This is purely hypothetical, just for fun. In this scenario, you don’t get to know who the GM is in advance, but they do have to run it as written. The players can leave whenever they like, but the GM has to stay until either all players leave or the players beat the dungeon.
This is magnificently evil. It’s also extremely specific, to the point I’m worried this happened in your life.
Thanks! And no, lol, if this had actually happened to me, I probably wouldn’t be alive to write about it. I would either have disappeared into the map myself, or been murdered.
But almost all the pieces are real things that have happened to me in other contexts. I have a quilting ruler that behaves in the way described, the “stairs are in the same place on different levels” thing is something that trips me up when reading maps of museums, and I have learned not to ink pencil sketches if I don’t want to ruin them. If I ever did try to make a scale map of a dungeon, it would 100% be physically impossible, whether I meant to be evil or not. I just don’t have the visual-spatial sense to get it right.