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]

Board Game Endings, Ranked

This is my tier list for "ways that board games end." Either the trigger for the ending or the way you evaluate the results or whatever. Anything having to do with the ending of a board game. Many of these are mutually compatible, obviously.

I've put them in order of worst to best, and I've included some examples of board games for each one. However, that doesn't mean I'm rating the whole game based on that tier. Diplomacy remains my beloved.

This post is an olive branch to Quinns after my last post.

Review of Initiative Methods

After collecting as many initiative methods into one post as I possibly could, I offered to write a review of them. A few people were interested, and I like having an excuse to exorcise my blog demons. I'm not going to touch on every single method in that list, and I'm not going to give numerical ratings or thumbs up/down or anything like that. I'll tell you what I see as the pros and cons of each major category and whether I personally find them to be worth it. I'll also single out a few particular methods if I have a noteworthy point to make about them. Heads up if you want to follow along with the big list post: I'm not going to review the categories in the same order. You'll see why soon.

Before diving in, I also want to state up front: I frequently see people heaping praise upon an initiative method, calling it revolutionary and preaching to anyone who will listen to adopt it... but they mostly cite pretty unremarkable advantages. Things like, "the GM doesn't have to write anything down" or "there's no dice rolling needed." Uhhhh yeah?

I suspect that those people are probably just describing the first method they've ever encountered that wasn't the "default" option they know from modern D&D (i.e. turn-based, individual, randomized). This is a common phenomenon I've seen my whole life: an RPG hobbyist who's only ever played WotC D&D makes first contact with literally any other game and is immediately convinced it's the greatest game of all time.*

*For me, it was Fantasy Craft.

What I'm saying is, Popcorn Initiative really isn't that special, y'all. It's merely better than one of the worst options.

The Shapeshifter's Duel

I recently had the privilege to take part in an in-person playtest session of The Seven-Part Pact, the upcoming game by Jay Dragon.

The Seven-Part Pact is a game for seven players, each one taking the role of a grand archwizard with phenomenal cosmic powers, sharing a sacred responsibility to hold together the fabric of reality. It exists at the intersection of RPGs, parlor LARP, and board gaming. It has no GM, instead distributing authority and responsibility between everyone. It's simultaneously cooperative and competitive. And it is so massive in scope that no one participant could ever hope to perceive the whole.

I genuinely cannot provide a sufficient play report, and I know that's not something most people read anyway. Instead, I'd like to share just a small slice of my experience playing it.

Ten Years (Part 3)

You've heard the good, the messy, and the annoying. But here in our grand finale? These are the real reasons I haven't run a 5E game in years. The stuff that makes me sometimes not even want to be a player anymore. To the game's credit, none of these things really bothered me for quite a few years. It took a lot of experience with the game before these issues started really getting to me. I'm sure if I played any game long enough, there'd be some aspect of it that would eventually annoy me this much.

All the criticisms I have in this post fall under two umbrellas: magic and combat.

Ten Years (Part 2)

As you know, I quite like D&D 5E. Hopefully I was able to illuminate some of its positive qualities that you may have overlooked. But let's be honest. This is the moment you've all been waiting for. The bad parts. A lot of people bounce off of 5E at first or they fall out of love with it after a while. But you want to know what a person who's spent a full decade playing it has to complain about. What are the most agonizing parts of this game after all this time?

Well, like before, I have to split them up into a few categories. Because "what makes D&D bad" is not just a long list, but a nuanced one.

Ten Years (Part 1)

You've probably noticed me blogging a lot more about 5E lately. And if you've read any of that, you'll know I that I have pretty complicated feelings towards it.

It's still my main group's main game. We've been together since early 2017 and have played multiple 5E campaigns together, including one that went all the way to level 20. But I was also playing it from the day it first released, including a few long-term campaigns and a whole lotta one-shots. I wouldn't even know how to begin calculating a modest estimate of the time I've spent with it. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours.

I myself haven't run a session in 5E in years, though. I've just been too interested in exploring different possibilities. It's how I started in the hobby, and it was inevitable I'd return to that instinct.

I may never end up playing a newer version of D&D ever again. So I thought it might be fitting to write my big retrospective on this game. I hope the amount of experience I have, coupled with my experiences across the rest of the RPG world, gives my perspective some value. At least, more value than 99% of the discourse out there about 5E.

The Best RPG Cover of all Time

This is the cover to the original 1977 Traveller boxed set, now commonly referred to as "Classic Traveller." Because of this iconic cover, May 1st is celebrated as "Traveller Day."

There's been a lot of talk lately about RPG covers in the last week (thanks WotC). So I thought, what better time to reflect on the finest one of all?

I insist that this is not merely old school rose-colored nostalgia. It's not merely "good for its time." I really think this is perfect in a way that no other RPG cover has achieved before or since. Change a single word, a single punctuation, a single nanometer to the kerning, and you have something lesser. And if you're not convinced, then I'm going to explain everything that I like about this image and why. Everything. Yeah, this post is ridiculous overkill. About as bad an idea as explaining a joke. But I want it all to be said.

Spoiler-Free Review of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I just got out of an advanced screening of the D&D movie. It was better than I expected. Not great, but good. I have a lot of very negative things to say, but does anyone want to hear that? Maybe you'll enjoy hearing about some things I enjoyed (without spoilers, of course).

There are many moments in this movie that felt very authentic to the experience of playing an RPG. I don't really give a shit if it "wouldn't work in 5E." If anything, it was a pleasant surprise whenever I saw something that is in 5E. But leave it to a bunch of pedantic, joyless nerds to dwell on the accuracy of rules. This movie understood the far more important thing to get right: what it's like to play an adventure with your friends. Everyone brought a delicately-crafted snowflake PC to the table with some backstory prepared, maybe didn't read up on all the class features they have, sometimes forgot the magic items they got, created stupid running jokes throughout the campaign, and were doing their best to say badass one-liners and funny quips despite being a bunch of nerds sitting around someone's parents' dinner table.

In the first half of the movie, a criticism in the back of my head was, "this is a very mid D&D campaign." The Forgotten Realms remains a garbage setting, and this movie does nothing to redeem it. The DM definitely came up in the modern, story-focused tradition of running the game in "scenes" that they've strung together with some excuse plot which the players are asked not to depart from. The PCs are neither cliche nor are they creative. They are the exact sort of forgettable class+race+tragic backstory combos that most first-time D&D players come up with. "Tiefling druid raised by elves whose motivation is some vague thing about wanting to protect nature, but is still pliable enough that they'll work in the DM's campaign without much friction." A big part of me wished that it was more like, y'know, a good campaign. Maybe even a great campaign.

In the second half, I began to appreciate the value in it being, like, an extremely generic campaign instead. Because that's what most people who play D&D are going to experience. They'll run some shittily-made WotC 5E module set in the Sword Coast with a forgettable villain, listen to (and forget) tons of lore and backstory that both does-and-doesn't matter, and then, every once in awhile... they get to actually play. They're thrown into a scene with a weird and tricky problem to overcome, and they start trying to solve it. They debate, make plans, leverage their resources, make some hilariously stupid suggestions, and eventually succeed through a combination of lucky die rolls and genuinely good ideas, the kind that only D&D players can come up with.

Asking whether or not the movie is good is a bit useless. I have a far more interesting question.

Every now and then someone asks about what movies and shows "feel the most like D&D." The most commonly-agreed upon answers usually aren't high fantasy works like Lord of the Rings or Willow. Rather, they're the ones about characters going on quests, using their noggins to solve problems, usually working as a team, and overall just seem to be tackling challenges that feel like the sorts of thing a DM would cook up to entertain their friends for the evening. Tremors, The Expanse, Jim Henson's Labyrinth, The Mandalorian, Big Trouble in Little China, those sorts of things.

My one thing I was hoping for more than anything else is if this movie would be a fitting answer to that question. "What movies feel the most like playing D&D?" And it actually was.

Overall I rate it a 1/10, because it only had one dwarf in it.

-Dwiz

Enough Dweeb Adventures

I have a hypothesis: Wizards of the Coast's 5E adventures are for fucking weenies.

I know, it's a tall claim to make. Let's prove this through rigorous scientific analysis.

[Okay, in all seriousness, I recognize that I'm really preaching to the choir here. But use this article for 1) knowing how not to write dope adventures, and 2) explaining to your friends who are squares what the difference is between dope adventures and mayonnaise adventures.]

The principal variables I want to examine are villains and conflict. They reveal a lot about a designer's sensibilities towards what's cool. Because as we all know, the bad guys are always cooler than the good guys.

I Want to Talk About The Green Knight

I don't do this very often but this post isn't about RPGs or gaming. It's just some thoughts on fantasy fiction in general, although it does occasionally reference RPGs because that's who I am and I know my audience.

I'll warn you when I'm about to get into spoilers. First I need to set the scene.

This post is a series of short essays. First, what I love about medieval European culture. Second, what I love about Arthurian mythology. Third, what I love about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Lastly, I'll talk about the movie. Warning: about half the sentences in this post begin with, "I like" or "I love," but I hope I'm still able to drive at something deeper than you might expect.