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RUNNING A LABYRINTH
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO OOCLY:
So you want to run a labyrinth! Awesome! We're always welcome to players running their own labyrinths. This means you know what you want to run, and you know when you want to run it... so you just need to make sure it's official and whatnot!
Step One: Comment to the Event Schedule page.
This is the page you want to be at if you want to run a labyrinth—by commenting here we can add it to a table of events! Just make sure that the date you want to run your labyrinth doesn't coincide with one that might already be scheduled.
Step Two: Make an announcement post to the OOC community.
We prefer that you wait until we've added your labyrinth to the table before making a post, however, if we've already talked about your labyrinth happening then you can just go right on ahead and make that OOC post. When we see your post up on the OOC community, we'll also plurk about it on the game's plurk account!
...AND THAT'S IT, YOU'RE SET TO RUN A LABYRINTH!
Notes: Ideally, we'd like to see labyrinths last no less than a few days. If it's a very socially engaging labyrinth, you might want to have that last all week. If it's a labyrinth where the progress relies on both your responses and the interaction between other characters, I'd suggest the middle-grounds of 4-5 days, give or take. If the labyrinth is incredibly simple and requires the bare minimum of interaction to progress, you can make it a few days. Nnnot that these are strict guidelines that you must adhere by, they're just suggestions!
WHAT IT TAKES ICLY:
Basically, labyrinths are activities! Games! Challenges! Tasks! Exploradoras! ANYTHING! If you want a reason for characters to encounter a velociraptor, put it in a labyrinth. If you want to have characters address their outed secrets, put it in a labyrinth! Labyrinths also contain anachronisms, so you don't have to sweat the small things like technology or memes, though it's always better to be safe than sorry by restraining from breaking the fourth wall and calling everyone fictional. That's a no-no. Still, why NOT have your labyrinth take place on an airplane full of zombies and pillows? Seriously, why not.
Here is the only thing a labyrinth ABSOLUTELY requires:
• treasure
That's right; all a labyrinth really needs is treasure at the end, which you can have determined from the start, make unique to each character, have completely randomized, and so on. You might decide that your snowy labyrinth gives everyone some hot cocoa and marshmallows in the end. One traumatizing labyrinth might supply pillows, whereas another traumatizing labyrinth supplies glass replicas of the body parts everyone lost. Treasure can range from useful to useless; it all varies!
If you're curious about what you can get away with in a labyrinth, here are some structural ideas:
★ Labyrinths can contain anywhere from 2-10 rooms, however, you can totally have more than that as long as it's not overwhelming. If you draft 20 rooms and have it so characters will only come across 5 of those rooms based on the decisions and actions they make, then so be it!
★ You don't have to go outside of 1 room though. If you just want an activity that doesn't involve going to a different room, then keep it in one room! Look at the social bingo, for instance: almost everything happened within one room, and the second room was a treasure room.
★ Exploradora qualities aren't necessary! You don't HAVE to force yourself to supply things to explore. Don't do a Me and make the mistake that I did with the social bingo; I said "HEY GUYS, FEEL FREE TO EXPLORE!" and I didn't even supply any useful description of the room. Nothing. Nada. I didn't say the table cloths were long—how would you have guessed it without approaching it? Why would you approach a table and wonder how long the table cloth was? What if that was important though? HOW WOULD YOU HAVE KNOWN THERE WEREN'T RABID SQUIRRELS UNDER THEM?! So basically, you don't have to force exploration qualities on your labyrinth just because, you can say "there's nothing to really explore" and leave it at that—assuming your labyrinth isn't focused on exploration I mean. On the flip side, if your labyrinth relies on exploration, do the opposite of what I did and supply information on things you absolutely WANT to be addressed!
★ Rooms aren't always "rooms". Remember, one room can be the great outdoors and have a trapdoor that suddenly whisks you into an ancient coliseum. While it's very good to have a general (if unclear) theme across an entire labyrinth, it's not forbidden to be a bit zany with the rooms characters can come across.
★ You can utilize groups/teams/pairs as seen fit in the labyrinths! Split everyone into pairs and send them down different routes, have everyone participate together but on different teams, and so forth. However, it's always good to mention this when the labyrinth is first announced, and to also note beforehand whether players can sign characters up together, anticipate to be sorted based on scheduling alignments or survey results, or expect to be completely randomized.
I'M 100% POSITIVE THERE IS MORE I'M LEAVING OUT, and just because I haven't mentioned it doesn't mean it's not allowed. Feel free to break the boundaries, and feel free to be creative. And don't be afraid to ask questions!
