The Maze of Zayene 1: Prisoners of the Maze

[Ron]

"Prisoners of the Maze" is a ninth-twelfth level module written by Robert J. Kuntz, a veteran author from the early days of TSR and co-DM, with Gary Gygax, of the original Greyhawk campaign. Production values are high. The cover is nice, although some people may not favor its cartoonist style. Cartography has a clear layout, but it is not attractive per se. The interior art really shines; Brian LeBlanc did an excellent job rendering the internal illustrations, which are one of the highest points of this product.

Although the text is well written and in high density, as they aren't many clear spaces in the book, I'm not satisfied with the contents. Characters will start trapped in the Maze after a failed assassination plot against the tyrannical King Ovar. I found in Necromancer's site that this module was initially designed to the World of Greyhawk, and Ovar would be Ivid, the mad overking of the Great Kingdom. Even so, there is not much help to mesh this in a personal campaign (a Greyhawk link would be impossible under the d20 license). Also, why the mage Zayene would imprison the characters instead of killing them? What is this maze anyway? It is full of traps although some sections appear to be frequently used by the King himself. Crazy or not, it is hard to believe he would place traps in his personal furniture, some of them unavoidable (it is a little worse, but I?m avoiding spoilers). All this mysteries might be appropriated to the players, but not to the DM, who would probably suspect that there isn't much logic underlying the dungeon. In fact, who would set deadly traps that, if overcame would release magical items?

Although I would not recommend this module -- I?ll not run it and I wouldn't like to play it -- there are some interesting features in this book. There are several new magical items, many of them very creative and will probably appear in my future games. A few new spells are listed, as well as some new critters; most are interesting and may be valuable additions to a campaign. Unfortunately, they aren't enough to justify buying this module as a supplement. "Prisoners of the Maze" is the first of a series of five. Perhaps some of my doubts will be answered in the upcoming modules, but this, if correct, will be a sign of poor design, as they should have been explained to the DM in the very beginning.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Death to King Ovar the tyrant! Life to law and order! Four characters are charged with a mission so insane, so daring, that terming it an assassination does not do it justice. Are the four volunteers who would lay low King Ovar killers or heroes? If murderers, how are they better than the madman they're assigned to kill? And even if they are mere assassins, are they determined enough to overcome the Maze of Zayene?

Prisoners of the Maze is the first part of the Maze of Zayene adventure series by Robert J. Kuntz, an award-winning author and co-creator of the worlds most popular roleplaying game! A fantasy adventure for 4 to 6 characters of 8th to 12th level.

 

[Psion]

Prisoners of the Maze

Necromancer Games has built their business on adventures that boast a "first edition feel." Of course it was only natural that in realizing this feel, they bring on board some authors that contributed to the first edition AD&D game. Robert Kuntz wrote or contributed to such classics as the City of Greyhawk, Castle Greyhawk, Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. In fact, Rob claims credit for Tharizun, the dark deity of the Greyhawk setting who makes an appearance in Wizards of the Coast's own Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

If fact, the Maze of Zayene series (of which this adventure is a part) was originally written as a Greyhawk campaign adventure. The villainous wizard Zayene was Xaene in the original, and the King Ovar referred to in the module was King Ivid. Of course, being printed under the d20 system licence, Necromancer Games had to alter the names.

Prisoners of the Maze is an adventure for 4-6 characters or 9th to 12th level.

A First Look

Prisoners of the Maze is a staple-bound softcover book. The book delivers 48 pages for the price of $10.95 US, but it does utilize the inside covers for maps. The price per page of the book is 23 cents, which is not unusual for products in this range, but is a bit higher than the norm for Necromancer's adventures.

The front cover of the book has a deep burgundy color, and a designation of "M1" in the top left corner, hearkening back to the days of old letter-number adventure modules. The front cover has a depiction of a cloaked figure casting a spell that harries some adventurers with colored orbs.

The interior is black-and-white. The interior illustrations include some that appear to be ink drawings and some more smudgy looking pictures that might be charcoals. The art is of passable quality. None stood out to me as being especially good or bad, though I didn't especially care for the smudgier pictures.

As with most Necromancer Games products, the text density is fairly good. Also, I appreciate that they made use of the inside covers. The asking price is a bit high on a per page basis, but combined with the text density it is a fairly good value.

A Deeper Look
(Warning: This section contains spoilers regarding the content of the adventure.)

Prisoners of the Maze starts out by declaring that the PCs are members of a conspiracy to kill the King (King Ovar). Having failed, they get tossed in the a maze constructed by the King's wacko wizard, Zayene.

I can hear my players now. "We do WHAT!?"

From all appearances, this adventure is written in the style of a tournament adventure, in which it the PCs typically have to be quickly thrown into the challenge at hand. And it does just that... the introduction section only takes up a page, and then it is on to the dungeon description. Unfortunately, this kneecaps any efforts to integrate this adventure into an ongoing campaign where getting the players with free will to go along with such a scheme might actually be a challenge.

The adventure comes with four pre-generated characters. If you do not want to use them, guidelines are provided for creating alternate guidelines. However, those guidelines seem pretty strict. The characters are supposedly only supposed to be humans of lawful good or lawful neutral alignment. Further, none of the default characters are rogues (yet they where somehow chosen for an assassination attempt) and it does not recommend rogues for the custom characters, yet their are many traps in the maze. It appears that the author desires the party to stumble around at the mercy of the traps in the maze.

If you are willing to railroad or bypass the somewhat presumptuous introduction, your PCs will find themselves in an underground labyrinth. It is only composed of one level, save for one balcony over a particular room. However, the maze can go on forever, as at each corner there is a hallway that teleports you to the hallway in the opposite corner. The text states that this ruse is totally and completely undetectable. I found this rather arbitrary, which is perfectly in keeping with the first edition feel that they are striving for, but in my opinion this is one of those bad first edition traits I would gladly leave behind. I would have much rather have seen them take the chance to live up to the "third edition rules" part of their slogan and given you a spot check.

At any rate, now the PCs are in the maze and it is incumbent upon them to escape. Ah, at least now they have a motivation. Well, they do if they don't have a teleport spell, which is easily available at this level (and never considered nor restricted by the text.) The PCs presumably stumble around the maze trying to find their way out.

Along their way, they will encounter a variety of traps as well as encounters with some bizarre individuals who ? as you might guess ? aren't the friendliest folks to get along with. Characters might encounter animated statues of knights, a human fighter with some ogre buddies and a squad of stuffed creatures that he can animate with an item in his possession, a commoner who passes on a hard to resist curse that causes PCs to be unable to recognize hostile intent for 18 hours, a harem of somewhat dangerous women (a vampire, a weretiger, and a fighter) guarded by vampire spawn, and a sorcerous jester with an odd assortment of spells.

One of the more interesting encounter areas in the Maze is the art gallery. Each painting depicts something different, and each has a different magical effect. There is a consistent set of rules for adjudicating the paintings. This section seems like a standout among a dungeon full of so-so wacko encounters.

In addition to the basics of the maze, there are appendices detailing the new monster, new spells, and pregenerated characters.

The new monsters include:
- Drench: A water elemental that resides in a font of water and strikes out at living things. This is basically a adaptation of the water weird that existed in 1e and 2e to 3e.
- Grotin: A grotin is an orb of living dust. It can lash out with tendrils that disintigrate objects. It is most dangerous against flesh, but fortunately, other items that the character may be wearing or holding are affected first. This may be a worthwhile monster, if aggravating for the PCs.
- Knight of Chaos: The knight of chaos is an animated statue of a knight. For some reason, it has a constitution score. This is somewhat vexing. Some early d20 system products made this mistake, but you would think that since the 3e books have been out over a year, most people would be up to speed on the fact that constructs and undead do not have constitution scores. Further, they seem to have an attack bonus about twice what it should be. There is a blurb in one of the abilities that implies that the knight of chaos somehow gets human qualities, but never really says what that means in game terms.
- Speckles: Speckles are shaggy creatures that absorb water with a touch, causing temporary Constitution damage.
- Symbus: A small abberation that tries to attach itself to an enemy with a number of needles. If it attaches four needles, it can exercise mind control on the victim.

In addition to the problems cited above, there seem to be other problems such as incorrect saves or attack bonuses or arbitrary HD type.

The new spells are all spell belonging to Mar the sorcererous jester that the players run into in the maze. The spells include juggling lights, stink bomb, chide, disappear, and joke.

Last is the pregenerated characters. There is a paladin, a cleric, a sorcerer, and a fighter. Again, notably no rogue. The characters don't seem especially optimized, but each one has a special ability as a "gift from the gods" for performing their tasks, in addition to their normal abilities.

Conclusion

Unless you are just so hyped to play this series that you have got to make up new characters or use the pre-generated ones, chances are you are going to have to tweak this adventure to get it to fly. At the very least, the introduction deserves some retooling.

Further, many of the creature stats are botched and many of the challenges seemed rather arbitrary to me, or like practical jokes to play on the PCs. Perhaps my sense of humor isn't what it used to be, but I didn't find that all that appealing, and I doubt the players would either.

However, there are some redeeming encounters and interesting ideas that might make this adventure worth running. Better yet, you could probably extract some of the better encounters for use in your own adventures; that would save you from having to re-engineer the introduction.

-Alan D. Kohler
Edit: deleted the reference to the Harem.

 

[MerricB]

This is an adventure of the older school of dungeon-design: inventive - and occasionally lethal - tricks, traps and other encounters. It is presented in a somewhat restrictive format as if for a tournament, which may make it difficult to adapt for your own campaign, though an inventive referee should not have too much trouble with that. The d20 rules are inconsistently followed, as many of the monster & pre-generated character stat blocks are incorrect. Despite this, there are many redeeming features about this adventure.

This adventure is set in a single dungeon level, into which the characters have been transported after a failed assassination attempt on the king of the land. Their goal is to escape the Maze and complete their assassination. Despite how this sounds, as the king is evil and corrupt, the characters should be of Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral alignments - it is strongly recommended that if the players use their own characters, they be all human and of these alignments, but there is no reason why a DM cannot adapt this adventure to their own purposes and ignore these restrictions.

This module only details the escape from the maze; the completion of the assassination attempt is detailed in later modules in the series.

Because the characters had not planned for being transported here, they're assumed to be lacking much of their normal adventuring gear, and this makes the adventure much more challenging than it might at first appear. The level is a maze, and without the ability to make a map, the players will most likely find themselves disorientated and confused very quickly, even more so because of various tricks designed to disorientate them further.

The individual encounters in the maze vary as to their difficulty. In general, most are relatively easy - if convoluted - for an adventuring party of the levels recommended, but the cumulative effect of not being able to return to a home base is likely to wear the characters down. The best feature about this adventure is how many of these encounters will make the characters think! This adventure is likely to be lethal for those who do not think before they act. There are several encounters where roleplaying is required.

This adventure should entertain both the DM and the players, and should allow for much interest to be maintained throughout, as the encounters are certainly of a level above "another orc guarding a chest". It should be emphasised that the maze is one designed by an evil wizard, intended to confuse and dismay his enemies as well as provide him with amusement from seeing their fumblings, which explains some of the apparent oddities of the layout.

That said, there are several flaws with the presentation of the module. Although the artwork is generally good, much of it is too dark in reproduction. The font used for the headings is particularly ugly and often suffers from the Necromancer Games' flaw of being RunTogetherWithNotEnoughSpacing. The stat blocks are often wrong, primarily in the skills and feats, but occasionally elsewhere as well. This probably won't affect the play of the adventure too much, but it is disturbing.

More problematical is the lack of any consideration for a party with the teleport spell or similar magics. What then? Why can't the party just then return to the main section of the castle? Perhaps the author thought the solution was too obvious to be spelled out, but it would have been nice, regardless, for such matters to have been covered in the text.

There are three appendices: the first details five new monsters and one new magical trap, of varying usefulness. Several names do not inspire confidence (Drench, Grotin, Speckle), and the pictures illustrating them are uniformly poor. Often the new monster stat blocks differ from d20 standards, and I feel the challenge ratings are too high.

The second appendix contains six new spells, again of varying quality. The final appendix contains the four pre-generated characters. All contain major problems with their statistics - for instance, the Sorcerer has the Quicken Spell feat, and the Fighter only has seven feats instead of thirteen. Their skill ranks are arbitrary. One nice feature about the pre-generated characters is that each has a special ability that have been granted by the gods.

The maps for this adventure are somewhat unclear and inaccurate, but revised versions may be downloaded from the the Necromancer Games website, along with other supplemental materials.

The adventure leads into the second and third parts of the Maze of Zayene series, but is quite playable without them, and could be adapted to be used in another campaign.

In summary, the overall design of this adventure is solid and definitely worth playing, although it likely that a moderate amount of work will need to be done by the referee to fit this adventure into his or her campaign. The rules problems are generally not such that they will be noticed by the players or adversely affect the adventure, but it would have been better if they had not been there at all, for most are relatively trivial errors. The actual encounters are exceptional, making this a good, if flawed, adventure.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

MAZE OF ZAYENE 1
Prisoners of the Maze

CAVEATS
This is not a playtest review. There are moderate spoilers.

OVERVIEW
This is a 48-page volume, the first of four (or five, depending on rumor) volumes in this series. The second two have been published by Necromancer Games, while the fourth is being released by the author's own company, Pied Piper. Maze of Zayene features maps by Conan Venus, and art by Brian LeBlanc. Layout and font follow the standard for Necromancer Games. This is one of the company's earlier releases.

The Maze of Zayene series was originally a series of tournament modules written by Robert Kuntz for AD&D (first edition), and this legacy shows in the introduction, which starts the adventure by throwing the PCs directly into the maze. The adventure itself details the maze (a single level labyrinth), and tells how the PCs must escape. In order to exit the maze, PCs will need to retrieve four objects from an equal number of demiplanes; these four areas are detailed in Maze of Zayene #2: Dimensions of Flight.

POSITIVES
One of Robert Kuntz's greatest strength is his ability to come up with unusual and unique encounters. This is best seen in an art gallery that takes up a portion of the maze, with dozens of pictures, sculptures and the like, many with magical properties. A group could easily spend an entire session just looking through this area. Many of the other encounters are equally inventive.

NEGATIVES
1. The start of the adventure is forced and dubious. PCs are tossed into the dungeon by Zayene after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the evil king Ovar. This team of assassins (if the pregenerated characters are used) includes a paladin…and no rogues. I get the impression these classes were picked more to challenge players than for any kind of in-game logic. Indeed, the module encourages the pregenerated characters be used, and I could imagine that a group of PC rogues would make certain parts of the adventure much easier with their trap detection and disarming abilities, open locks skill, etc.

2. "Inventive" doesn't necessarily mean "good." For example, one encounter against a lieutenant of Zayene is a fighter wearing hairy armor, that he can cause to grow and entangle opponents. Uh…okay. Then there's Zayene's "harem"-what it is doing in a dungeon designed to toy with prisoners, I have no idea. The acidic carpet is interesting (designed to keep PCs from camping out and regaining spells too much), but players may find it a bit hard to swallow as well.

3. To fully use this dungeon, you will need to pick up Maze of Zayene 2, since you cannot escape until you get the four keys needed. If you choose to forego this, you could I suppose hide the keys throughout the dungeon. Still, considering the interdependence between Maze 1 and 2, these should have been published as one volume, not two.

4. The map is rather crude looking, and there are numerous errors in the stat blocks. Considering the fact that Maze 1 came out so early in the lifespan of 3rd edition, however, I can overlook this to some degree. Fortunately, errata for Maze of Zayene are available through the Necromancer Games website and forum.

RECOMMENDATIONS
Though it had some inventive portions, overall I found the premise and handling of this dungeon dubious, and have felt no desire thus far to run it. Some parts, such as the art gallery, I might cannibalize some day and use in other adventures, but I don't think I'd run it as-is. The assassination plot not only seems far-fetched to me, but it would be hard to fit into an existing campaign world, which is a departure from Necromancer Games' policy of making their products as adaptable as possible.

If you do run Maze of Zayene, I recommend picking up the second book in the series and running them as a one-shot or tournament-style adventure. A "beer and pretzels" type group should have no problem accepting some of the things I found troublesome, but a group that likes to innovate or seeks to reason things out may find this adventure frustrating or annoying.

 

[Melan]

Maze of Zayene 1: Prisoners of the Maze

WARNING! SPOILERS

Prisoners of the Maze is the first of a four part module series by Rob J. Kuntz. Originally published in the late 80s as a generic, but clearly D&D-compatible product, it was republished by Necromancer Games. Unfortunately, Rob and Necromancer parted ways after Maze 3, leaving the series a torso - although Rob's company, Pied Piper Publishing, will publish the fourth part as a free download.

In some respects, Prisoners is one of those modules that show their age. It is heavily assumed that the DM will use the tournament background: four PCs want to assassinate the evil king Ovar (who is essentially Ivid of Aerdy from the Greyhawk setting), they are caught by his court mage, Zayene and immediately transported to an underground maze from where there is but one way to escape. There has been much complaining about this aspect of the adventure, which I don't consider a particularly horrid fault - in fact, I would run Maze of Zayene 3: Tower Chaos first, and then move onto this part. Of course, that module was only available more than a year later. I believe it was a costly mistake, and the entire series should have been released in one volume - but that's certainly crying over spilled milk.

Another fault, which is a lot more serious, is the assumption that the default party in the module's appendix will be used. These are well rounded characters, but there is no Thief among them. Some parts of the module will be ridiculously easy if the party has one, and, what is worse, others don't offer a good opportunity for a roguish character to really shine, or leave it to DM fiat.

Despite all these misgiving, Prisoners of the Maze is a good module. The maze is definitely not the realistic dungeon (more like a collection of weird and challenging encounters) - there is a court of insane judges and Knights of Chaos, a taxidermist, a jail, an archery range and a large underground gallery with magical paintings. It is pure dungeoneering fun (if you can suspend your disbelief a bit). Again, there are errors (two women in a harem look almost naked at first, but when they attack, it turns out that one of them is in fact clad in Half Plate - a definite "What?" moment), the maps are lackluster (there is a better one available as a a free download at Necromancer's site), but still, the old school charm more than makes up for it.

Score: 4/5