I got my two Labyrinth hardcovers today, the World Book and the Adventure Book, along with the early backer coin, which is very lovely. I like the Tales of the Valiant universe setup; it is one reality, one universe, one place, and it is connected by pathways "between space and time" called the Labyrinth.
There are no planes. There is no plane walking. There is no "Prime Material Plane" with infinite universes.
Where the gods live is a realm beyond anyone's ability to get there, and it keeps players from hunting and killing gods and elder demons. They can project a form into this world, which may take hundreds of years to reform, but you aren't killing them permanently.
Thank you for a sane universe setup, Kobold Press. Planar campaigns have ruined my campaigns for over 40 years, and it is way past time this was put to a stop. Planar campaigns killed D&D 4E for us, as every one of the iconic worlds, including the forever utterly destroyed Forgotten Realms that collapsed the entire Underdark and cratered the world, were turned into level 1-10 "MMO starting zones" before the planar adventures started.
Come to think of it, we loved D&D 4E, but what D&D 4E did to the established campaign worlds was to completely destroy them all. The changes were too significant, as the shoehorned-in races into the worlds that never belonged there, because the game did not want to mess with the "MMO character creation" of the core books. They advanced the plots through terrible retcons and world-spanning changes for the sake of the "rule of cool."
Every world was destroyed by Eberron's design sensibilities. I loved Eberron, but only there, not everywhere.
Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant get it right. You get one universe to play in, as many campaign settings as you can imagine, but only one universe with no planes. Where you are right now is important, and it means something. You can't just "colonize the planes" as if it were some place with infinite land and resources, building utopias "just because" and seemingly having infinite resources to support city-sized populations "because of magic."
I hate this notion that magic is free to use, without an ultimate cost or price. It is "running up the National Mana Debt" clock, getting infinite free resources, food, goods, and anything else you want, "just because I want it." I love a yin-and-yang to magic; what you get is what you must pay. Sustain a population on magic? Prepare to have them start to change and mutate after a few generations, as those chickens come home to roost.
Nothing is free. Farm the land and live a sustainable existence, just like how this world works, and you will be safe. Live off of magic, and that karma debt keeps piling up every time you get free stuff. Even in Tales of the Valiant, this will be a theme for me. On the small scale, you will be fine. Try to live off magic on a civilizational scale, and you are asking for trouble, like, on a Pompeii or City of Sodom level of trouble.
Just because one character can do it does not mean magic is the enabler of free everything in a society. If it scales to industrial levels, it isn't magic. Yes, part of this is Eberron's problem as well, and it sort of started the "free civilizational magic" thing. Looking back, Eberron had its flaws.
This is why Dungeon Crawl Classics is the best magic system in gaming. You will eventually pay a price for everything. Even divine magic comes with a cost.
The Labyrinth books are cool, and they are an excellent framework to stitch together campaign worlds and settings without needing to drag Heaven, Hell, the gods, all the demons, elemental planes, a Great Wheel, various neutral places nobody cares about, spoke-like structures that don't really have a concept in reality, an axial hub that stretches the metaphor, cities with billions of people living there like this is a usual place, and all this planar baggage we need to go through just to go visit another world.
We even get more character options here, which is always welcome and tides us over until the Player's Guide 2, which is in its final days as a Kickstarter, and please go support that to keep Open 5E alive and well.
Highly recommended.
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