It’s a good time to get lost in a Labyrinth. The Labyrinth Worldbook and Labyrinth Adventures are on their way to the public, and the Labyrinth World Archive is live for any gamer to share their homebrew (while retaining all the rights!).
I figured I’d share how the Labyrinth came to be, what it does with the Kobold Press cosmology, and where it might be headed down the road. Let’s open a portal to the design process, shall we?
Where is Midgard Monday? For nearly three years, the Kobold blog has offered free Midgard content to loyal fans and curious newcomers. Kobold Press is committed to Midgard, and the Labyrinth is an outgrowth of the setting, even as it peers into other places. For at least a while, Midgard Mondays is becoming MAZE MONDAYS as we explore this strange, new place known as the Labyrinth!
Foundations of the Labyrinth
Nothing creative happens in a vacuum or without reference to a context or to what came before. The Labyrinth as a space-between-worlds owes a lot to the SF of the ’70s into the ’90s, such as the Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny, the Riverworld books by Phillip José Farmer, the Time Bandits film, or the Stargate universe.
The idea of a many-worlds setting is straightforward, and somewhat like the isekai concept, in that it links disparate worlds and makes them all playable or explorable. The specifics of the Labyrinth unite and expand on things very much part of the Kobold Press view of fantasy—fantasy worlds are many, and the flavors are all different, but it should be easy to go from one to another.
So, the design goal was to show a set of bubble cities, paths, tunnels and portals that connect, and that some scholars, heroes, and fools know how to get from one branch of the maze to another. So the first question from a lore and cosmology perspective was: who found the Labyrinth, and how did they survive it?
Fortunately, a ready-made answer already existed in the Midgard setting, where the Great Labyrinth of the minotaurs has been canonical for a decade or more. The Great Labyrinth was defined as a place of protection and religion for minotaurs. Their clerics can open portals from within it to many locations around Midgard . . . and perhaps beyond.
Second question was, just how many worlds are we connecting? The answer is twofold: The Labyrinth connects about ten core worlds. Each is described in some depth in the Labyrinth Worldbook, and that defines a great many adventure options.
However, the Labyrinth also connects about ten thousand worlds that define the setting. So design had to embrace the core, but leave plenty of room for expansions, one-shots, and anyone’s personal favorite world to appear in the setting. This definition of a that flexible framework started with help from the community in the Guide to the Labyrinth released in 2024, which sketched out the framework for the setting and factions. It also included about sixty new worlds shared by backers (who retained all rights to their worlds). How do you hold all that together?
A Campaign Overlay
Enter the concept of a campaign overlay. A campaign overlay is meant to make it easy to bridge your homebrew campaign, your favorite published world, and any other world you like, including the core worlds of the Labyrinth. You can go from Golarian to Midgard or the Realms. You can swing through ancient Egypt on the way from the Court of Shadow Fey to steampunk Castle Falkenstein. This makes it both highly entertaining, and non-disruptive to everyone’s existing campaign setting.
Why non-disruptive? Well, for as long as D&D and related games have been around, the majority of the GMs and players have played in worlds of their own creation. D&D was invented to enable homebrew settings, to empower GMs to build worlds (ahem, Kobold Guides to Worldbuilding Volume 1 and Volume 2). Making a creation of your own is deeply satisfying—why play in someone else’s world?
Because sometimes that’s exactly what you want. Maybe your players want to visit Eberron for its lightning rails and noir touches and a mystery. Maybe they want to visit the Dragon Empire in Midgard to deal with a dragon who literally commands armies and collects tribute from entire nations. Or the clockwork city of Zobeck, to learn the secrets of making a particular automaton. Maybe you want to gather runes from the Rune Lords of Golarion, or dine with Count Strahd von Zarovich.
If you want to visit the best fantasy worlds and get a taste of the very best of each one, that’s an awesome campaign. Or it could just be done to get Frank to shut up about Dragonlance for once. It’s a way to run your “change of pace” game without going full Call of Cthulhu or figuring out the rules to Tales from the Loop in a week.
So how does that work, exactly? I’ll talk about that next week.
The factions are perfect for really engaging campaigns that span a number of worlds and are easily fitted into any home brew. I also love the overlay of a smaller pantheon, which makes home brew building simple. Just pick up these two and the never ending battle against the Void and you have a solid foundation for setting hopping with a tangible thread that tightly binds them and the story. Bravo!