I ran the Wedding part of the Maze of the Blue Medusa recently and I think it went mostly well. One of the things which improved my DMing as the sessions went on was that I stopped using the Random Encounters pages at the start of the book, and wrote up some 5e specific bits on other sheets. These were super easy to flick through and had all the story bits I wanted to remember.
If me and my group ever go back to the Maze, there’s some bits I need to change about these creatures though.
Action economy
We were running with a large group of players; six players, plus the DM who might be running a large number of monsters (in order to put up some amount of a fight). In order to keep the combat round time as short as possible I decided I’d play easily beaten bad guys, but a number of them throughout the adventuring day. The aim here was that there was more strategy required around how the players use their resources.
Unfortunately, I made them too easy. I could give the sharkman like 90 hit points, but they’d grind them down in a turn or two, giving him no time to do his cool thing. I could add more hit points, but then, meh, you know? I should have given some creatures legendary actions. I don’t think my group would have felt cheated by this; afterall there’s usually six of them and 1 on my dude.
So, next time I come back to these encounters, I’ll add those.
Encounters feel out of place
I began by rolling on the Encounters Table (but quickly stopped) but it lead to some people being where they had no right to be, sometimes. The mummies are super cool, but usually need an escort to get back home. However, access to the Archives is secret, I think.
My players very eagerly wanted to follow Torgos home, but that would require going through dozens of rooms. Many of them I’d not yet read. And most of them have something interesting in that would otherwise slow the characters down. In a crawl, this is a bit difficult. I fudged it, I suppose. But it was a bit of a shame.
Pick relevant random encounters and probably don’t bother rolling to see which one comes up.
I’ve been trying to decide what’s the best way to make “enemy flash cards” with all their info quickly on hand. Your cards are very neat and color coordinated, and I thought I should ask What program did you use for the cards?
@Mal Thanks!
I used Microsoft Publisher, but ended up regretting it. The initial fonts I chose turned out not to be embeddable in a PDF, which was very annoying. I had to go through and tweak sizes and fonts again, which has left it looking different from what I hoped.
I’ve recently been learning to use a proper layout tool, Affinity Publisher, which has far more tools for the job but is a little expensive.