I backed the Labyrinth setting for Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press on Kickstarter. Several months ago, my gaming group started playing through the Labyrinth Adventures campaign. We didn't love the first adventure Lost Book of Mektar so we were really hoping for an improvement with the second adventure, Chasing the Inferno. We've played through the adventure, and this blog post is my review of it. There are major spoilers in this review.
Like the first adventure, this one has an appealing plot hook. A group of low-level devils have deserted from their legion, along with the legion's prisoner. The prisoner is a syderean sage, Nakhuma the All-Knowing, and he's got information that your faction wants. It's your mission to find the deserters before their legion commanders can, and rescue Nakhuma.
Also like the first adventure, this one supposedly has 3 parts.
In the first part of the adventure, player characters receive their mission from their faction leader. They're told that to go on this very important mission, they must first obtain a portal key to the Weald of Drysaf from a merchant named Razda.
The PCs go to the market and encounter Ysella, a werewolf currently in human form. Ysella has a potion of Remove Curse and wants to drink it, and yet also doesn't want to drink it. The PCs must persuade her drink it, without physically forcing her to drink it. If they do, then she tells them where Razda is. He's over there, in that building.
The PCs go to Razda, and he asks them a question: "Where is the son of Holdevar?" The players haven't heard of Holdevar, so they roll to discover whether they have that information. If they do, Razda gives them the portal key. If they don't, then they can help Razda open a treasure chest he can't unlock. It's a combination lock, so the PCs roll to discover whether they can guess the combination. If they do, then Razda gives them the portal key.
The PCs next go to a ferry that can take them into the Eleven Hells. There aren't enough seats on the ferry, though, so they must roll dice to race NPCs for a seat on the ferry. If they fail, then they must wait until the next morning for the next ferry.
The ferry takes them to Mentir, where they must go to a gambling hall and play, you guessed it, a minigame to gain access to a portal upstairs. This portal takes them to the Weald of Drysaf, where they must navigate a "maze" (it's 3 encounters) to traverse the branches of the World Tree to the world of Cachor.
This part is the actual adventure. On Cachor, the devilish deserters have set up camp, and it's up to the PCs to figure out how to deal with the situation. They can stealth, they can attack, they can negotiate, whatever. It's up to the PCs. This is easily the best part of this adventure.
The thing about this adventure is that most of it is not a blueprint, but a toolkit. If you try to run this adventure as written, your players are hit with a series of baffling dice games in place of roleplay, and a connect-the-dots plot line.
I do think, as written, this could be make for a fascinating and fun miniature wargame narrative scenario. I can absolutely imagine setting each part of this adventure up on my wargaming table, getting my miniatures from point A to point Z, and then playing a dice game to complete the scenario and determine what variables will be in place for my next game. But as roleplay, the first 2 parts of Chasing the Inferno are too prescriptive. If I told my players that they had a mission, and then forced them to endure minigame after minigame, I'm pretty sure they'd justifiably abandon the game.
To make this adventure work as a roleplaying scenario, I treated the first 2 parts as tools for a sort of sandbox adventure. I told my players that they had to hunt down and find the deserters, and rescue the prisoner. Then I set them loose. During their investigation, they encountered Ysella (as a random encounter, with no bearing on the location of Razda), and eventually Razda, the ferry on the River Styx, the gambling hall, and so on. The clues about where the deserters had gone, and how to get there before the legion does, got revealed not by the faction leader narrating a quest at them, but through NPC interactions. I used the elements that fit into what my players were doing, and did not use it as a map filled with minigames disguised as plot points.
Part 3 is basically perfect as-is, so no adjustment required there.
The biggest problem with the adventure is its failure to deliver on its own promise. The adventure pitch for the game master, and the quest given to the players, says that the PCs must find the deserters before the legion does. There are minigames in the first 2 parts that can slow the PC's progress. But it's all illusory, even to the game master. The adventure has no timing mechanic built into it, and the legion is never scheduled to show up. Obviously the game master can have the legion show up whenever convenient, but it strikes me as odd that the adventure acts as if though there's a timer when there isn't. I understand that the game master is meant to act as if there's a timer, and that the timer can be entirely faked, but if that's what the adventure wants you to do then I think it ought to say so. The adventure is written for the game master. There's no reason to pretend like there's a race against time when there isn't. Just tell the game master to say there's a race against time, but acknowledge to the game master that there is no actual timer and to bring the legion into the game as appropriate.
A problem I'm having with the book so far is that the campaign aspect of it was perhaps overstated. The way this book chooses to link the adventures together is to allow for a collection side quest, with items hidden in each adventure. Find all the parts to a magical door, and you can turn them in at the end of the book for a reward.
That's not really a campaign, though. There's no narrative drive to move from one adventure to the next because no adventure has the singular goal of recovering a piece of the magical item. The collection quest is always a side quest. It's a bonus item hidden somewhere in the adventure.
I like a good side quest. I like having things to fall back on when a player gets a very good roll to find something but you don't have anything otherwise planned. But that's not a campaign, that's a random table that fits together in the end.
It seems that you have to do a lot of extra work to make this book a campaign, and that surprised me because it's pitched as a campaign for the Labyrinth setting.
This is the second adventure in the Labyrinth Adventures book and I have to admit that it's shaking my faith in this product as a whole. The main city of the Labyrinth is nowhere near as interesting as Sigil, so I'm running the campaign in Ravnica. The first adventure was painful, and Chasing the Inferno is a collection of minigames of varying quality, with a map tacked on at the end.
Having said that, after setting Labyrinth Adventures aside, my gaming group enjoyed Chasing the Inferno. It's good for ideas and inspiration, and ultimately that's what any adventure is, because there's no adventure published that gets run exactly as written.
For best results, don't get fooled by the apparent linear narrative presented in Chasing the Inferno. Mine it for ideas and encounters, and then fit those in to your game world.
Cover image by Kobold Press.