Arnesonian Mazes

Building on my previous post about Making Mazes Fun...

The Maze is the space between dungeon rooms. Yeah that's right it's a liminal space -- fuck you. It is a place that random encounters can arise from, and where fleeing monsters can melt back into. When you huddle in a room and something shuffles by the door, it is from the Maze, because that corridor can lead anywhere, it doesn't just link up a couple rooms. The Maze is the wilderness of the dungeon, it is the "outside" of the inside.

Arneson's Blackmoor had the Maze:

Here corridors are king. With so many stairwells, who knows where the Maze might lead. Sometimes they extend out beyond the confines of the rest of the dungeon:

How do you even run these at the table? This was before VTTs, so I have to think they were simply described by Arneson, and probably not with perfect precision. I imagine they would be navigated from intersection to intersection, often times only advancing a few feet before the next intersection. This becomes a tangle, even a "tanglefuck". All players have to go on is DM language, an assault of information and decisions.

Even finding a room to go to is not guaranteed. The Maze is a haystack and the rooms are needles.  This is not like a normal dungeon. It is not like the usual hedge maze we might imagine either, with long twisty hallways that mostly dead-end. 

On the lower levels of Blackmoor the Maze seems to become all-important, until the special chambers disappear into strange nubs, little closets so small that Mr. Alexandrian wondered if they were just placeholders or teleporters to large rooms.

To me, all this is good.

Is it boring to play? I don't know.

But I suspect that even the players who are not mapping will feel the Maze. I think they will become afraid of getting lost. I think they will mark up the dungeon with chalk. I think they will know not to split up. I think they will definitely feel that they have extended their necks into an unsafe space that it might not be so easy to return from.

(update)

To be honest I'm not sure how you WOULD do a maze-like thing -- on a standard sheet of paper with a vaguely standard number of dungeon rooms -- in a way other than highly interconnecting corridors. It might even be necessary to use 8 directions.