Tag: Maze of the Blue Medusa

Lady Nine-Bone’s nine bones

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I haven’t thought about The Medusa in a little while, so I’m unsure how much of this is homebrew and how much canon. Your mileage may vary, I suppose. It’s fun to share though.

Lady Nine-Bone’s fingers allow her to read the surface thoughts of the original owner. The fingers grow back quickly after being taken. She carried a device – The Stripper – to do this.

  • Psathyrella. The Medusa. [Cells. Stoney, snake fangs.] Has one charge of Flesh To Stone per day, which persists as long as the finger exists. (She is usually thinking of how lonely she is, or admiring a piece of art which she finds either boring or fascinating.)
  • Torgos Zooth. The Selenian. [Almery. A slight glow of moonlight.] Has one charge of Compel Truth Or Lie, which lasts for one hour. (He’s looking for ways to find his children, or chasing off Critics or Pelory.)
  • Xanthoceras.The Obsessed Lich. [Gardens. Dripping wet.] Has one charge of Gain Lich Immunities, which lasts for 1 hour. (He’s trying to decide what his next bounty should be in an attempt to impress Zamia.)
  • See–me-no-more. The Invisible Lizardman. [Archive. Flickering between visible and not.] Has one charge of Greater Invisibility, lasting 1 hour. (He’s cursing those that know his name and wondering how to break that particular part of the curse, or he’s considering new alchemical agents.)
  • Kinxys Ziteki. The Last Saurid King. [Gallery. Bones. The flesh rotted away.] Has one charge per day of Regenerate Limb. (His thoughts are slow and old and mutters only of being hungry. She’s not listened to them recently, as they were boring. After all, he’s dead.)
  • Torcul Wort. The Gold Boy. [Wedding. A golden digit.] Has one charge per day of diving the provenance of gold. Aurem Spectors avoid her. (His thoughts are of the machine and how fantastic it is, or cursing his mother for being a traitor.)
  • Milo DeFretwell. Psycopath. [Gallery. Dripping blood.] Has one charge of Detect Intentions each day. (She does not read his thoughts. She only has the finger to ensure he’s still locked away.)
  • Quatri-Glotta. The Elephanine True Teller. [Cells. Tiny elephant foot.] Has one charge of Detect Secret per month. (He’s quiet when alone, only wanting food.)
  • Dendro Blackpoll. Severed Hands. [Almery. Blackened evil.] Can open any of the doors in the Almery at any distance. This is how she makes her way through. (Dendro suggests a way of the Medusa dying, and Blackpoll disagrees. Drendro always thinks he can save her. Blackpoll is unsure.)

Some Encounters In The Maze

Shane2 Comments

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.

Here are those notes.

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.

Gargonox’s
 Redemption Army

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Gargonox is a beholder… well, he used to be. He died a few thousand years ago, but still ticks along, trying with all his might to muster an army in the hopes that it’ll impress his mother, a medusa. The medusa actually. The first. Unfortunately… she’s long since forgotten about him.

It’s probably best if your party of level four or five adventurers put him out of his misery. You’ll be helping all the corpses stay in their eternal rest much more peacefully.

I wrote this adventure to play in the middle of Maze of the Blue Medusa, replacing one of the rooms, because I needed to take a break from the crawl, really. I also needed an opportunity to give them a few magic items, which went well.

I was hoping originally to put this on the Dungeon Masters’ Guild, but then realised that the Dyson map I’d built the adventure around wasn’t one of their commericial ones. So you get the adventure here, for free!

I pushed along anyway, because I wanted to play around with Affinity Publisher, which is lovely. I’d quite like to get better at design skills, so taking large gulps of inspiration from MotBM was the way I went. I hope you like the look of it.

There’s also a d40 random loot table, for those of you who enjoy them.

Grab the adventure here.

Roll on your own time

ShaneLeave a comment

For a dungeon master, tabletop games are really a hobby in two parts: preparing the game and running the game. It’s fine to prefer one over the other, and we all get short on prep time when life gets in the way. I’d like to suggest that one of the parts of a published adventure you should prepare is getting rid of any random encounter table rolls you have to do during the game.

Roll them before the game for infinitely better results, always.

I’m running Maze of the Blue Medusa at the moment, and there’s a great deal of prep that has to go into it. I’d only recommend running this adventure to the most dedicated of DMs; there are hundreds of rooms each with their own ploy, either a kind of trap or a piece of the story for the players to put together. I spend a few hours before the game to look around the potential rooms but even then, the randomness of the player choices makes anticipating their moves difficult. During the game, there’s a great deal of time where I’ve needed to tell my players to talk amongst themselves whilst I flick to the right page.

There’s not much to be done about this – other than study the book more.

There is another area of the game which slows things down though; random tables. The Maze is not a safe place, and random encounters are supposed to happen whenever the characters make too much of a disturbance or when they let their guards down. The book suggests an excessive “every twenty minutes”. These random encounters are to be rolled on a table – the table changes depending on where in the maze they are.

I’ve come to the conclusion that these tables should never be rolled on in the middle of a game. These tables aren’t unique to MotBM. You’ll find them in most published adventures. Random loot tables are less time consuming, but they also have a similar missed opportunity.

Instead, roll on these tables during your prep time. This is where fudging the dice roll can really come into its own. This buys you time during the game because you don’t need to scramble for the next battlemap or spend three minutes looking up creatures in the monster manual. More interestingly though, you can think of the story of the fight.

Nearly always your players are looking for more information about their current quest, and any smart group keeps back one of the combatants for questioning. Just give them the right person for the information they need.

In The Blue Medusa, there are a large number of potential encounters. There are half a dozen mummies, for instance, each with their own goals in the maze. Throwing those out during my game at the moment wouldn’t do anything but confuse the players. Their logic, most likely, would be that the DM is offering this NPC who’s carrying a history golem, and so it must have something to do with the quest at hand. Almost always, these random encounters don’t push the story forwards. The just distract.