D&D 5E Labyrinth as metaphor for madness

[RangerWickett]

My party got its hands on a jar that contains the demon lord Baphomet. They adventured inside a history book to find the lost true name of the Demon Prince of Beasts. They stopped an army led by a group of mages who wanted to get control of the demon.

Now the party wants to banish Baphomet back to the Abyss. The players have been discussing how to set up a binding circle to hold the bastard once they break open the jar, and then they'll use his true name to command him to fail his save against banishment. But of course it cannot be that easy.

Next session I'll start by letting the players settle in, get their minis and dice out, shoot the sh** for a b**, and then I begin narrating that they're in a strange narrow valley, twenty feet wide, with a stone floor and walls composed of curving ivory tusks that rise thirty feet up on either side, mortared together with crushed bones. They stand at a T-intersection, though the path is not entirely straight in any of the three directions. The sky above is drizzling blood, and from all directions they hear howling beasts in the distance. Among the bedlam, they hear human screams for help.

They're in a labyrinth, being pursued by demonic minotaurs and other horrors. (And one crazy actual cannibal.)


What's actually going on is that hey, the party got everything right. The ritual circle will hold, and if they can just spit out Baphomet's true name they'll be able to force him to fail his save. But when they broke open the jar, Baphomet's essence of savagery swept out and began to drive everyone around him mad. In the real world, all the PCs are unconscious, writhing while their minds are trapped in the ivory labyrinth. Baphomet sent out a call to the beasts in the wilderness, and if the party takes too long to get out of the maze their twitching bodies will be mauled to death.

What I hope to accomplish is to have the events in the labyrinth represent a struggle for the PCs to keep their minds intact. As they navigate the maze they'll be more and more blood-soaked; eventually the ground itself will become ankle-deep with blood, and as they slog through it they'll find it harder to think straight. Whenever they kill a monster in melee the rain will intensify (though disabling a creature without killing it is fine).

If you 'die' from HP damage you have an aneurysm in the real world and die. If you end up getting swept away in the blood, you become a beast. If you get out of the labyrinth, you wake up.

Along the way they'll find nooks set off from the labyrinth, each of which depicts a sliver of memory, acting as a light recap of the campaign. They'll also be able to piece together what happened just before they got kicked into the labyrinth, what's about to happen (being torn apart by beasts), and some elements of a mystery that the players clued into but never quite figured out. And as they navigate the maze there will be three general areas:

* The Hunting Grounds - the starting area, where beasts pursue the party

* The Cages - rows of cells with other people who've faced Baphomet and gone mostly feral, but who can recall bits of the ancient lore of the demon lord

* The River of Blood - a part of the labyrinth with 'white water rapids' - except it's red water, and it's still a labyrinth full of demon beasts and clogged with half-devoured charnel from previous hunts; some of those bodies would make a lovely makeshift raft

Finally there's the 'boss fight' against Baphomet's essence, who towers over the blood-flooded labyrinth near its exit. He tries to stop you from making it out, crushing walls beneath his hooves as he leaps after you. He's too strong for the party to kill, but I expect them to be clever enough to evade him and make it out.

(I might need to write some good 'demon lord dialogue' that he can roar at them.)

When they make it to the exit of the labyrinth the river tumbles into a bloodfall, and they drop into an endless black abyss. And then awaken. They can then command Baphomet and banish him.



What do you think? Advice, suggestions? In particular, does anyone have a good game mechanic to model navigating a labyrinth, something where I can balance speed of success against the slowly encroaching blood-madness?

 

[Lidgar]

Neat idea.

Two suggestions for dealing with the labyrinth on the fly:

1. Use the random Dungeon tables in the DMG, and include a random event table, or
2. Run all of it like a random wilderness encounter table. If you have Return to the Ruins of Greyhawk, see how they set that up.

In either case, you can weight the random table with speed factors so the rate of progress influences the results. For example, using a d100, it could have a modifier of up to +25 and -25 depending on their progress, with a result of -24 (rolling a one) meaning TPK and 125 (rolling 00) huge success.

 

[GX.Sigma]

What do you think? Advice, suggestions? In particular, does anyone have a good game mechanic to model navigating a labyrinth, something where I can balance speed of success against the slowly encroaching blood-madness?

Sure. Dungeon crawl. Except instead of wandering monsters, you roll periodically to see if madness has taken hold yet. Check out the Abyssal Corruption table, DMG p.62.

 

[Quickleaf]

What do you think? Advice, suggestions? In particular, does anyone have a good game mechanic to model navigating a labyrinth, something where I can balance speed of success against the slowly encroaching blood-madness?

I think it's a grand idea

I get the sense you don't plan on handling this as a dungeon crawl with an actual map and a designated mapper player? And rather that you intend to abstract things in a more "theater of the mind" style? Is that right?

I did a very similar mechanic in my Dragon Mountain 4e conversion, which I believe I got from the Alexandrian blog. Basically you design the Blood Madness as an escalating threat in a couple stages (5 is a good number). You determine what triggers increase stage.. If you wish, you may also include methods to reduce the stage of the Blood Madness, though that is optional.

[SBLOCK=Blood Madness]
Blood Madness is a 5-stage form of madness unique to Baphomet. When the PCs enter The Hunting Grounds they are at stage 0. You may either track the PCs' Blood Madness individually or as a group.

Things that can increase the stage: Entering the Cages, Entering the River of Blood, PC exhibiting wanton violence within the labyrinth, Barbarian using rage within the labyrinth, trying to bash down the walls of the labyrinth, etc.

Stage 1: Narrate that everyone is extremely on edge. Short rests are not possible.
Stage 2: Strange reflections in blood of PCs gone cannibal crazy, and feel free to mess with their perceptions. Dredge up a moment of excessive violence or brutality from the PC's past, like a bloody ghost haunting them.
Stage 3: Remembering things becomes difficult, and you might try to orchestrate a fight between some of the PCs if you think your group would handle that well. Concentration automatically fails at this stage.
Stage 4: The PCs minds are almost lost, and Spellcasting is impossible as if they were in a barbarian rage. They are no longer considered each others allies and beneficial special abilities that affect others (like Bardic Inspiration) only work when inspiring violence.
Stage 5: The PCs are lost to the Blood Madness and cannot differentiate friend from foe. Every round they attack with a melee weapon if a creature is within sight. Even if the group succeeds in escaping the labyrinth, a PC at stage 5 might still be crazed upon returning to their body.[/SBLOCK]

The actual navigating the labyrinth depends on how abstract you and your group want to go. And it also depends on what allows the PCs to escape the labyrinth; a couple options here:

• There is an actual physical maze they need to navigate, which you have worked out on graph paper in advance. It should be hard, but there can be clues about the way out scattered in the maze. Escaping becomes a matter of trial-and-error, player spatial intelligence, good map-making ability, and the ability to piece together clues.
• There is no actual map. Heck, the labyrinth may be constantly changing. Escaping involves figuring out some trick of the labyrinth, probably something that reflects some deeper truth or weakness of the demon lord Baphomet or his philosophy. In this sense the labyrinth is really just a disguised puzzle/riddle that is solved when, for example, the PCs refute "men are just beasts" and restore the humanity of a feral prisoner in the labyrinth.
• An in between approach.  Most of the labyrinth is not mapped, but you do have several key chambers/areas prepared in advance. Navigating to these chambers could be a skill challenge or an abstract puzzle. Then each chamber is a specific trial or test, and only once all three are complete does Baphomet (and the exit) appear.

Last thing, a rat bastard DM move: Since you're messing with their heads to begin with, you might have "false exits" scattered throughout the labyrinth. Flawed clues and evil prisoners can point to these exits, though to be fair they should seem a bit too easy; PCs stepping thru them may merely encounter an illusion, or they might be separated from the party and hunted by a savage monster, or they might return to the real world in the form of a beast which then has to fight off the beast hordes attacking their comatose bodies.

 

[Sunseeker]

When doing puzzles, it's important to keep in mind the player/character dichotomy. Some players are really good at solving puzzles, some characters should be good at solving puzzles. These two do not always line up. If this is a possible outcome at your table, allow character skill checks to take the place of a player racking their brain to solve the puzzle.

 

[Riley37]

There was a first-person-shooter computer game, "Max Payne", with a sequence in which the hero had to navigate a maze, to return to consciousness. Along the way, there were glimpses of certain particularly thematic moments and incidents from the protagonist's background. It kinda nudged the player to pay attention to those part of the stories, rather than ignore them as a pretext to shoot at lots of enemies.

The PCs might, along the way, encounter various odd things, which aren't challenges to be fought or solved, but which hold thematic meaning. A tree, bearing fruit, and the fruit have the faces of the "supporting cast" NPCs. A swarm of bees, with no queen, representing the army after the PCs killed its Pontiff. A miniature replica of the town which that army planned to invade... complete with inhabitants, walking around in train-model scale. (Watch your step, don't crush the town's tavern!) That sort of thing. Basically, they look it over, and the only thing to do is shrug and keep going... and to remember it as a marker of their progress, or as a marker of a dead end.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

One possible albeit inelegant maze mechanic: Some sections of the labyrinth might be mazes of dead-end tunnels. One PC can try to lead the others through these by making an intelligence check (to remember which paths they've previously taken)...or something else that seems reasonable. Every failure or number of failures might result in a random encounter roll.

Possible flavor ideas: Baphomet is kind of associated with devouring and cannibalism on occasion. Reduce or eliminate healing...or maybe make healing result in exhaustion from starvation with visible/audible signs such as "Your stomach growls ferociously and you feel weak as your wounds close over." But offer some healing effects or remove exhaustion levels when the PCs eat a dead foe. Perhaps even more if the foe is of an intelligent and similar species.