I was excited about Kobold Press's Labyrinth release. I thought that if anybody was going to come up with a compelling alternative to Planescape, it would be Kobold Press. I was, and still am, intrigued by some of the concepts from Labyrinth Worldbook, but ultimately I felt that it was oddly dispassionate about the multiverse it was creating. The Labyrinth Adventures "campaign" book was even worse, with stand-alone scenarios seemingly developed by someone with some a clear and exciting vision, but written by authors who maybe had never run a game of dnd. To make the best of a disappointing experience, I've decided to enumerate what I have personally learned from the publication of the Labyrinth. The lessons I'm taking away from this might not be universally true, but at least they're indicative of things some people (like me) don't like about some gaming products (like Labyrinth.)
The interesting thing about Labyrinth is that I feel it's atypical for Kobold Press, which normally produces very good source books and modules. I'm not sure whether Tales of the Valiant is just heading in a direction I don't personally understand (others might love this stuff, I don't know) or whether this was just a project that didn't go the way they had intended. My opinion is that it's bad, but not objectively, so I want to know why I think it's bad. Here are the lessons I'm taking from Labyrinth.
Bearing in mind that the sole purpose of the Labyrinth setting is to provide multi-planar adventures, it's strange to me that it makes no effort to define how gods work in the setting. Do gods have domains? Are their powers limited to a specific world, or to an entire plane of existence, or are they all able to influence any world on any plane across the Labyrinth? There are gods of the Labyrinth, and some of them are the same as gods in Midgard. What does that mean about the cosmology of this setting? How are adventurers who can step outside of reality meant to perceive their gods now?
Do the gods stay the same no matter what plane you visit? And if so, how does that affect the source material you're using for that plane? How do I manage Midgard gods while my players visit Toril?
There are no answers in the Labyrinth source books about the role of gods and devils and demons. In Planescape, this was made very clear: Gods are just berks like you and me, only more powerful. But there's always someone or something more powerful, so even the gods ought to watch out. This was one of the foundations of the setting, because when you start jumping between realities it's an obvious question that comes up, quick.
Obviously the easy answer is that the game master can just decide. But if that's the answer, then what's the point of the setting? I'm capable, as a game master, of introducing a portal that takes the player characters to another world, and then grabbing a source book and using it to represent the new reality they've been transported to. The Labyrinth setting is supposed to provide parameters for how what I find in one source book is compatible with what I find in another source book. The setting ought to matter. It ought to provide a framework for how we are playing across source material.
Portals, gateways, rifts, planes, realms, reality, worlds, portal keys, and a Foulton Door. I've read about them all, and I still don't understand what the Labyrinth intends for any of them to be, exactly.
Drawing from geek tradition, it seems obvious.
A portal is a gateway doorway bridge between two realities.
Step through a portal, and you're somewhere different.
But wait, are you in a different reality or just a different place on the same plane?
Or are you in the Labyrinth?
And once you're in the Labyrinth, and you travel one of its many avenues to another place, is that when you emerge on another reality?
Or are you just going to a different planet?
Also, how do portals and gateways actually work? Are they set to a single destination or can they be set to a variety of different places? And if they can be, then why is the Foulton Door a big deal? It sounds like any old gateway to me. And maybe it is. That's OK, but maybe that ought to be made clear.
The Labyrinth Worldbook reads like a beginner's manual about boats that forgets to define sails, oars, rudders, or the different types of bodies of water.
The most unique fixed point in the Labyrinth is its hub city, known as The Smithy. I can't tell you anything about The Smithy because the Labyrinth Worldbook hardly spends any time on it. It's a city that exists between realities (or whatever the Labyrinth is) where there are people living. Many people (all people?) are divided into various factions, some of which are dedicated to crafting portals and portal keys, and others protect the Labyrinth from the degrading influence of the Void, and so on.
I think we can imagine the Labyrinth as basically a non-literal "planet" where there are roadways and regions, and so people within the Labyrinth get up to the same things people everywhere get up to. They have markets probably, and organisations, and social clubs, and jobs, and families, and all that stuff. But most of this is extrapolation. The Labyrinth Worldbook doesn't say any of this. It just says there's a city at the [non-literal] centre of the Labyrinth, and there are buildings that house factions there.
It's the blandest city I've ever read about in a dnd book, I think. The Smithy doesn't have to be Bard's Gate complex, but it may as well not exist as written in the Labyrinth Worldbook. Red Larch from Princes of the Apocalypse has more character than The Smithy, and Red Larch has only got 22 locations in it.
Really, the biggest problem with The Smithy is that it's got a name but no substance. I think if you're going to say there's a hub city in the middle of your multiverse, then you have two choices:
Labyrinth Worldbook spends a few paragraphs on the city that's meant to be the headquarters of the setting. It's got a bland name that further confuses the issue. A smithy is a place where a blacksmith works, which I'm guessing is an allusion to the Keepers of the Keys faction, which does fashion keys. But I didn't think portal keys were literal metal keys, so I didn't think the Keepers of the Keys just stood around a furnace hammering metal into keys. And yet that's what the name of the city suggests. And if that is the case, then what about all the other factions? Is the city just one big smithy to them, as well? Or does the name "The Smithy" have nothing to do with blacksmiths, and is just some historical name that no longer applies the way it used to?
The word "labyrinth" has meaning in real-world languages. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a place constructed of or full of intricate passageways and dead ends" or a "a maze (as in a garden) formed by paths separated by high hedges." It can also be something tortuously complex, but the primary meaning of "labyrinth" is a literal maze.
Given that the setting is called "labyrinth" and there's a minotaur on the cover of the Labyrinth Adventures book, and a minotaur on the collector's coin that came with certain tiers of the Kickstarter, there's every reason to make the association between "labyrinth" and "maze". But the Labyrinth setting has no maze. In the Labyrinth setting, the Labyrinth is the space between reality, with lots of avenues to different worlds or planes or both, or something. It's unclear. But it's not a maze. It may be complex and confusing, but it's not a maze, it's not a place constructed of or full of intricate passageways and dead ends. It's a system of roads, with cities and settlements and worlds or planes or something.
I don't understand the intent of this setting. Is the system of roads supposed to be like a maze? How do travelers navigate the Labyrinth? Are there guides? How are they meant to travel? What happens if they go off-road? What else exists between worlds? Is it all just roads? Are there walls, or just fog?
This is all imaginary, so there are infinite possible answers to these questions, and the problem is that the Labyrinth Worldbook provides no answers. I don't understand how you get into the Labyrinth (a portal? maybe? or do portals just take you directly to a plane...or world...or whatever?), I don't understand where you are when you're there, I don't understand how you get from place to place, I don't understand what the places are.
I also don't care. I'm happy to accept whatever the setting gives me. But the Labyrinth doesn't. It simply doesn't address the specific mechanisms of its own setting.
Because Tales of the Valiant (and 5e, and so on) is a game, the mechanisms of the imaginary physical space where players dwell does matter. Weird stuff comes up at the best of times, like the fact that a player can't move diagonally without spending extra movement every other square. So when a setting tells me that player characters have transitioned into a space between reality, I need to know how to explain that to my players. What do you see in the Labyrinth? How do you get around? What happens if you fall off? What's the ground made of? Is there a ground?
When in doubt, make it a mechanic. That's the ultimate way a game book can express reality. If the intent of the Labyrinth is that you enter the Labyrinth and then potentially get lost in a maze of reality, then give me a random table of aimless wondering results. If the intent is that you end up at your destination with ease, but get a glimpse of alternate pathways then give me a random table of possible sights. If the intent is that you have to find a guide, then give me a price list and a few NPC guides to choose from. If it's not explained in the flavour text, and it's also not a mechanic, then it doesn't exist.
Almost every scenario in the Labyrinth Adventures book spends multiple pages detailing every last room in locations that are largely incidental. The Lost Book of Mektar is the most egregious example, in which the player characters are asked to search 27 rooms for a book that's not there.
Obviously not all rooms in any location are important, but when the entire location is unimportant then none of its rooms need to be keyed. A keyed location in an RPG adventure communicate to the game master that there's a dungeon crawl. It's OK to tell the game master that a house is "a normal house" (or whatever) if the only point of the house is to establish that the MacGuffin is not located there. Or maybe key a few rooms. But not all the rooms of all the locations.
The game world isn't supposed to exist only as a place for player characters to hang out in. There's supposed to be lots of other people in the game world, and they're all meant to have their own lives or adventures happening. In other words, important locations in an adventure need background activity.
The Labyrinth feels empty to me. Sometimes there are clunky minigames that force interactions with a non-player character, but often players go to a place and you're given no indication of why the place exists or what people do there. In most settings, I think you can get away with that because most settings are meant to be a standard fantasy world. We can all fill in the blanks. But in the Labyrinth, locations are often, by definition, other-worldly. Players deserve to hear about what the demons in an infernal casino are doing, or what the miners in the fog between pathways are gathering, or what the upper-class faction leaders think about between parties. When player characters arrive in a new realm, they ought to feel like foreigners, and their activity ought to feel like the background noise of someone else's life.
The player characters are travelers between worlds. Selling the idea that there's a world around them is essential.
I think we sometimes ignore the possibility that players might go through an adventure exactly as written, because realistically that basically never happens. But what if it did happen? Playtesting an adventure as if it were on rails can be a valuable indication of how the essential components of a scenario fit together.
I would believe one of the good adventures, like Chasing the Inferno, did some kind of strict playtest. I felt like the steps to Cachor were a little clunky as written, but when my group played, I found that my players had plenty of encounters to choose from while searching for the path to their destination. On the other hand, I've run poor old Lost Book of Mektar twice, and both times I had to drop the next plot point in the midst of the game because my players just weren't getting to the next plot point on their own.
A strict playtest of plot points would look a little like this:
If playtesters can't make a clearly mapped adventure "work" for their characters, then probably players and game masters who don't have a map won't be able to make the adventure work for them.
OK, so the Labyrinth was a bust. We've all devised an adventure or a character that seemed great an the inception, but that turns out to be a flop upon delivery. I'm glad I read the Labyrinth Worldbook and played through much of the Labyrinth Adventures book, because I like to learn from mistakes. Maybe the Labyrinth isn't a wholesale mistake to Kobold Press. It could be exactly the product they wanted to release, and the product happens to not have been for me. Either way, I've learned some tricks that I've now filed away for the future.
And anyway, it's not like playing Labyrinth was torture. I got to play a tabletop RPG, and my players and I were by turns shouting and then grumbling and then laughing. I got my money's worth. Sure, it was sometimes a challenge as a game master, but what doesn't kill you, and all that.