This is a review of the third adventure in Kobold Press's Labyrinth Adventures book. My gaming group has been playing through the book this year, and happily Song of the Void proved to be a [and probably the first] really good adventure of the book. We had fun with this one, and much of it is down to how appropriately open the adventure is. This review has spoilers, so don't read it if you intend to play it.
My short spoiler-free review: This adventure is simple, but good enough to be considered for an emergency one-shot when you have nothing else planned.
The adventure opens in a tavern, where the barkeep confides to the players that he helped a guy get away from the local Void cult. Just then, the local Void cult bursts into the tavern and announce they're looking for one of their members who seems to have lost his way. The cult leader has a magical staff, called Nightsinger, which the player characters can obtain by defeating the group.
My gaming group didn't end up fighting the cultists at all. Instead, they did some impressive role play, and made a few lucky rolls, and convinced the cultists that the PCs were more Voidy than the cultists. The tiefling barbarian of the party was granted the staff (and, to the surprise of the player, a dose of Void insanity!) and appointed the leader of the group.
It turns out that the cultists are taking the staff to the site of a ritual, where the scenario's Big Bad is going to let Void into the world. In part 2 of the adventure, the players are meant to descend into the guarded grotto, and then in part 3 they're meant to disrupt the ritual.
The guarded grotto is a nice and simple dungeon crawl, more or less, and part 3 is the final battle. It's a one-shot adventure pretty much by the numbers. It's easy to run, and not too ambitious. Is it the third adventure in a great big multi-planar campaign? Maybe not, but then again Labyrinth Adventures, as it turns out, is far from a big multi-planar campaign. It's a series of stand-alone scenarios, and this one is legitimately one of the better ones in the book.
What makes this adventure good is that, unlike Lost Book of Mektar or Golden Acorn Heist (the next adventure in the book), this one is a sandbox. You meet some baddies who hint at a ritual, and then you can do whatever you want. That's what my gaming group did, too. They never got to the guardian grotto, and never had to disrupt any ritual because they owned the staff. During a random encounter, they discovered that the local orc horde wanted to destroy the staff, and took that as a hint that the staff was really really bad. So they went to a nearby city, sought out a wizard to create a portal for them to get them back to Ravnica, and put the staff in a safe deposit box in a bank, safe from the cultists. That was good enough for them, so it was good enough for me.
Were I to run this adventure at a convention, I'd try to keep things on track, and I think it would work well. There are 3 maps (the tavern, the grotto, the big battle at the end), so I'd probably have one of the cultists escape and run into the grotto so the players would quickly follow, but basically this is a straight-forward adventure that's got all the essential elements PLUS the first meaningful appearance in this setting of the Void.
I think the Void element is surprisingly understated in these adventures, and I think it would have been a much stronger through-line than the Foulton Door found at the beginning of the book. The Foulton Door creates a portal that goes anywhere in the Labyrinth. I guess that's exciting? Except that the players are already doing that. They're jumping from world to world for every adventure. Why do they need or want a Foulton Door?
I think keeping the Void from devouring reality is a much more compelling over-mission, and that's largely what I'm trying to use in my game. Void Taint is a fun mechanic, and it makes the Void itself a formidable enemy. How do you fight something that drives you a little mad every time you see evidence of its existence?
I enjoyed Song of the Void for its simplicity. Sadly, Labyrinth Adventures sacrifices worldbuilding for overly-detailed building layouts. The tavern gets 7 or 8 entries just to reveal that, yes, it's a tavern, but the world where this takes place is 100% generic, with not a single distinguishing feature. That's not a problem if you're not running this adventure as part of a multi-planar campaign, and it makes this adventure good for one-shots. If you do incorporate it in a campaign about traveling the planes, be prepared to do all the worldbuilding yourself, because this campaign book, about traveling the planes, doesn't do a lick of it for you.