My Labyrinth: Midgard

I am building my Labyrinth and putting together some of the best third-party 5E settings, centered around the official Kobold Press world, Midgard. So, of course, I will start here, in one of the best non-D&D world settings out there, and one that feels better supported with gazetteers, adventures, history, and current events.

Midgard feels better constructed than the Forgotten Realms at this point; it is not stitched together from novels, has not undergone so many sweeping changes and retcons, and the entire world feels grounded and cohesive. There is no video game, so there isn't that distraction hanging over the campaign. There are times when I want the video game to stand on its own, and the campaign setting to stand on its own. I have seen a game come in and take over a setting, and it feels like the setting will never escape the pop-culture moment, and shall forever serve it as fan service.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game, but I want to move past it. I am ready for new characters and adventures, and the ones they keep putting on the covers of books need to be retired, lest they become the Realm's next version of the unkillable GMNPCs, which the setting has long suffered from.

Midgard forces me to create new iconic heroes, and nine times out of ten, those will be the PCs.

Also, once I start putting the "TSR/Wizards worlds" in there, they will slowly begin to take over the campaign. They are too comfortable and familiar. You can always "fall back to Waterdeep" and "find a safe place." I want players to feel like a fish out of water, without any comfortable place to lean on, and to be forced to care for and learn about a new and different place.

The best campaigns I ever ran were "fish out of water," where the players were caught entirely off guard, forced to survive, learn about new places and people, and show how clever and resourceful they were to adapt. They had to get to know people, figure out who they could trust, take some bumps along the way, and live in an entirely new world.

Familiarity and comfort are the opposite of excitement and adventure.

Even in the modern era, with the melting pot of 1001 races and cultures, Midgard still holds up far better than most other settings, where new races and backgrounds don't seem to have a history with the world, and everything feels like it was recently dropped in. While Midgard feels more malleable, the other settings' decades of history hold them back. I played in the original versions of Greyhawk, the Treams, Mystara, and all these different races were not in the setting. They exist outside the lore, have no homelands, and have no history; all of them feel transient.

They have all been retconned into the world with no history or reason.

Eberron was one of the few worlds that tried to make sense of the different lore, and that was the last we saw of the company trying to create a setting for the game, rather than play on nostalgia and shoehorn in the new stuff alongside the old. Midgard is not as well-known, and it has a lot of room for my own creations, so it feels more open to change.

Granted, you can say they are "new planar arrivals" in any setting, but Midgard has a stronger connection to the Labyrinth. This less planar, more grounded dimensional passageway feels like The Ways from the Wheel of Time books. I like the Labyrinth a lot, and it is the glue that holds the universe together.

The Labyrinth beats the stuffing out of the D&D Multiverse in comparison to creating a fantasy universe framework. The D&D Multiverse is too closely tied to gods, the old alignment wheel, and there is no mystery to the structure or composition of the planes. It focuses too much on the home of the gods, and not enough on what D&D lumps together in the "Prime Material Plane." The Labyrinth pushes the gods into smaller homes and places greater focus on actual campaign worlds and the connections between them.

Where the D&D Multiverse is god and alignment-centered, ToV's Labyrinth is strictly campaign-world-focused. The Gods have no structure, and if you wanted "Norse god home" you could insert it into the Labyrinth without needing to change much else, or reflect what the Chaotic Neutral god home is, what the Neutral Evil go home is like, and all the silly structure and symmetry the concept is enamoured with.

The Midgard worldbook also cautions against having too many fantastical ancestries in a party, and advises focusing on a few; with too many, the party begins to feel more like outsiders and a motley band of wanderers. Connections and mixing in are essential in a world like this. If you are in the Northlands, play a Northlands mix of ancersteries, have some connections to the place, and fit in better. A frog person, a dhampir, a dark elf, and a trollkin in these lands are going to raise some eyebrows.

Midgard and the Tales of the Valiant cosmology setup is much stronger than D&D's, and it reduces the importance of the outer planes in the setting, and instead puts the focus squarely on campaign worlds, where it should be. Ever since D&D 4E, the outer planes have felt too crucial to the D&D setting, reducing the campaign world to MMO starter zones, and making them feel like places that you forget and move on from once you have planar travel.

In the Labyrinth, I can focus on two or three campaign worlds and never have any travel to the outer planes. The lands, peoples, and places are still significant. These random-planar cities and other outer enclaves, all trying to recreate the magic of Planescape (but failing), do not diminish the importance of the core campaign worlds. Midgard will always be the "prime campaign world," and that will ground the campaign.

When I used the planes in AD&D, nothing was habitable for any extended period, and some outer planes, if you tried living in them, would change you physically and mentally. If you live in the Beastlands for too long, you will develop animal-like features and slowly transform into an animal. Pandemonium? You will slowly go insane. The Abyss? You slowly turn into a demon, grow horns and hooves, and your alignment shifts permanently toward chaos and evil.

Valhalla? You grow wings, your hair turns blonde, you never want to leave, a pegasus shows up and asks to be yours if you stay, and you adopt the northland's accent like a Norwegian or a Swede. Or you turn into a troll or dark elf. The Spider Queen's plane? You all start to slowly turn into dark elves, driders, or, most likely? Insects. You wake up with giant bug eyes, -2 CHR, and get a +2 on perception checks. You decided to stick around and never paid attention to the constant buzzing that drove the halfling insane. The dwarf turned into a giant centipede last night, and we can't find him.

There is no absolute save for these effects, and they will get you, since you are only mortals. The longer you stay, the worse it gets, and the worse the saving-throw penalty I will give you. There are no tourists in the outer planes. Sorry, you are mortals, and these places have far too much power for you to withstand or comprehend.

Some planes do not have air or water, or will dissolve you alive. Others are the insides of living beings. Some lack the third dimension. Others have nonsensical geometry, and you will step into a wall and get lost forever. Save versus spells, fail, and the character sheet gets torn up.

People's brains these days cannot comprehend how alien my outer planes are, or how terrible they are to visit. This is the only way to run them, or they become permanent campaign suburbs that take over the game and render all the game worlds as meaningless starting zones.

But that sort of almost Lovecraftian absolutism is needed, or else the planes are "just another place," and they mean nothing at all.

The art in the Kobold Press books is fantastic, and it feels more like fantasy than the Realms. The current Wizards team is leaning too hard into modernity, and D&D feels like an anime version of Harry Potter, with too many steampunk overtones. Fancy trench coats and Victorian-era suits with vests and ties are not medieval armor, and the art does not match the feeling I want. I want plate armor to look heavy and impose a restriction. It is not fashion; it is armor with a practical, life-saving use.

I want armor to feel like it is needed and saves lives; it is not a fashion choice.

And the Labyrinth forces a geography on players. If the exit to a new world is in a particular world, they will need to start there. The gate spell may not be used, as the spell description mentions.

"Deities and other planar rulers can prevent portals created by this spell from opening in their presence or anywhere within their domains." - ToV, Player's Guide, page 283

When you exit, you are forced to "start here," wherever "here" may be. There could be a couple of exits in the same world, and travelling between them is dangerous, but faster than the alternative. This gives the referee some control over the "gate game" and forces players to deal with the locals when they pop out. Campaigns can be ruined by "too many gates" or "gate rooms" where travel between worlds becomes too easy, and you just use a transport hub to get anywhere you want to go.

Midgard has maps, cultures, places, fascinating lore, and a story behind every place in the world. I can read the book for hours and be inspired to create adventures here. This world still feels like a fantasy to me, and that gritty, down-to-earth touch of life without technology feels true here.

Once you dig in, you will find this is a fantastic setting that does everything you want it to. It does feel like Paizo's Golarion, in that there are dedicated areas for every type of adventure, but they feel distinctly different than Pathfinder's offerings. Where Golarion's themepark areas seem very on the nose, Midgard's areas are more subtle and have their own identity.

Choosing Midgard as the campaign homeworld for my version of the Labyrinth feels like a good choice, as does keeping the TSR/Wizards worlds off the cosmos so we can focus on this world, and not fall back on comfort or nostalgia.

Midgard is a solid choice, and a great place to begin.