Several months ago, my gaming group started playing through the Labyrinth Adventures book, and frankly it's been tough going. We were surprised to find that Labyrinth Adventures is not actually a campaign, but several stand-alone adventures with a perfunctory side quest to provide the illusion of a greater purpose. Frustratingly, there's no consistent threat, no storyline, and a wildly shifting tone from adventure to adventure. We just finished the Golden Acorn Heist, and this is my review. There are no spoilers in this review.
In the Golden Acorn Heist adventure, a ratatosk (squirrelfolk) asks the player characters to steal a golden acorn that's fallen from the world tree from a demon's stronghold. As has been the case with every scenario in Labyrinth Adventures, this one follows the one-shot formula: State the mission, take the player characters to the location, describe the location in belaboured detail, describe the boss battle at the end. For this adventure, the formula works well enough.
The adventure falters when it decides for you that the player characters will disguise themselves as servants in order to infiltrate the stronghold. I think half the fun of a heist adventure, or more broadly dnd itself, is planning how you're going to accomplish the quest. For whatever reason, this adventure assumes that the player characters are going to disguise themselves as servants, and solve a boring "puzzle" to open the room where the acorn is kept, and then escape. It's easy enough to ignore these prompts, but it also creates an immediate disconnect between what the adventure text provides you and what you need to run the adventure.
Golden Acorn Heist, like Lost Book of Mektar and Song of the Void, spends several pages on location descriptions. The layout is great, with a list of points of interest, a clear list of exits out of each room, and a one-line summary of what the room is like. The problem is, 9 out of 10 locations are completely insignificant. There's never much happening at the key locations, which makes it seem like the Labyrinth is oddly languid, full of mostly empty buildings with just one or two major personalities who aren't really all that involved with anything you do.
For Golden Acorn Heist, I had an Izzet scientist (I'm using Ravnica as a replacement for the bland Smithy of the Labyrinth Worldbook) ask the player characters to retrieve the titular golden acorn. It seems the acorn, coming from Yggdrasil itself, has magical powers, which the Izzet scientist wants to use for a magical item he's crafting. As a reward, he'll give the item to the player characters once it's crafted, and they can beta test it for him.
Instead of being hidden in a vault in a stronghold, I placed the golden acorn in an art gallery run by the Cult of Rakdos. I sketched out the floor plan (or what the player characters would know of the floor plan, anyway) of the gallery, and told them to plan their heist. This gaming group tends to favour action over discussion, so their planning phase was surprisingly brief.
Once the heist began, they successfully detected the demonic guards lingering on the ethereal plane, but failed to detect the magic ward around the acorn. They got past the guards, and set off the magic ward, which reduced their thief to 1 hit point. The players took advantage of some very cool synergies within their adventuring party and got away with the acorn. It took one session, but was a resounding success. The players felt challenged but were ultimately successful despite my best efforts to place obstacles and surprises in their path.
In retrospect, I could have run the adventure closer to how it was written, using the same obstacles I'd invented for my modified session. i think the problem is that the scenario, as written, just doesn't read as an inspiring adventure. I looked over the pages of the adventure and saw the same formula as the first several adventures in the book, a goofy setup, no interesting choices to be made, and a location with no story. I couldn't imagine running the thing as written, so I just changed everything. Were I to run this again, I'd try running the heist within the stronghold provided in the scenario, but I'd definitely let my players decide how they wanted to get in, and what their plan for the heist was.
For me and my gaming group, the multi-planar Labyrinth expansion for Tales of the Valiant hasn't exactly been a success. It's specifically designed to facilitate multi-planar adventures, but it lacks clear distinction between portals, gateways, and rifts, it doesn't provide an actual labyrinth, and its campaign book isn't a campaign. It doesn't have the personality and factions of Planescape, the identity and guilds of Ravnica, or the cool flying ships of Spelljammer. There's nothing compelling enough in the Labyrinth to cause me to use it over the simpler solution of imaginary magic portals and a handful of real source books for other settings. I do not recommend the Labyrinth as a product, and my gaming group is moving away from this campaign now that we've completed the Golden Acorn Heist. It's not the end of the book by any means, but it's the end of our Labyrinth campaign, such as it was.
I have high hopes that the upcoming Northlands setting will be a return to Kobold Press's usual excellent production (and because it's literally a return to Midgard, I anticipate that it will be a vast improvement over Labyrinth.) Hopefully the Labyrinth works better for other gaming groups.