze seems to be interested in escaping. To me that makes a lot more sense then committing to elaborate, century-long schemes that never pan out anyway. My players and I were in unanimous agreement that a lot of the module’s issues with plot would go away if the direction was shifting from entering the maze to escaping it.

After killing the Medusa, the Maze will begin to crumble apart and destroy itself from it’s foundation. As written, escaping the maze is basically impossible. Once the Maze initiates it’s destruction all the prisoners in the Cells become unpetrified and go out for blood–many of these prisoners are dangerous even alone, but in a group, they’re practically unstoppable. Each section of the maze starts to cave in after 1 or 2 hours, meaning the players are forced to go through an absolutely insane gauntlet of everything they might not have dispatched, without rest, with several of the easy exits no longer accessible. This would normally constitute a massive flaw with the module as it is essentially unwinnable, but by this point I refuse to believe that anyone running the module would have the abject stupidity to run it as written by the time they reach the final encounter, so it’s of only mild concern.

Lastly, I want to read you a description of one of the NPCs, because it is outright insultingly idiotic:

Levalliant Green is a supervillain. He lives by different rules. Literally. As far as the GM is concerned, LG may have planned, prepared, and predicted anything. The variety of his response is infinite, but must be constrained by the tables below. Green is exceptionally brave, intelligent (18), driven, and perceptive. He has 1 HD and no magical powers of any kind—use standard NPC schmuck stats. He tends to refer to people by their first names, which he usually knows. (Of course letting his arch-enemy petrify him then waiting for you to kill her was all part of his plan.) Pyxis (Cells 297) served him.

Green’s Defenses once unfrozen

If Green wins initiative, he will disappear and become undetectable—by the most mundane means available other than the means by which the party thinks he did. If the first thing they think is he drank an invisibility potion, it wasn’t that. If they first think he ran around the corner, it wasn’t that. If the first thing they think is secret door—nope.

In fact, he definitely didn’t disappear by the first d4th reasons they think of. It’s something else. The GM should decide something and write it down. This is, by usual GMing rules, totally unfair—but Green has one hit die and lives by different rules. If Green loses initiative (which is rare; he generally tries to hold still with a readied action to flee), he will not be killed or captured in the first round of combat—again, for the most mundane reason the players can think of that’s not among the first d4. Illusory self? Nope. Magic item? Nope. Write down the reason the attacks of the first round failed. These two tricks work twice each per combat. He knows where all the secret doors in the Maze are (though he hasn’t opened them all), and whatever happens in the Medusa’s room is likely part of his eventual scheme. Play him as hard and as deviously as possible.

I want to make it clear that this is his entire blurb. There is nothing provided in the entire book for why this character acts this way or what he’s after.

Separating Art from the Artist

I’m going to drop some quotes here that I think are particularly relevant to Blue Medusa.

“Going through all this WOTC and TSR stuff I’m definitely amazed and almost impressed how few genuinely gameable ideas manage to get communicated in these texts.

How do they do it? I went through and tried to figure out the most important bits:

1. Pretend a standard monster in a standard room is an encounter worth paying for.



This is the biggest one by far: Yes, it is fun to fight an ogre in a room, but it is not fun to pay to be told that there’s an ogre in a room, especially not for 8 paragraphs. The idea that an ogre can be in a room is logically implied by the ogre being in the Monster Manual, which you probably already own.

If I am actually paying for it–the environment should be complex, the creature should be complex or both.”

…

“I’ve noticed that if you have a weird room and a weird monster (not just reskinned weird, but like what it does is weird) then sometimes it’s super fun but sometimes it’s just incomprehensible.

Weird rooms plus nothing is sometimes spooky but sometimes just like the players are like whatevs and walk past.

Weird room plus normal monster though–that’s almost always a good time. Understandable enough that players can use their heads, novel enough that they have to.”

…

“To me, just as the point of combat and action mechanics is to facilitate the creation and in-game use of interesting dungeon puzzles and similar tests of tactical wit, the point of interesting social mechanics would be to facilitate the creation and in-game use of interesting social puzzles.”

All three of those quotes express pretty strong, agreeable sentiments. They’re sentiments that damn MOTB in particularly harsh terms if you accept them as fact. Here’s the catch. The author of all three of these quotes? Zak S. The primary author of MOTB.

Obviously, this is all a bit baffling for me.

Those familiar with the RPG industry will be well aware that Zak S is a very controversial figure, having garnered as many fans as he has people who literally believe he should be killed. I want to make it very clear that at the time I ran MOTB, I had no idea who Zak S or Patrick Stuart were. My experience was not biased by any sort of pre-conceived notion of his character. I earnestly believe that MOTB is a terrible module for reasons that do not in any way involve the actions or public image of it’s authors.

That said, I could tell pretty much immediately upon skimming the PDF that what I was reading was probably written by someone with some…personal issues, let’s say. This is, in fact, the most common criticism of MOTB. A vocal minority have stated that they felt creeped out and/or annoyed by the prose and scenarios presented within the book, often using words such as “edgy” or “cringey” and what have you. Having read some of LOFTP’s other modules, MOTB is pretty much as ordinary as whole milk in comparison, so I can’t say that I felt the same. There’s definitely an underlying current of abrasiveness throughout the whole module, though.

For example, it’s pretty clear that one or both of the writers had a hell of a thing for cunning, capricious, sexually open, extremely powerful and classically beautiful women. This archetype appears so often in the module that it becomes difficult for a DM to stop the NPCs from feeling samey. There’s the Medusa herself, the three torn sisters, Ashen Chanterelle, Lady Crucem Capilli, the Sphinx, the list goes on and on. I’m not saying I have any real issue with these NPCs, it’s just very obvious that there’s a “type” being imprinted on you here. Gay men and heterosexual women who play through the module will probably start to roll their eyes after a while, especially since there’s no examples of male beauty or even male cunning unless you count the terrible Levalliant Green NPC.

When Zak and his pals talk about their experiences with the Maze I consistently see them mentioning cannibalistic behavior. If you read the blurb on the Art Gallery, you probably figured out that the whole thing is basically just a set up for unnecessary cannibalism. Obviously Zak doesn’t play D&D with the same people as me, because I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a single player or character who would consider cannibalism preferable to just walking away from the table. I suppose eating the Chameleon Women technically isn’t cannibalism, but you’re not exactly going to be able to cook them either, so “raw reptilian meat” probably isn’t even going to register on most players’ list of viable food options.

If you compare the best rooms in the Maze with the worst rooms, the difference is staggering. We have the Wedding area, the Chapel, which creates a really interesting, “slow burn” style story with the players uncovering more and more about the details of this disastrous wedding and what really happened. It’s easily the best area of the entire dungeon and if it was printed as it’s own module, I would probably say it was brilliant. Then we have the Almery, an area that exists for seemingly no reason, with no real theme or central motif. It’s filled with terrible encounters that are all either way too easy or ridiculously powerful. We’ve got the Reptile Archives which is essentially a sequence of dead ends and empty rooms with the only thing of interest being an utterly bizarre werewolf subplot that never goes anywhere or provides anything of interest to the players. It’d be nice if I could claim that all the good rooms were written by the better writer of the two and all the bad ones written by the worse, but obviously the truth is far more complicated than that.

I don’t know if Zak or Patrick ever got to the end of the dungeon with any of their parties, and I suspect that neither of them particularly cares because that was never the point.

I struggle to understand how people this passionate and with this many strong convictions about gaming managed to put out a product like this. If I’m forced to come up with an explanation for all of this, the closest thing I can think of is that Zak S and Patrick Stuart are writers who are very, very perceptive when it comes to noticing problems with the common malaise of RPG products, but neither of them has the slightest clue how to actually fix those problems. The most kind way I could approach MOTB is by calling it a failed experiment. It wanted to be The Megadungeon That Didn’t Suck, but was doomed, because the writers refused to acknowledge that they the games they were playing did not necessarily reflect a game that most others enjoy, or even really function in many settings. There is a sense of active contempt that emanates from MOTB, it is a contempt directed towards the very idea that “good gaming” or “good art” is subjective, or that the vast majority of tables do not share the same values as their groups.

There’s simply no way that the writers didn’t understand that there’s a massive world of difference between OD&D and 2E, 3E, 4E, etc…no, there’s no way that they didn’t get that making a “system agnostic” product was outright impossible in the way they were presenting it. They knew, they just didn’t care, because they were going to mod the game to fit their personal preferences anyway. Completely disregarding the entire point of a module, to act as a point of context for players who can’t afford to be doing that type of thing. This ostrich-in-the-sand mentality seems to stem from an absolutely militant insistence that anything to do with designer theory is the literal devil. MOTB sucks because it was put together in a way that could only ever suck. From the very beginning it was doomed by nature:

I made a painting and then Patrick wrote room descriptions for each part of the painting. Then we passed it back and forth for years writing and rewriting, trying to make it into the kind of dungeon we wish we found all those times we cracked open a new module only to be disappointed—something strange and interconnected and bringing enough ideas to the table to be worth what you paid. And we wanted to make sure our maze was designed so those ideas weren’t buried under piles of words but instead unfolded as it was read and became easier to run for that unfolding. When fickle players send you flipping pages toward one of 300 rooms, we want you to land thinking “Oh yeah—that guy, I know how to run him.” Let us know if it worked. —Zak

This is not the way you design a functional dungeon. Designing an abstract piece and then trying your damnedest to unnaturally force an actual ecosystem into it after the fact it is not going to work. Dungeon crawls live and die by the presentation of their challenges, you will not produce compelling challenges if you are forcing a square peg into a circle.

So no, it didn’t work, Zak.