The Maze du Châtel

A brilliant explanation of Judging technique!

Cameron wrote: Some discussion later, they decided to ditch the Maze (Vulfelind and Galswintha, unaccustomed to my play style, actually asked if that was "okay," since I'd obviously put a lot of work into the Maze. Hah!) and head back to Orléans.
In another post, you explained how Pegasus Mountain came to be (pre-planned stuff, ad-libbed stuff, and stuff mapped out when the requirement came up), and as I was re-reading the story hour archive, I came across this bit.

Was the Maze similarly designed? I mean, did you map out the whole thing, or were you adding levels as you went?

Ha! I am so lazy!

I laid out the first ten rooms of the Maze level 1, plus one connection to level 2, plus three rooms in level 2. Then I rolled the type of encounter (and species of encounter when appropriate) for another 30 rooms at each level (180 rooms total), but I didn’t map them.

When the players cleared a few rooms, I took a break to extend the map in that direction by the same number of rooms, using my list of pre-rolled types.

I treated “Unique” as a code word for:

1d6
1-2. links to another level
3-5. puzzle
6. unique monster

The only real worry was if the players moved too rapidly in the “wrong” direction, which was why I pre-rolled the types of encounters. As soon as they go off the map, I would ad lib the map (taking notes, and not “blind” ad-libbing, it always has to make sense and fit into what’s already there) and use the pre-rolled list to describe what they see (or what they run into).

If they ran into an un-mapped puzzle, trap, unique monster, or the like: I have TONS of traps, puzzles, monster ideas, and so on from games I ran years ago. All in a binder. Grab a page! Bam! Done!

So when Vulfelind and Galswintha were worrying about how much work I’d put into the Maze … there were literally 12 rooms they had failed to explore that were actually mapped.

To reiterate: I am so lazy!