I backed the Labyrinth setting for Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press on Kickstarter. Along with the worldbook and the campaign book, I purchased the supplemental game material by Beadle & Grimm. I'd heard of Beadle & Grimm when they were doing bespoke kits for popular D&D 5e modules, and I thought it sounded really useful. It seemed like a great way to get stuff that, really, you should get anyway with the book. This is my review of the Beadle & Grimm supplementary material for Labyrinth Adventures.
I'll tell you up front that it's a mixed review. There are some good things and some frustrating things about the product.
One of the [many] best things about Paizo is how prolific they are. You hang around Paizo enough, and you start to accumulate assets that work really well together. You buy an adventure path, and a couple of maps, maybe an item card deck, and so on, and eventually you've got a private gaming library. Not all the maps they produce are bound to a specific adventure, but some are, and the others are generic enough to work with lots of adventures. You really only need one map of a magic school, or a jungle lair, or an evil temple, and you're basically good forever. Paizo manages this really really well, and gives you lots of options.
D&D in its 5th edition form never really worked its way up to the same level of supplementary material. They often had maps in the books, but the maps were small and if you wanted to use them you had to photocopy and enlarge them, and after a while it just became too much trouble. I bought the D&D-branded "Tactical Maps Reincarnated" and they were just terrible. Every map felt like it was just a corner of a larger location, and none of the dungeon maps had a clear distinction between corridors and rooms.
As a direct answer to this problem, Beadle & Grimm started producing Dungeon Master kits for popular modules. They were bespoke and expensive, but if you were going to spend a year or more running an adventure, why not spend some cash to make the game sessions more enjoyable? I never bought one because at the time I wasn't running 5e, but I thought it seemed like a brilliant idea, and always wanted to try one. A decade later, Tales of the Valiant exists and Beadle & Grimm have branched out to systems not produced by Wizards of the Coast, so I jumped at the chance to get a kit for my upcoming Labyrinth campaign.
In the box, there are some tactical maps, some item cards, some sheets of monster stats and portraits, and some player handouts. Also, a game master screen specific to the Labyrinth. And some foam for padding, which is never a good sign in a box that's meant to be packed with useful gaming assets.
I'll start with what doesn't work, because I think the only thing that makes it "bad" is the difference between expectation and delivery. The kit is basically all good. What's bad is what's not there, and the feeling of frustration during a game when you discover that you don't actually have what you thought you had.
The most egregious omission from the kit are some monster and some NPC stats. Which monsters and NPCs are missing? That's the frustrating part. If you start confidently running the adventure knowing that your Beadle & Grimm box is close at hand and contains everything you need, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. As it turns out, the box only contains some of the monsters and NPCs you need.
To be fair, there's an index in the box that tells you exactly what it contains. But you're not running the adventure out of the box, you're running it out of a book. So even if you do a lot of upfront work to highlight which stat card you have in the box for each adventure, the reality is that you don't know what you need until your players decide. When that happens, you're likely staring at a boldface monster or NPC name, frantically trying to recall where its stat block is located. Is that one that came in the box? Or is it in the Monster Vault? Or in the back of the Labyrinth Worldbook?
After the first 2 adventures, I did my self the favour of pretending the box had no stat cards, and I just used my books as usual.
Solution: Sit down with each adventure in advance and highlight, in the book, which monsters and NPCs have stat blocks in the Beadle & Grimm box.
Some items get tarot-sized cards to help players remember that they have them. Obviously not every item in an imaginary world can be committed to a card in a finite box, so the item cards are understandably incomplete. I get it, no problem.
What's strange to me is that the cards have no art on them. I own several item and face decks for Paizo adventures, and they all have artwork. Every item gets a portrait, from humble sack cloth to elaborate magical item.
The Beadle & Grimm cards have a stock image suitable to the Labyrinth setting on the back, and the item name and description on the front. Does it do the job? Yeah, I guess, but is it any better than players just jotting down the item on their character sheet? I don't understand what value the cards add to the game.
Solution: There's no helping the lack of art. As with the stat cards though, you need to sit down with the adventure in advance and highlight what items have cards, or else you'll miss what needs to be handed out.
Battle maps are hard, because like items there are an infinite number of places a battle could break out. I tried playing the adventures as close to what was written as possible, and still combat happened at unexpected times and in unexpected places. As a result, most of the maps were nice to have when things happened to align, but never something I came to rely on.
I don't know what the right solution for this is. I guess the only guaranteed all-inclusive map experience is for a closed system, like a dungeon (come to think of it, it's odd that the first adventure didn't have a map of the setting that took up 95% of play time.)
In the end, I was finding myself telling my players that the map I was laying out did not reflect the in-game reality. That, of course, negates the point of having bespoke maps, so half way through the campaign I just filed the maps away with all my other D&D maps and just sort of rummaged through my folder for a map that vaguely fit the situation.
Solution: For me, it was back to a dry-erase mat and whiteboard markers, except when I remembered I had a map that suited the occasion.
Aside from stuff that's not there, everything that is there is pretty great (I still don't love the item cards, though).
The maps are nice and they're in my collection now and they'll be used for lots of adventures from now until they fall apart.
The stat cards are handy as long as you remember which ones you have access to. They're also sensibly designed to drape nicely over the game master screen, so your players see the art for the creature without you having to hold up the book while self-consciously trying to cover up the important numbers and descriptions.
The game master screen is nice, and probably should be its own separate product. It's really nice. It's got a "map" of the Labyrinth, a reminder of the major gods, and other general game data. It's a useful screen, especially for games in that setting.
Last but not least, there are a bunch of handouts in the box, and they're really nice. My players love them. In terms of bespoke, this is where all the bespoke got spent. I genuinely believe the handouts are hand-made. My players love the texture of the papers, and they greatly appreciated having in-world "evidence" to hold onto during the game.
As with everything else, there are some surprise omissions. I searched for what felt like several awkward minutes for a note that I'd sworn was in the box, only to decide in the end that it was a handout that hadn't been included. To this day, I'm not really convinced I didn't just drop it somewhere, and I still look under tables and chairs of my office and game room thinking I'll find it.
My advice is to sit down with the adventure and highlight items you definitely have in the box.
As nice as the handouts are, I'm aware that I could have made them all myself at home. It doesn't take long, it's not difficult, and it's something I've done for past games. Are the handouts alone worth the price of the box?
For me, no. Beadle & Grimm kits are expensive, but so is everything in New Zealand. The thing about a Beadle & Grimm supplement is that it's an expense on top of another expense. I already bought the books, so deep down I feel like I ought to have the stat cards, the item cards, the maps, and the handouts. When I chose to purchase them "again", I have to admit I expected something really special.
What I got, in practise, only created more prep work for me. I couldn't just open the box and start running the adventure, because I never knew what the box did or did not contain. Because the adventure book wasn't published with the box's existence in mind, there's no indication in the text of what I would find in the kit and what I would have to look elsewhere for. In the end, I feel like I paid twice the price of the book only to have to reverse engineer what I'd bought.
The best parts of the box are the handouts and the game master screen. I consider a game master screen non-essential, and the handouts I know I can either make myself or leave up to my players' imagination.
Given that I ended up not using the one I had, I'm unlikely to purchase another Beadle & Grimm game master kit. I like the concept, but maybe it's one of those ideas best left for a boxed game.
Cover image by Kobold Press.