Wednesday 23 June 2010

Geomorphs

Some while ago, I sent my players up against a wizard who had, as a defence for his lair, a moving strangler-vine hedge maze. It shifted when nobody was looking, so unless there were enough people in the party to keep their entire route under direct observation, they could never be sure that things would be the same if they had to retrace their steps. The maze is not a barrier, but a trap – anybody entering without the appropriate passkey should end up wandering aimlessly until they starve to death, are killed by any of the various denizens of the maze, or are retrieved by the wizard for use in various nasty experiments.


I decided the easiest way for me to run this would be by randomly drawing from a set of geomorphic tiles as the party moved through the trap, and to that end I designed this tile set. There are, I found, a few useful tile configurations missing; I may (or may not) get around to filling those in one of these days.

Each tile is about 170mm square, and is superimposed with a 25mm hex grid. You can grab a PDF of the whole set here (approx. 2.41MB).



As it turned out the party managed to get through by a combination of accident and brute strength – one party member was partially petrified and enormously enlarged, so when she fell down under her own weight she took down many of the hedges as well, and being mostly stone, she was immune to the constriction of the strangler-vine. That got them most of the way through, and gave them the idea of using tubes (I don't actually remember where the tubes came from) pushed through the remaining hedges and enlarging them enough to crawl through.

1 comment:

  1. Awesome. I'm a sucker for hedge mazes. So, I'm assuming you were drawing these behind your screen to hide that fact that the maze was shifting?

    Anyways, thanks

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