Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game: A Scathingly Positive Review

[NOTE: I originally wrote this review back in 2023 as a guest post for Bones of Contention, a critic collective comprised of many of the best RPG bloggers out there. This review is a little old, but I stand by it!]

Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game is a self-contained system and adventure adapted from the 1986 film Labyrinth, published in 2019 by River Horse Games. The main creators behind it are the brothers Jack and Chris Caesar, but the adventure is mostly written by Ben Milton (AKA Questing Beast). The book is 294 pages and uses the original concept artwork for the movie by Brian Froud, with additional artwork by Ralph Horsley and Johnny Fraser-Allen.

I own the PDF of the game and am currently running it for the second time, both campaigns using Discord voice+text and Roll20 as a VTT. As probably indicated by the fact that I'm running it again, I am a big fan. Short review: 10/10, quite likely the finest experience I've ever had using published RPG material at my table. But this book already has a lot of positive reviews, and I felt like it might be worth it to spotlight some of the qualities that I haven't seen discussed in those. The things which I didn't really discover until I played it myself.

[By the way, the artwork in this post was done by my friend Norn, a groovy firey whose face was stolen by the Goblin King. You can find their stuff and contact them about commissions at norn-noszka.com]

Appendix T&T

This post is part of the "Appendix N" blog bandwagon. I decided to share some of the many influences that have shaped a game I've been working on for a few years called Tricks & Treats.

It's a game about having spooky adventures on Halloween. You roleplay as kids and teenagers celebrating the best holiday ever, taking advantage of a rare night of unsupervised freedom, navigating the complex and unforgiving social landscape of adolescence, and investigating a mysterious horror that needs to be thwarted in order to save the day.

It's built for one-shot mini-sandbox scenarios, each one revolving around a major Halloween activity (trick-or-treating, going to a haunted house, attending a costume party, etc.). They always prominently feature a cast of NPCs thoroughly stocked with conflicts, rumors, and various hooks, and a unique "puzzle monster" that can't be defeated without gathering clues and forming a clever strategy.

There are many obvious cultural touchstones that you can connect to this game. You might expect the Appendix N to include things like Goosebumps, Hocus Pocus, The Monster Squad, The Goonies, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc. Maybe even adult horror like IT and Halloween. And like, sure. Those things are all part of this game. But they weren't part of what I personally put into it.

That's what this post is about. If someone playing it says "wow this is really giving Scooby Doo" or "I'm getting big Over the Garden Wall vibes from this" then that's awesome. By all means, bring those influences to it when you play. But those aren't my influences. These works are.

How Do You Handle the "Inside" of a Hex? (George Lucas Special Edition)

[Context for this post: this is a re-write of an old post of mine I wrote back in 2021. I wasn't happy with my explanation, and it's filled with errors, but people link to it frequently anyway. Please update your links to this version, instead.]

I have noticed an unspoken disparity in the way people seem to use hexes in the context of a hexcrawl, and I think it deserves some attention. That is: do you bother with precision in the movement that takes place within a hex OR do you treat the space within them as fairly nebulous and concern yourself only with the movement between hexes?

This is a surprisingly complex topic.

L Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Mike Mignola

Hey, happy 200th post, Knight at the Opera. Now let's populate this digital megadungeon with some L monsters.

K Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Richard Whitters

K monsters are all plundered from various cultures around the world, perhaps outside the "default" medieval England / France milieu popular high fantasy normally anchors itself within. Anywhere from Japan and China to Germany and Norway to... uh, Atlantis?

Jackalwere at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: this comic

Uhhh... yeah, so I guess this is basically the only major "J" monster in D&D's history. There's a couple other minor ones but only this guy has found his way into the majority of editions. And usually in the core books, too!

I spent literally months with this post sitting in my drafts folder trying to come up with something worthwhile to say about the jackalwere, knowing that it would get an entire post to itself. Unfortunately, I really got nothing.

It's yet another iteration of the classic folklore "stranger danger" monster. It's reminiscent of lycanthropes, it borrows a lot from the Arabian ghul, yet it's not as potent as a Rakshasa or even just a doppelgänger. The art has never been great, and jackals themselves aren't very interesting (even though the word "jackal" is wonderful). Worst of all, I've never used one in a game!

I just started playing The Caverns of Thracia. Guess who guards the entrance. Some gnolls and a jackalwere. You know what that guy ended up doing? Getting sucked into a black hole I opened. Didn't even get a chance to open his mouth or swing a sword or nuthin'. He never stood a chance.

The letter J deserves better.

-Dwiz

I Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Prem (aka Coool Brain)

Been quite a while since the last one of these, huh? Sorry about that, for the three people who found this series interesting. The purpose of this series was to help keep me regularly blogging, but as you may have noticed, I've been busy blogging for the last year. But hey, that's no excuse to leave something unfinished.

Now, where were we?