Mazes (2022)
By Chris O'Neil
231pp, Non fiction
Notes
2024-02-07
A rule book. Are RPG rule books fiction or non-fiction? I'm going with non-fiction in this case.
I haven't played this yet so this is just a rules read through.
System
Mazes is an OSR adjacent RPG. In keeping with other Old School Renaisance pieces it jetissons the player character interaction mechanics and improv stylings seen in many modern RPGs in favour of delivering a straight to the point dungeon crawl experience. Mazes varies from the template in a few interesting ways though...
- There really is nothing but dungeons here (Mazes); no treking across the wilderness, no taverns, no quest givers, no shopping for provisions "Skip all that noise -- start at the door into the dungeon"
- Whereas most OSR fare will choose a favourite D&D edition and build a system around those rules here we get something much more interesting. Each player only ever rolls a single dice* the number of faces you get depends on your character's "Role" which is a kind of super-class (The DM never rolls anything). You might think this would make e.g. Sentinels (d10) strictly stronger than Paragons (d4) but this isn't the case because the success criteria for different types of check are distributed un-evenly and rolling the highest or lowest number on your dice has special effects. It's a fascinating idea and I really look forward to seeing how it plays out in practice.
- Character creation is very quick, literally 10, 15 minutes and character progression is practically non-existant. This is good because it seems the system can be pretty brutal wrt. sudden and unexpected death -- very old-school.
Theme
This is where the rule book falters for me, it doesn't really create a sense of place or purpose. What do these adventurers want and what is the nature of the world they live in? Broadly we're in sword and sorcery territory, think Robert Howard and Fritz Lieber, the type of story the game sets out to tell is dubbed "Swords against the darkness" which sounds kind of cool but I feel like the book needs more than the couple of paragraphs it provides to flesh this out.
Part of the issue is how sparsely illustrated the book is, there's some perfectly nice sketches but they lack specificity. Similarly where the game does provide colour in the text it doesn't really do so in a coherent way. A good example if this is the "names" section in the character class here are the suggestions for the Haunted Librarian class:
Patrick, Adriel, Nicole, Senzaarous of the Three Eyes, Xi Bung, Aramavirumcnoabtrois
These veer haphazardly from just normal names (Patrick, Nicole) via vaguely orientalist stuff (Xi Bung) and trad fantasy (Adriel, Senzaarous of the Three Eyes) to wierd fantasy (Aramavirumcnoabtrois). But what are we to make of this? I guess part of it is that it's just funny to juxtapose Patrick with Senzaarous of the Three Eyes and part of it is about saying "do what you want, make up your own setting" but more a more concrete vision of the world could have helped to sell the theme.
Thoughts in anticipation of running the game
Like most GMs I'm a tinkerer, I always tweak RPG rules; ignore some stuff, add some stuff etc. With Mazes I'd like to make inter-character relationshsips more meaningful, I feel like a way to do this might be increased use of flashbacks. The rules touch on the idea of flashbacks but it's not really encouraged. I like the idea of fleshing out characters relationships with one another during lulls in the action (like that bit in FFVII where you have to climb the stairs) and perhaps providing some systemic advantage to characters with a shared history relevant to given situation which in turn would encourage players to come up with these scenes from the backstory.
* yes, I use dice as the singular