Imagine everything you think you knew about the cosmos was wrong. Forget what you've learnt from the Forgotten Realms, or from Planescape, or Pathfinder, or Midgard. The Labyrinth can be your new reality.
The Labyrinth is a source book by Kobold Press for Tales of the Valiant or any DnD 5e variant. (It has nothing to do with Jim Henson, although I think there would be room to steal ideas from that movie for this setting, if you wanted.) Significantly, Kobold Press is Wolfgang Bauer's company, so Labyrinth is nothing less than a new planar model published by one of the original creators of Planescape. Given that Planescape was one of my favourite settings for AD&D, I went all in on Labyrinth, purchasing the worldbook, the campaign book, plus the special Beadle & Grimm's campaign assets. This post is an overview of just the worldbook, because at the time of writing my gaming group is just starting our playthrough of the campaign.
The Labyrinth is a new fictional cosmology for tabletop roleplaying games. Instead of the overlapping planes or a great wheel of adjacent planes, the Labyrinth has "planes" of reality scattered across a great void. Except, they're not really planes, but worlds. Everything is a world, including Midgard, the heavens and the hells, the dreamlands. If you bring in other settings, then Golarion and Krynn and Abeir-Toril would all be worlds within the Labyrinth. Each [known] world is connected to some other world. These connections form a labyrinthine network through the void.
It's a little confusing at first, but the Labyrinth Worldbook conflates the concepts of world, plane, dimension, and even inter-dimensional as a matter of course. To be fair, Labyrinth isn't the only property to do this (the "planes" of Magic: The Gathering feel a lot like planets), and I think it's at least a little intentional. All the possible spaces in the Labyrinth have a tendency to blend and blur into one another, suggesting the common analogy of "the veil" being thinner in some places than others.
The miasma of states of existence in the Labyrinth is only confusing if you insist on imagining the Labyrinth as a coherent maze. To be fair, the term "labyrinth", for most of us, literally means "maze." But in the Labyrinth Worldbook, the term Labyrinth refers broadly to several configurations of reality. There is a Great Maze that belongs to Minotaurs, but it's just one component within the cosmic Labyrinth, so the Labyrinth itself is not the Great Maze. It's only a maze in the sense that it is (as Oxford Dictionary defines the term labyrinth) "a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one's way." It helps, I find, to think of the Labyrinth more as a cosmic puzzle box than a metaphysical maze.
Because the Labyrinth is not a linear maze, not every world is directly connected to every other world. To get from the Hells to the plane of Sunhome, for instance, you would have to traverse through Midgard, the Summerlands, and probably a few additional nodes. That makes it sound easy, but traveling from one world to another, as in real life, is no easy feat.
The connections between the worlds of the Labyrinth are generically called pathways. A pathway is any means of traveling from one world to another, and they can take many forms.
There are, apparently, sometimes literal walkways between worlds. You walk from one world into the next. The worldbook isn't terribly specific about how this manifests, maybe to allow for variation. It does mention specifically the example of "One enters the Great Maze in one world and leaves the Maze in another." That brings up images, for me, of Jim Henson's Labyrinth, with great stone corridors and strange microcosms appearing whenever an adventure is required. However, the worldbook also allows for subtler passages, noting that paths and tunnels sometimes "fade slowly from the Labyrinth into the destination."
My understanding is that some one world might have a clearly marked doorway that pops you straight into a literal maze that leads to other worlds, while another world's only passageway to another world might be a forest path concealed in a magical wardrobe.
The Oak Roads are the branches of Yggdrasil the World Tree, and they span between several worlds. How easy it is to get to an Oak Road depends on the world you're in. It's easy on the worlds of the Old Ring, but on other worlds it's a Druidic secret that the Oak Roads even exist.
You can take a boat (as long as you have the fare) along the River Styx to reach a number of worlds. Reaching the River Styx is easy from some worlds (it flows freely through the 11 Hells, for instance), while on other worlds the only way to reach it is through death.
The Astral Sea is a reliable route from world to world, but it's also one of the most dangerous. Many powerful beings exist in the Astral Sea, and so it is a rarely used pathway.
Magical doorways can essentially circumvent the Labyrinth and deliver you from one world to another. It's not impossible for a portal to glitch and deliver you to a world other than what it is tuned to, and the reliability of a portal largely depends on its creator.
Some people are able to traverse the Labyrinth by dreaming. This usually involves magic and help from the Dreaming God Cartokk.
The most dangerous means of travel, a void rift is like a warp in space. This is often how evil aberrations from unreality arrive into a world.
One exception to the everything-is-a-world rule is the ethereal plane. Consisting of ether, the ethereal plane pervades all worlds of the Labyrinth. Someone with the ability to enter the ethereal plane could feasibly travel from one world to another.
The planes of fire and earth and wind and water aren't exactly literal worlds in the Labyrinth. They are, however, literal spheres found on the outer edges of the Labyrinth.
Any cosmology that defines reality is bound to have to answer the question of what's beyond reality. For the Labyrinth, everything that's not a part of the Labyrinth doesn't exist, and it's called the Void.
The void isn't just nothing, it's malignant nothingness. It is forever encroaching on the Labyrinth, devouring worlds and invading reality with the many void creatures that have been described in Kobold Press bestiaries, I think, since forever. If you're an owner of Tome of Beasts or Creature Codex, then you know of void monsters like Voidlings or the Void Dragon. These monsters appear in reality through void rifts, and seek to destroy everything that exists.
Explorers of the Labyrinth classify worlds as 1 of 5 categories:
That's the setting provided by the Labyrinth, and probably you could drop any game into it without straining the fiction. The Labyrinth serves all practical functions of a planar setting. You can move from one reality to another, either by stepping through mysterious mists or by finding a portal or by magic. Demiplanes are "bottled cities" in the Labyrinth, and of course powerful magic users can create and nurture new planes even as fiends from the 11 Hells migrate in Hellish caravans seeking worlds to take over and populate with fresh fiends.
Believe it or not, everything I've covered in this blog post is just the first chapter of the worldbook.
Chapter 2 contains information about major worlds of the Labyrinth, including the hub city known as The Smithy. A city founded by Labyrinth travelers in need of a homebase, The Smithy is home to the Keepers of the Keys, a society of Labyrinth explorers and adventurers. There are many famous Labyrinth connections within The Smithy, including the Celestial Steps, the Five Ways Bridge, and the Moonbeam Arch.
Chapter 3 describes the many factions that exist within the Labyrinth. I'd expected Planescape-style philosophical groups, but Labyrinth factions are more like the guilds of Ravnica or the factions of the Forgotten Realms, which is to say that they're highly functional. You can use these factions to drive a campaign.
Chapter 4 provides player options, and Chapter 5 is full of a bunch of spells. Chapter 6 contains the pantheon of the Labyrinth.
Chapter 7 is the game master's guide, and Chapter 8 is the bestiary.
My Sunday night gaming group has just finished up a patchwork Tales of the Valiant campaign that's lasted a year and a quarter. We're starting the Labyrinth Adventures book now, so I'm eager to become very familiar with the setting.
I'm still reading through the worldbook, but so far the Labyrinth is a dynamic setting that provides a fresh and unique take on planar travel. It's a setting I'm ready to explore.