I’m sure the guy who designs the Ikea stores could give you some tips.
You can make your maze more efficient by confusing and disorienting your victims, so they waste energy. Make extensive use of duplication, so that large sections of your maze appear identical. Lots of mirrors. One way doors. Lighting that cycles to another colour when a victim leaves a zone. Provide some landmarks, which periodically retract into the floor. Circular rooms that revolve. Speakers which provide audatory cues, but switch them around every few minutes, so a particular sound comes from a different direction. Led displays showing random numeric codes. Dead-end long passages that only provide room to crawl down, so the victim can’t even turn around, and has to inch their way backwards and upwards. Long climbs that lead to nowhere. Heavy items (large enough that a victim can carry only one) that must be transported through sections of the maze to unlock entrances.
While caving, I’ve gone down a path that was a “Dead-end long passages that only provide room to crawl down, so the victim can’t even turn around, and has to inch their way backwards and upwards”, but the hitch was that it was also a quick-running and ice-cold stream that came up to my chin while I was forced to crawl in a prone position. Fun, for me; nightmarish for others.
Yes. Fun flick. I wouldn’t want the out-and-out death traps though. Sure, people might take the odd fall when forced into a multi-story chimney-style climb, but I’d rather they weren’t actively murdered.
A true labyrinth has a single path albeit with many turns. I would assume therefore it’d have to be very large, because you can’t really become lost in it.
Make a section of the maze out of a grid of small square rooms, with fringy tapestries hanging down in front of all the walls and doorways. If it’s a real doorway, the person just has to push through the fringe to the next room, but they can’t tell a real doorway from fringe just covering a wall until they touch it. And then cover many of the walls behind the fringe with slime, or centipedes, or make them very hot or cold to the touch, or otherwise uncomfortable.
You’re going to need one goblin that always lies, one goblin that always tells the truth, and one goblin that lies or tells the truth completely at random. Figuring out which is which in the job interview is pretty tricky.
People! You are not thinking outside the box here. You need to shrink the ‘guests’ first. Then you write a maze creation app, output it to a CAD format, and feed it into your home made 3D printer.
If you havent started yours yet, google home made 3D printer in google. Its the mad scientists friend.
Look, guys, labyrinths are just not worth the effort. You’re pitting your deviousness against the hero’s mojo, and the mojo always wins. It doesn’t even help if you try it on an ordinarily low-mojo hero, like Superman or Wonder Woman, because those folks are generally bristling with brute force and can just bust out. And if you try it on a HIGH mojo hero, like Bond or Xena – well, you don’t want to be around when they escape, because you’ve also pissed them off.
And Athena help you if you have a high-power, high-mojo hero, like the Hulk.
If any of your staff presents you with a plan that involves capturing the hero and keeping him alive in a labyrinth, kill them.
If you work for an villain who orders you to put such a plan into effect, kill him.
Some damn hero will show up disguised as a peasant. Or be mistaken for one. Or else you’ll chuck in a simple peasant boy who’s secretly (and unknown to him) the son of a great wizard. Or something.
In the first place, it’s not cost-effective. Random executions are not only more effective at doing what you suggest, but a lot cheaper as well, leaving a lot more money in the budget for mook firearm training, the important of which cannot be over-emphasized.
In the second place, it is inevitable that at some point the hero’s wife, husband, mother, father, girlfriend, boyfriend, little sister, little brother, mentor, or sidekick will wind up in the labyrinth. This draws the hero to you under circumstances you did not devise, and as mentioned above heroes always get escape the labyrinth, and they always escape pissed. What if your labyrinth catches one of Wolverine’s ex-girlfriends, and he storms in, kills all your mooks because that’s how he rolls, and discovers her head in the belly of the last troll he eviscerates? Do you REALLY want to be around for what follows?
There was a third place but I forgot what it was. Must not have been very important.
In the fourth place the labyrinth is obviously going to be on the grounds of your lair. Its very existence is a security threat. If it’s a “fair” labyrinth, MacGuyver or Batman or the Fantastic Four will find a way to turn use it to gain ingress to the rest of the lair. Well, not the Fantastic Four, because they are just going to just bust through, and God help you if the most vulnerable of them (Johnny) gets hurt in the process. And if it’s an unfair labythinth – well, you should have just shot the victims in the first place.
If you haven’t been dissuaded, and still want a passively deadly maze/labyrinth, you might want to consider carving one out of a rock salt deposit, for that added bit of dessication. I agree that it should be located far away from your personal lair/residence . . . and possibly surrounded by desert. To be fair, the exit should lead to an oasis in the desert, but a little extra containment wouldn’t hurt.
When faced with a worthy opponent I, a GOOD mad scientist, do my best to kill them!
Severing their spinal chords and paralyzing them from the neck down is easy, but it is not safe enough to have a still thinking enemy.
Full lobotomization can be done in seconds if you know how. But this still leaves them alive and a truly skilled Scientist can reverse the procedure.
Shutting down the autonomic nervous system is the way to go. Then retrieve any needed information from the brain. Final step, flash fry the brain so that no one else can get information from it.
Remember, anything worth doing is worth doing correctly.
