The Mages' Contest

The Plot

Every ten years, the Mages' Guild holds a contest. The prize of the contest should be left fairly vague, unless one of your PC's is a high- ranking member of the Guild...I usually use some statement about "material considerations...well, it's politics mostly..." However, since Guild mages tend to be not particularly active types, the contest is structured as follows: each mage hires a group of adventurers (here's where the PC's come in), who then compete for the prize in a maze set up and run by the Guild. The party should be hired by a mage, who tells them basically the information above, plus the number of other groups competing (I usually use four groups total, since in my maze they tend to meet up at the end for a final battle, and dealing with more NPC's than that would get hellish). The mage gives each PC a magical "token"; basically just a little one-use magic item. The tokens can have effects like Levitate (for a duration), Light (ditto), Invisibility (as the spell); just go through the PH and pick out spells to use. Make up a maze to put the party though, and don't forget that several other groups are doing this at the same time! The way I run it is that I have a map of a maze, with four relatively distinct paths to a final room. They do cross over, but not very often. Each has several large empty rooms on the map, and some marked spots in the corridors. Then I have a list of rooms to use, and corridor tricks, and I just insert whichever ones I feel like when they come to a room or a corridor spot. The four groups race through the maze, and the objective is to find a large flashing gem. I usually set it up so that when the party reaches the last room (where the gem is), most of the other groups arrive at the same time. If the party tries to hang back and let them fight it out, I have some of the NPC's start going for the gem. Remember that this was set up by a Mages' Guild, so you can put in almost anything you want...some examples of rooms I use are:

1. The room has a chasm cutting it in two. There is another door on the far side, and a bridge across the chasm. (The chasm is actually an illusion, but falling in will take the PC out of the contest) On the bridge, there are two "knights". These are merely animated suits of armor, and they have orders to prevent anyone from crossing the chasm. They will react predictably to actions by the PC's, and so can be lured into traps; for example, a thief tries to climb across, one of the knights moves to block him, the party tosses oil onto the bridge where the knight would stand, then the thief goes back. The knight walks back and slips in the oil. Make the bridge very narrow and no handrails.
2. Another room with a chasm, but this one has a maze of invisible paths crossing it. The party would have to move very slowly, feeling their way along and probably mapping the maze as well. Therefore, you put a monster (I usually use a nonafel, or cat-o'-nine-tails, from the Fiend Folio, or else something called an amorph hopper which I made up) on the bridges to mess them up. Let the monster leap infallibly from one spot to another (it knows the maze perfectly), or else let it fly.
3. A circular room with a pillar in the center. As soon as one person enters the room, tell them that they see the door slam behind them and the room begins to spin. They are plastered against the outer wall by the centrifugal force, and are slowly being crushed. Then send them out of the room, and tell the other players that they see the guy enter the room, and then throw himself against the outer wall. It's an illusion, of course, and the other players can do whatever they want, but whatever they do, the trapped character will interpret it as something that would be happening, or else just something weird happens and he can't figure out why. For example: they tried slapping the "trapped" character across the face. He felt the blow, but had no idea where it came from. However, there's a catch: the crushing is real. After a little while, ribs begin cracking...the idea is to try to get the "trapped" character to disbelieve his surroundings.