This is my review of chapter 8: Monsters of the Labyrinth of Kobold Press's Labyrinth Worldbook, a planar setting for Tales of the Valiant (or any DnD 5e variant). As with spells and gods, it's hard to go wrong with a chapter full of monsters, and this chapter does not disappoint. Better yet, it exceeds expectations by starting with monster templates.
A monster template is a set of adjustments you can make to a monster in order to localise it to a specific setting or region within a setting. For example, in the Labyrinth there are dead worlds that have fallen to the Void. You can apply the Lost template to nearly any monster from any monster book so that it seems like it's distinct to a lost world. Common player reactions are expressed in confused utterances like "That monster doesn't usually do that..." and "Can that monster do that?" and, of course, "I think we need to run." It's very satisfying for everyone, because even familiar monsters become new and exciting.
There are 3 templates provided: Lost, Void Blessed, and Void.
A template does require extra preparation time, at least in my experience. I usually just end up writing the whole stat block out, with all the changes of the template incorporated in. I guess you could try to make the modifications as you play, but that seems like a lot of cross-referencing to me. Maybe you could do it with a good set of index cards.
However you manage it, or choose to ignore it, the template system offers flexibility for encounters, and I love that this book provides them. I feel like this book has been serious about the Void as the ultimate threat, and I appreciate the clarity and consistency.
Lots of great monsters. There's a crazed clockwork (or is it?) aberration, the mother of Void Angels Kel Belleth (that's her on the cover!), the avatar of Nidhogg, devils, giants, hags, a portal eater, and much much more. These are the weird and intriguing creatures that player characters can only expect to encounter in the Labyrinth, or in the far-off places you can only get to through the Labyrinth. It's consistent in tone and theme, and the monsters look like they'll be a lot of fun to play as a game master.
At the very end of the book, there's an appendix called Labyrinth Encounters. It's 23 pages of random tables providing the game master with not just random monsters, but actual encounters. Here's an sample:
This worn-out road passes walls of cracked masonry and holes gouged in the ground. One hole is large enough for a Medium creature to pass through, leading to a dark, oubliette-like chamber where a pair of gibbering mouthers murmur in overlapping madness, attacking anything they lure into their lair.
It's short, simple, direct, and exactly the kind of thing you want after your players have discovered a pathway through the Labyrinth. And there's 23 pages of these things (across several tiers of play), so stepping through a portal never has to be a simple one-and-done experience. Your players can step through a portal or a rift and find themselves wandering the Oak Road toward a goblin encampment that definitely wasn't on their priority list. This is the kind of saving grace in game design that delays progress just long enough for the game master to catch up on what's "supposed" to happen next in the adventure. Brilliant stuff.
The main appeal, I think, of the Labyrinth is the concept that traveling to different planes of existence doesn't have to be an instantaneous event. Sometimes, traveling between worlds takes real time, and physical effort, and a map, and rations. It's like Spelljammer but for your feet.
That's an appropriate analogy because just as the 5e edition of Spelljammer suffered from organisational and specificity issues, so too does the Labyrinth Worldbook. The cosmology of AD&D works really well in part because it's based on well-developed real-world mythology. As wrong as they were, those early philosophers had constructed a pretty complete story of how the physical and spiritual worlds interacted, and they had hundreds of years to account for missing pieces. The Labyrinth doesn't have the benefit of centuries of development, so it doesn't really answer questions like what exactly the Labyrinth is (is it its own realm, made up of matter? or is it ethereal? or both?) and what it looks like (is there a sky? does it depend? is it just mysterious woods? or mists?), and so on.
If the very concept of inter-dimensional travel is new to your roleplaying group, then the Labyrinth provides a setting that more or less explains how it works. I think the Labyrinth Worldbook is likely well worth purchasing for game masters who have never run a planar adventure.
If you've played in Planescape or Spelljammer or with Pathfinder's planar rules or with Kobold Press's previous planar setting, then Labyrinth doesn't add a whole lot of new logic. It somewhat re-frames how you get from one dimension to another, but it doesn't give you a lot to work with. Essentially, the Labyrinth is a little like the city of Sigil, if Sigil was everything and not just a city. Step into a portal (or is it a Gate? or a pathway?), and you're in the Labyrinth. You can have encounters with weird monsters and far traveling NPCs. Then you can walk through another portal (or gate or road or something) and end up in a different setting than the one you started from. That's the Labyrinth. It's a good idea, and maybe it's not delivered quite a cleanly as previous Midgard books have been.
For my Labyrinth campaign, I'm using Ravnica as a stand-in for the generic and under-developed Smithy. Ravinican guilds take the place of the bland factions of the Labyrinth. But the concept of a journey between worlds has been useful, and the adventures from the Labyrinth Adventures book has, at worst, provided at least some inspiration. My point is that there's no wrong way to use RPG material, so the Labyrinth Worldbook has done its job: It's gotten me inspired, and it's helped me construct a fun adventure for my group. Whether you buy it for yourself, I think, ought to depend on whether you already have a vision for how planar travel works in your setting. If you need ideas, then the Labyrinth could be a setting you enjoy.