Making Mazes Fun & The Case for Long Corridors

This is written after the Mazes in D&D episode of the Wandering DMs.

There's a lot of maze haters out there! I'm not interested in them.

The question I'm interested in is: what would make mazes fun? How could they be used in design of megadungeons? I have been thinking about this awhile and I have a couple ideas rolling around:

1. Riddles or Partial Maps

This can be as simple as a partial map, but what might be interesting are instructions givine a route through the maze.  Players could find a scrap of paper with a route like, "BLUE ROOM, From Gorgo's Face R L R S R RR R Y S L".  This could be a series of turns, but WHAT is Gorgo's Face?  Is it one of the big faces painted on the wall in room 12?  Is it the statue in room 23?  Is this something a rumor roll can reveal: Gorgo is the nickname for the bull statue in room 14?  And what about the directions themselves? R and L make easy sense, and S is probably straight (or is it stairs?), but what is "RR"? The second right? And what could 'Y' mean?

And what if the directions are backwards? The players know the Blue Room and want to get to Gorgo's Head. How easy is that to figure out?

What if the dungeon has changed since the directions were written, a new hole knocked in a wall?

This is in a sense the DM injecting things that might come about from having a shared world.  Have your other groups and factions deal with the maze, take actions on it, and have lore about it.

In other words, treat the maze as a location that you flesh out and breath life into, that's not just a harassment zone.  Give the players a head start with the layout of the maze to make exploration of it more purposeful, more directed, and less pointless exploration.

Somewhat counterintuitively, my other solution idea is to make the hallways more boring.

2. Twisty Passages w/ Room Anchors, aka Drunken Circuit Diagrams

This is an idea that I got from Empire of the Petal Throne, and a glance at a photograph of MAR Barker's underworld map (which was quite large). It is not exactly what I saw on that map, but it has made me think of it.

First to talk about other designs you may have seen out there.

There's the standard Gygaxian mapper-hostile design with some tricky areas of hard-to-describe things like angled hallways, curved passages, slopes -- along with a fairly dense layout because the map is trying to fit on a single piece of paper. The complexity and density make these a nuisance for the DMs to describe and there's often not much purpose to it.

There is another kind of layout, the well-Jaquayed dungeon, which is more of a grid really; you can generally get from place to place. By contrast there's the Unjaquayed-but-not-linear dungeon (think Stonehell L1) which is more like a maze of rooms.

Ok, stop imagining those and let's imagine something else.

Imagine large rooms, but the space between them is almost filled with mazey passages that have relatively few branches or intersections outside of rooms. To get from Room 1 to Room 2 you don't just open a door and go down a thirty-foot hallway to another door: you enter a hallway that goes 60', turns right, goes 90', take the left tee 100', and there's the door.

Most importantly, the corridors are long, and snakey, but there are few decision points and locally simple geometry that gets complex on a larger scale.

Something like this conceptually:

Lots of long twisting passages: possibly minor level changes will be useful to do crossings. Crucially, I think, a "northern" exit will not necessarily take you generally north. You need the map! Or landmarks.  There should probably be more corridor intersections so there is usually one decision in the hallway between rooms.

This is something like the mazes from Zork or other old text adventure games, but here the passages are real and not mysterious.

I think it's also very important to go very light on tricks and traps. A little should go a long way.

POSSIBLE BENEFITS

You might think I'm only making things worse by adding more corridors. But long boring hallways are a feature! These hallways can be described and mapped by players very quickly. You can cruise quickly to the next decision point. Your non-mapping players will not have time to get bored.

However game time will pass. Torches might go out. Wandering monsters might appear. This is good! The corridors are a place where things happen now. Combat in corridors is fast and pretty simple; tactics are boiled down to the essence and this is where old D&D shines IMHO.  Also in a corridor the DM does not have to work as hard to mesh wandering monster encounters into the action of whatever silly stuff players are doing inside a room. Simple geometry is good!

A large space of between-room filler corridors also creates a more believable kind of "buffer zone" where, believably, monsters can emerge from and disappear to. In other dungeons there can be feelings of "Really, where did he run to?" and "Where do these monsters come from, we've cleared all the rooms over there??" The labyrinthine hallways of the dungeon I'm describing can never be fully clean.

Another contrast is it makes rooms more special by contrast. Rooms are destinations, landmarks, decision points, and can be more standalone things. As a designer, you can get by with fewer dull rooms, because the hallways will carry some of that dead space, and not require as much DM effort to fill with some interesting but essentially pointless little bit of dressing.

DRAWBACKS

This map might require a smaller grid size, and/or multiple pieces of paper.

It's not that easy to draw dungeons this way, avoiding trivial loops. A little while in dungeonscrawl gets me something like this (adding in some "complexes"):

The dungeon might seem extremely unnatural. But we're talking about a megadungeon here, not "old single-level basement of the watch tower that's now a bandit lair" design. I think for the EPT Jakallan underworld it's even more reasonable, when it's understood what's being represented here is centuries of a city being built on top of itself, and not anything that was a functional whole at any time.

Maybe players will miss DM's trying to describe a T-intersection where one of the corners is a diagonal bevel and there's a door ten feet south of what would be directly ahead, and the north hallways ends after 20 feet in a door on the east side and the south hallway bends SE be a like, 15' wide corridor after 30 feet with a door on the west wall 10' before the bend??? I don't think they will..