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, how the Void was defined, and where it might be headed down the road. Here’s part 1 if you missed it. Let’s continue!
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!
Enter the Labyrinth
Kobold Press has built settings and regions of clear, distinct, playable flavor for nearly 20 years. Why not put the best of them into a single menu? Instead of infinite planes with few functional locales, I drafted the existing Hells, the River Styx, the World Tree Yggdrasil, and the Great Maze to serve as tools connecting a few key worlds.
The places where adventures ALREADY thrive became the heart of the core worlds, plus the addition of one dead world (Coldforge) as a place to loot ancient magic and unbury titanic secrets, and one place that has been hinted at for years, namely the fey home of the Summerlands. Now we needed to define goals, powers, and creatures for far less than 60 worlds, but with the best of Kobold behind it.
Then Richard Green (see his design diary here) added deeper detail to the factions and characters and locales many of the core worlds, and his own world of Parsantium became part of the Labyrinth. The threads to connect one world to another grew stronger with the ability to pop from one world to another using the portals of the Keepers of the Keys faction, or the rifts torn in reality by Void-based factions. Frequent design meetings kept the lore in sync with mechanics, and vice versa.
The tools for visiting worlds and bouncing back belong to the factions of the Labyrinth. They understand and command various ways to move from one world to another and back. Sometimes, of course, heroes stumble into another world. There’s lots of drop-ins, gear, magic, and support for this concept, and a healthy dose of advice on how to run it as a one-off or a “guest star” sort of series.
No one should visit the Labyrinth without a full pack, is what I’m saying.
Arguing About the Void
What unites the Labyrinth as a place, if everything about it is so different? The Labyrinth is a single setting because the various factions there all have tools and magic for traveling between worlds. As a result, they see something that heroes of a single world do not. They understand the threat of the Void.
The magic of the Void is easy, corrupting, and destroys what it touches. Heroes of the Labyrinth know this, because they’ve seen dead worlds up close. They’ve seen void cultists and rippers tear a world part, and they know that once the seed of corruption is planted, it can’t be just cut back. It must be burned out.
The Concord of Stars faction might be the most fanatical in rooting out Void corruption, but all Labyrinth heroes understand the danger. The Void eats worlds. Its dark promises turn thriving worlds into sterile places of drifting sand and endless night. It’s a universal evil and entropic force that gives heroes a common enemy.
But before we got to that point, the designers had many long arguments about what the Void is and how it works, precisely.
A certain crowd wanted the Void to be a Spelljammer knockoff with space ships, void pirates, space dragons, and possibly some hippos with guns. I was not a fan of that approach. I see the Void as an inimical force that destroys everything it touches, not space with a fantasy flair. So there were, shall we say, heated discussions about that.
A History of Nothingness
Now, the Void and its powers have deep roots with Kobold Press. Early examples of it for 5E were designed by Dan Dillon, including the Void Dragon from Tome of Beasts 1, and also Deep Magic: Void Magic. But it goes back further to 2014, Deep Magic for Pathfinder RPG, which saw the first appearance of the voidling.
The void has been associated with evil, corruption, and cool purple mage bolts from the start. It entered the player character realm with Void corruption points (again designed by Dan Dillon) for the Midgard Heroes Handbook. The first Labyrinth-style Void faction was likely the Demon Cults & Secret Societies: Harbingers of the Void, and the first all-void adventure was probably Warlock Lairs 70: the Voidspeaker’s Apprentice. There are many others.
And I share some of the blame for Void creeping into Kobold lore. I created the satarre as a race comfortable with oblivion in Tome of Beasts 2. And to codify some of this, I created the void saint Nargoth (check out his sweet t-shirt) and a selection of void spells to describe a form of dark power in Warlock: Void Magic. (In the same issue, the editor commissioned a set of spaceship stats. Sigh.)
Ultimately, the design direction came to me in a nightmarish vision. The Void was not just implacable evil, the realm that devours worlds, it was ALSO a gravity-less entropic plane enabling stellar travel. The Near Void is the region that is survivable by low-level characters, dangerous but not instantly fatal. It allows people to walk through it without hiring some paddlewheel monstrosity. It makes it possible to have Void adventures in tier 1 play.
By contrast, the Deep Void is darker, barely capable of sustaining life. Undead, demons, and a few mad cultists survive there, plotting against the living and the sunlit realms. You can visit it with powerful magic, flying on the back of a void dragon, or yes, on a void ship powered by the wind between the stars. Much more detail on its hazards and inhabitants are in the Labyrinth Worldbook.
But you’ve been warned.
Adding Your World to the Labyrinth
So, I’ve talked about how the cosmology came together, the roots of the Void, and some of the ways in which the Labyrinth empowers gameplay. However, it’s not entirely about the Worldbook. A great joy of making your own homebrew campaign is sharing it, so Kobold press launched the Labyrinth World Archive. It’s for anyone with a world of their own to tell people about it. People other than your existing players, that is.
You can share its name, its connections to factions or other worlds, and its important highlights, places, and characters. You retain all rights to your submission and can delete it whenever you like. You can also comment on other entries.
Heck, if the Archive gets big enough (100 entries? 400?), I suspect I might ask people to vote on favorites, or find other ways to grow the Labyrinth. People might share their own adventures, in the style of DM’s Guild. It’s very much a community effort. If people like it, it thrives, and if people ignore it, we’ll move on.
But mostly, I love the idea of a catalog of everyone’s homebrews, and I hope that idea warms your heart a bit as well.