Example Dungeon: The Danzuishanese Maze, Floor 2, Orientation.

Nirrum and I both have excellent Balance

That said, we both have abyssmal spatial reasoning and short-term memory.

The Danzuishanese maze holds more secrets yet my friends! This floor has a problem with it, in that I did not telegraph the options well enough. The hub room is irrelevant, the position of any of the doors isn't. The red herring extra doors did not help either. If I had enough energy, I might have put more behind each. That said, they explored every option on this floor, even if they didn't find all secrets.


As of this floor, I'm still on this track, hell I designed most of Danzuishan with this track in mind.

Second Floor-Orientation

The second floor's entrance will always bring the party to a massive, open, and empty domed room with an unremarkable apex. There is nothing in the first room. On the walls, at 15 ft up, there are three doors, each a different color, each in their own frame. The doors are not real, and their destruction reveals nothing behind them save more wall. If a door is somehow fragmented or pulled off the wall it attempts to reform wherever the largest piece is. Placing the door anywhere other than it originally was opens up a new room the doors function identically, and can serve as multiple entrances to the same room from different locations. Infinite loops are possible though occupying the same space at the same time just shunts one object out of the way

Of course they're going to play with the doors. It was not necessary for me to change their colors, and I should have had some more rooms than this, but that said, multiple doors proved useful.

• Placing the door on the floor opens up an identical but upside down version of the room with the lair of a sleeping adult white dragon. The dragon sleeps on a pile of silver worth 7000gp, and over two hundred gems worth 10gp each, with five diamonds worth 1000gp each. In the room there is a frightened elf cleric of pelor who immediately spots the party and looks up at them in fear, and then back to the dragon, hoping it won't wait. He has been here for two years and has avoided the dragon waking by remaining very quiet. There is no other visible entrance to the room but at the very bottom, there is a way to Floor 3 if one lifts the round ornament covering the oculus hole.
  
  Their first rescue! They loved this guy. One cast of silence and flight later and he's out. They explored the rest of the room before killing the dragon, shooting him from above. It was too big to fit out the door so it relied on its breath weapon. The maze is very tough and does not take damage easily, and any damage it takes, it tends to repair. Note that the dome here is upside down, this keeps the spatial theme of the floor but also hints that the maze constructs itself in strange ways. They left through this exit to the Third floor, Dark water.
• Placing the door on the wall at floor level Reveals one of 1d4 rooms, selected at random each time the door is opened
  • 1) A small closet in which seventeen swarms of Necro-ants have build a colony out of what appears to be bones and dust.
    
    Fuckin ANTS. The players in mine found this third, and they assumed this was the insect floor. The closet is small and tells a very simple story. These ants feed on the dead, and make the best of the space they're in. If they had used speak with animals here, I would have made the entire colony sapient as a reference to Aunt Hilary, from Godel Escher Bach.
  • 2) a round, sandstone room that is 90ft long and contains pillars laid out in a 5ft grid. Between the pillars of which slides a Flail snail. 4 shadows lurk at the corner of the room waiting for something to attack the snail.
    
    One of my players has truesight after paying out the ass for a replacement eye. They spotted the Shadows first, then recovered the snail and its shell. The shell makes an antimagic shield and after a while, turns into a slightly less powerful but still useful shield that gives advantage against magic.
  • 3) A team of Mazehunters, Two level 5 fighters with adamantine greatswords and a Cleric of Bahamut with an adamantine mace, all Copper Dragonborn, Fighting a Devourer and a Glabrezu and losing. They are in a long, square corridor that ends in a shaft which goes to Floor 5, it drops 400ft and lands in room 2, passing through floor 4 on the way.
    • The maze hunters, if saved, thank the adventurers and walk straight through a solid wall to leave. They explain that they could not use the door that the party came in, and that they're in their own "bubble" for the maze.
    • The Glabrezu and devourer die permanently if they are killed here, the Glabrezu will beg for their life and can even be "rescued" and brought outside the maze
      
      The Maze Hunters brought these along with them but they attacked. Once picked up in a Maze hunter's instance, you can't see other instances unless your instance collapses. They never realized what this pit was for, even when they found it from below later. They saved the maze hunters and went their separate ways.
  • 4) A Room With four gargantuan stone boulders draped in reed cloth ropes. Hard sunlight comes from an occulus at the top of the brown-walled stone room, creating stark shadows. On each boulder sits a creature. Each creature is vaguely humanoid in shape but are all abberations in classification. One is made out of translucent calcite and has extremely long arms that reach halfway down the rock and terminate in a bifurcated tentacle. One is covered in Triangular cat-like ears which follow the noisiest person in the room as they walk, turning to hear them as best they can. The third is made entirely of grey fuzz with droplets of clear liquid on the end of particularly long bits of fuzz. The fourth appears to just be a tiefling-shaped coconut. In the centre sits a thick wooden pillar, carved in a way that it is reminiscent of a very surprised human. Placed in the human's hands, Embeded in the wood is a +2 Lance. 
    • Interacting with the Calcite creature reveals that he is an illusion, and casts fireball on his location at 7th level
    • attempting to interact with the ear-creature reveals the ears as *extremely hard teeth* though they flatten at the touch and the being remains passive and impervious to damage, divination magic does not work on the creature though it reacts favourably to fish, attempting to follow the sound of living fish, picking them up with its mitten-like eartooth hands and placing it on its skin where they are ground into mulch
    • The Grey Mold creature acts like a sundew plant. A creature must succeed a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be absorbed within the creature. Creatures attempting to help the first creature physically must make the same saving throw. Absorbed creatures are restrained and can use an action on their turn to try and remake the saving throw. Absorbed creatures take 10d6 Acid Damage at the start of the creature's turn, and if they are reduced to 0hp they leave no corpse. If the grey mold comes into contact with any fire *at all* It explodes dealing 1d4 damage to everyone in a 5ft radius
    • Interacting with the coconut tiefling causes them to shatter like glass and for 10 insect swarms of green centipedes to come pouring out
    • Interacting with all four beings causes the lance to darken as it begins to sweat *snake venom* from its tip, causing it to do an additional 1d4 poison damage when used to make a melee weapon attack. The Expression on the statue changes to look relieved.
      
      They loved this room, Interacted with everything, and even took the tooth creature with them, naming it Augustus, The teeth cat. When the statue was relieved, they left an extremely well painted picture of Barstomun Strongbeard from Xanaran's Bar and Inn behind. I'll get into the rules for Xanaran's in another post. Hell, they even got the lance. One of them almost died to the Grey mold creature, which was inspired by Sundew plants. Not one of these things in the room were what they seemed. 

• Placing a door elsewhere on the dome causes the room to Lose Gravity until the door is placed elsewhere, The room on the other side of the room is in darkness but placing inside the room reveals it to be a long corridor lined with teeth, not unlike the throat of a lamprey, Creatures that enter inside the room are quickly swallowed and die. The lamprey room has 4700hp, which, if exhausted, kills the creature, the other end of it contains a hatch that leads to floor 3. When the room is at half health it vomits a Massive pool of acid, filling the first room up to a depth of 4 feet, seemingly ignoring the antigravity effects. Creatures standing in the acid take 1d6 damage at the end of each turn they spend there. The acid does not interact with gold very strongly and has no magical properties, the acid is unable to travel into other rooms. The acid, if collected, is hydrochloric acid, mixed with some proteins and enzymes, but is much more concentrated than human stomach acid. The only magical property it posesses is a strange immunity to magic that affects gravity. The magic is so weak that it does not bypass magical defenses.
  
  They never did kill this thing, though I recall them doing quite a bit of damage. They almost used one door that they just held aloft to kill the dragon with acid, but thought better of it.

More to come soon as we enter dark waters!

Kao ra'u mish'a: Mu ra'ti namish'ke. 
-Nirrum dal Kaolok,