Normally, I don't like multiverse settings and planar mash-ups, as they reduce the importance of the campaign world. This was huge in D&D 4, where the game has a built-in assumption that you became plane-walkers at level 10 (out of 30 total). As a result, we had this feeling that full-blown campaign worlds such as Nerrath, the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, and Athas were "MMO starting zones" and rarely had challenges beyond level 10 living in them.
D&D 4's reimagining of the cosmology was a horrible design, and it started the whole "planar thing" we see in D&D 5E today, where the planes seem more important than the campaign worlds. It is dialed back a little, but the feeling Wizards wants Sigil, Spelljammer, and Planescape as a part of everyone's home campaign worlds puts the Hasbro "foot in the door" to each and every creation of its players, along with all the "product identity" of the game mixes into its monsters and spells, which pollute homebrew worlds and makes them partially owned by Hasbro.
Tales of the Valiant and its mostly IP-free monsters are a better starting point for homebrew.
The MMO-ification of D&D is one of the fatal flaws of D&D 4 and 5E. Arguably, 5E is worse with its MMO resting mechanics codifying the "full resources per encounter" MMO model into resource management. When you can't design adventures and encounters to model the full allocation of party resources, you take the easy route in game design and do a "soft reset" every encounter.
The 3.5E "15-minute adventuring day" has been codified into the rules with 5E; they just got rid of travelling back to town and the inn, and gave that to the party in the mechanics.
What does this have to do with the Labyrinth? Tales of the Valiant and Midgard do not have that "MMO starting zone" feeling, and the worlds are complete "level one to twenty" places. Midgard is a whole world, not just a starting zone, and those high-level CR 30 monsters are running around the sandbox somewhere. Watch out for them.
This is how we initially viewed Nerrath back in the day, the default D&D 4E campaign setting we fell in love with, and yes, it was just one map. We expanded this out with surrounding lands, but it eventually fell to the constant assault of Wizards' D&D releases, and all the planar books buried our imaginations with planar trash that felt "more important" than the world we built.
Our campaign turned from "gritty fantasy survival" into "Star Trek the D&D Generation," where the parties we ran were world-hopping troubleshooters, and the game got stupidly huge in scope and overly political and gate-happy. All of a sudden, Nerrath went from a dangerous, compelling, interesting place (of our own design) to a bedroom community for plane-hopping adventures.
At first glance, the Labyrinth shares similarities with a planar or multiverse campaign. The worlds connected by the Labyrinth are all distinct and different, but they aren’t arranged in a pattern like the Great Wheel of D&D cosmology, or the World Tree Yggdrasil of the Norse mythos. Their pattern, if one can be imposed, resembles a set of marbles scattered in the Void, connected by gossamer strings and of roughly equal import. There are no “outer planes” or “inner planes.” - Guide to the Labyrinth, page 10, Kobold Press.
And on page 11:
In addition to that structural difference, the places connected by the Labyrinth are worlds, not infinite planes. They are the homes of mortal creatures and celestial beings, transfused by more or less magic, and each different in a thousand ways from all others. The Labyrinth connects mortal worlds, not mystical realms of the afterlife. - Guide to the Labyrinth, page 11, Kobold Press.
There is no "Great Wheel" or "symmetrical universe structure" that is the hallmark of D&D. If I go to this place on the Wheel, it will be 100% neutral good, and we will be generally safe here. They tried to break D&D's mental symmetry in D&D 4, and they went right back to their beloved symmetry in D&D 5 because it is product identity (and Planescape relies on it).
The gods, these faiths claim, have no material home—they are entirely spiritual or immaterial, or they dwell in worlds so distant from mortal comprehension as to be effectively unreachable until a soul crosses the boundary of death into the afterlife. - Guide to the Labyrinth, page 11, Kobold Press.
And you can't "walk in on the gods" like you can in D&D. Finally. The Great Wheel that pegs every god to a position based on some imaginary structure in some arbitrary universe model that puts structure on something that effectively cannot be described or quantified is dead and gone.
I love the Labyrinth redesign. This is cool. This addresses D&D's chronic cosmology issues.
No more going into the Greek Mythos and killing gods like this was an early 1980s roleplaying session out of Deities and Demigods. Demons can cross over and make their homes here, but the gods and the supreme demons' "true forms" are untouchable. Projections and manifestations can happen, but these are forces and things that exist in a place far beyond comprehension.
No more killing the gods and demon lords?
They have to use proxies to do their bidding?
Priceless, thank you.
Gods and elder beings showing up is campaign-ruining, and too many of my games suffered from this horrendous trope and D&D shtick. It sucks, it takes the air out of the campaign, and it promotes power-gaming to try and "kill the gods."
Kobold Press' universe model is similar to Monte Cook Games' setting, The Strange. An interconnected place where worlds are born, live, destroyed, and spring into existence overnight out of thought. There is no structure, only the vast sea of imagination, ideas, and dreams out there in a collective consciousness of some mental plane where everyone's psyche is collectively shared. Ideas can spring forth seemingly at random. In The Strange, you can have a small demi-plane with the 1950s show The Honeymooners and its seasons infinitely repeating in its own little reality, and you can visit it, characters can come into consciousness and escape, and this "is as they are" there.
In the Labyrinth, every 5E world sort of exists, not because it is a part of some company's IP, but because the Great Wheel is there, and you need to "buy into" a corporate brand and frame your imagination of fantasy adventuring to their model. Worlds exist in the Labyrinth because they were imagined somewhere and spring to life there. The book even provides a list of worlds envisioned by the original backers of the ToV Kickstarter, each shared as a paragraph description.
Yes, the Forgotten Realms can exist in the Labyrinth, but not because it is a part of the Great Wheel and Hasbro's IP. It exists because millions of people over the past 50 years have played there, read the novels, loved the characters, and experienced the place as if they lived there. We here on Earth don't even know we created the place out in the great Sea of Dreams, but we have, and it exists.
I love that feeling where a shared consciousness can create a world.
Now, this is pulling in heavily from concepts presented in The Strange, but how else can you explain the near-hundred shared campaign worlds in this book? Those come from people's imaginations, and now they are codified, written into a book, shared, and are real places for millions to enjoy. But there is support for this idea in the book:
Worlds Can be Created and Destroyed. The people of the Labyrinth know that entire worlds can be born and die in days or can last timeless ages beyond mortal understanding. But worlds are not eternal: they can be grown, built, or dreamed into existence, or they can arise spontaneously out of the Astral Sea. - Guide to the Labyrinth, pages 8-9, Kobold Press.
The key words here are "dreamed into existence." By who? Not just the people living there, but by a universal consciousness that includes us here on Earth, from our current year going all the way back to the beginning of life on this world. I can have He-Man following Tales of the Valiant rules on a world out there if I want. There is also support for this:
Stories. Because the Labyrinth is the space between worlds, where hidden cities and strongholds are home to strange creatures and bold heroes, your stories are unlimited, and you can hop genres from horror to cottage-core to sword and sorcery as you please—each change of worlds can be a change of genre and tone. Your adventures can hop through rifts and portals into 10,000 worlds—or just to your three or four favorites, with a short stopover for a published adventure you especially like. - Guide to the Labyrinth, page 6, Kobold Press.
Genre can change, so the world's rules on everything can change and be modeled how you want them to be. I am getting a distinct GURPS vibe here, with some worlds acting differently than others. You can have a horror world or a world from a cartoon. You can have Bronze-Age fantasy. You can do a Conan world. You can do science fiction or a mix of fantasy and ancient technology. You can do Heavy Metal or the Dragon's Lair video game. You can do a fantasy Dracula. You can do a Western fantasy mix. You can do Thundarr. You can do Greyhawk. You can do a swashbuckler pirate world. Whatever you can imagine, you can have.
So even a single adventure module, such as the original Isle of Dread, can exist in a demiplane on its own, and the place "just is." Traditional D&D thinking would have you going, "What campaign world is this in, and where do I put it?" It does not have to be anywhere; it can "just be what it is" somewhere, without anything else. You can have "edges of the map" where ships just sail into and fade away, and ships sail out of and appear, like some video game map with an edge of the world no player can ever cross, but the rest of the world just does, and does not question if it is even there.
Again, those ideas are also from The Strange, a great game about imagination that is worth reading. Nobody questions the demiplane, but you can break free and awaken. Then, the pathways open to you, and you can escape the Matrix.
I can have a world comprised of just two modules, Keep on the Borderlands, and the Isle of Dread. Get on a ship in one, and appear in the other. The players could know they are trapped in these two demiplanes, but no one else does. They could discover a new adventure zone through another pathway, such as the Tomb of Horrors, and exist within a strange realm of worlds that are real to those who inhabit them, but strangely trapped inside the spaces of dreams.
What Kobold Press is trying to do here is break the D&D model of imagining fantasy. D&D began just like this, as an "anything and anywhere" system that could be applied to any setting. Over the years, the IP piled up, and now if we want Dracula, we must play Ravenloft. If we wish to play Conan, we need to play Dark Sun. The copyrighted IP excludes imagination.
And the Great Wheel is the corporate framework in which all this IP and controls hang.
So Tales of the Valiant comes along, eliminates all the Wizards' IP, takes a sledgehammer to the Great Wheel, and puts your imagination in the forefront, instead of copyrighted IP. You are outside the cave. You have a universe model that puts your ideas at the forefront. You don't need Sigil, the City of Doors, hanging out there, or Spelljammer starships flying in like the Millennium Falcon. You are free to make the realms and Greyhawk your own places, or not use them at all. You can demiplane it with just a few locations, or build an entire unique world of your own.
Another game that tries to get you creating worlds and breaking free of Wizards' IP? Daggerheart. They have you making an entirely unique world every time you start a campaign. Every company creating alternative games out here knows it has to break the juggernaut of Wizards' IP. If you simply create "new rules to play by," you are doomed to be a second choice and ceding the fight to D&D. But, if you put my ideas first? Does your game celebrate my creativity? I will play your game.
And the D&D IP grows tired and overused, just like a lot of the nostalgia entertainment companies foist on us as a lie. Star Wars and Star Trek are the only science fiction series. D&D is the only fantasy. Marvel and DC are the only superheroes. None of it is true. What you create should be celebrated and held up first, before all these other ideas.
Tales of the Valiant is more than just "Xeroxed D&D."
It is more of a key used to free yourself from the chains of copyrighted IP, and a door that opens to your imagination. There is a larger concept at play here, a freedom and realm of imagination and possibility that many will never experience because they don't understand why it is being done in this way. This is why ToV has a robust monster design system. If I want a sewer world with garbage elementals, I can have it. If I want a world with killer robots that shoot lasers, I design the monsters and I have them.
D&D 2024 dropped monster design. Ask yourself why? This is supposed to be a game about imagination. Then why is it just about copyrighted IP? Why are they doubling down on the cartoon? Why so much nostalgia, and so few of the players' ideas?
This is not about system choice.
This is about the freedom to use your imagination to dream and create infinite worlds.
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