Into the Labyrinth: Musings on Labyrinth Worlds

I've not been as active on my blog lately not because I've been too busy doing other things, but because most of the things I've been working on aren't "ready for primetime."  That said, one of the points of the blog is to let people see "how the sausage gets made," so revealing some of my thoughts and approach to things might not be a bad idea.  It at least shows you things going on behind the scenes and gives you material to chew on and perhaps do something with on your own.

Recently, the Tall Tales group chose to explore a route that brings them the most directly into contact with the Labyrinth and the Skairos.  I've been thinking about them for a long time, which likely is surprising to some, as the Labyrinth is just a foot note in other posts but in my head, it becomes increasingly central to the "mysteries, monsters and conspiracies" of the Glorian Rim.  They are:

• The source and wellspring of the Akashic Mysteries
• An initiation trial of House Kain
• A means of exploring the galaxy without ever getting onto a ship.
• A source of cool monsters and lost relics.

Thus the labyrinth is likely deserving of more attention than it's getting and, with it, their creators (or, at least, the race most deeply associated with them, the Skairos).

Inspirations for the Labyrinthine Worlds

Ideas churn in my mind constantly, and I attempt to feed that churn by constantly consuming interesting works related to what I'm doing.  For the Akashic Mysteries in general, I had known I wanted something that felt a bit like the more conspiratorial versions of the actual paranormal research of the 60s and 70s paired with new age thought, mixed with the cthonic cults of ancient Greece (especially the Oracle of Delphi and the Elysian Mysteries).  I also knew I wanted something that involved multiple timelines crossing, like a council of time-shadows where people from the past consulted with people from the future.  All of this blended into the Akashic Mysteries.


Inspiration for the Labyrinthine Worlds came later, as I read the Hyperion Cantos, wherein they literally have Labyrinthine Worlds. As far as I can tell, these were just worlds hollowed out by mysterious builders who, I believe, intended to use them as mass graves for all of humanity. Pretty dark!  But I loved the idea of exploring a world of caverns and tunnels and ancient ruins deep beneath the Earth.  I think everyone does, and that's one of the appeals of Tolkien's Moria, which itself seems to have inspired most of D&D, which boasts some pretty vast "mega-dungeons."  But what would sci-fi be if not offering what fantasy does, but turned up to cosmic proportions?

And if we combine this idea of worlds riddled with ancient tunnels with the ideas behind the Elysian Mysteries and the idea of seeking out the secrets of the labyrinth of your own mind, we create a nicely bisocciated mirror between physical caverns and cosmic self-experience.  To descend into the labyrinth is to descend into a metaphorical and literal underworld where one seeks to gain cosmic knowledge.  At least twice, I've used this metaphor, both for the initiation rites of House Kain, and for the initiation rites of the Akashic Mysteries and House Sabine, though one is martial and the other is sorcerous.

The Labyrinth as Dungeon

The Labyrinth also reveals another need in Psi-Wars, one which has been mounting for quite some time: Psi-Wars is as much a monster-hunting setting as it is an Action setting. In fact, I think you can make the case that it's a "kitchen sink" setting, but it tends to embrace the themes of monster hunting and action more than it embraces the themes of Dungeon Fantasy and After the End.  Characters don't descend into labyrinths to kill monsters and take their stuff (well, I mean, members of House Kain might, but that's more of a background thing than something that's explicitly the focus of the game design of the setting), but rather, they engage in Action-oriented stuff, like defeating the Empire or uncovering an insidious conspiracy, and sometimes that insidious conspiracy has its origins in something truly monstrous, at which point, the characters need to transition to more supernatural tasks.  Fortunately, we already have the core tools players might need to do that: this is a setting that already brims with psychic and divine power.  We just need to give them something to fight.

As we dig into the themes of the Glorian Rim, we find that we have layer after layer to explore.  We have the superficial layer of the war between the Alliance and the Empire, but beneath that we have the rivalries between the houses and the criminal empires that lurk just under the civilized veneer of the aristocracy.  Beneath that, and we start digging into the mysteries of the Alexian dynasty, and beneath that, the Akashic Order that stood behind the Alexian Emperors, and beneath that, underneath it all, beneath the feet of humanity, lie the labyrinths from which the Akashic Mysteries sprang.

If we're going to explore them, we need to have a sense of how they work, and while I dismissed the themes of DF for Psi-Wars, they certainly provide a lot of inspiration for something like a Labyrinth or the monsters within it.  While our heroes wouldn't descend into a Labyrinth for sweet loot and enchanted items (though a relic or two might be nice), the experiences they had in the labyrinth might not be much different from a slightly more ultra-tech version of what DF adventurers experience.  Thus, I've found myself buying more and more DF works, seeking inspiration.

How I currently see the Labyrinthine Worlds

I often find I accumulate layer and layer of thoughts and ideas on a topic that never actually reach you, dear reader.  Some of them come from things I've read, ideas I've had, thought about, researched and developed without ever actually writing down, or from conversations I've had on Discord in a heated flurry of exchanges that the rest of the community might miss, so it might be nice to lay out the rough ideas I have for the labyrinth at this particular moment.

• The Labyrinth connects all Labyrinthine Worlds

 The Labyrinth is more than just a set of tunnels through a geologically dead world.  They are tunnels through space and time itself.  Once one descends into the labyrinth, one can travel through all the labyrinths of the labyrinthine worlds and arrive at some new destination in some profoundly remote world.  This will be especially interesting (and one of the core elements behind the adventure we'll do in the Tall Tales) for the labyrinths of destroyed worlds, as their labyrinth might remain "whole" in the weird space-time that they occupy.

Navigating a labyrinth this way will require a unique skill, at least Navigation (Underground) and perhaps some unique perk or technique.

• The Labyrinth is surreal

There are lots of "haunted locations" in Psi-Wars, from the Eldothic Deep Engine to regions of Twisted Psionic Energy, but they need to have their own unique feel, and the feel of the Labyrinth is a blurring of the real with the unreal.  The Labyrinth is not just physical tunnels, but some sort of metaphysical journey in search of enlightenment.  The dream-journeys of the Akashic Oracles have some sort of connection with and are reflections of the physical journeys of those who delve into the labyrinth.  Strange events occur in the Labyrinth that have portentous impact on the outside world.  The journey into the labyrinth begins to take on a symbolic nature, as though the entire experience could be a dream or a moment of religious ecstasy. When one completes a journey, they should be left wondering how much of it was real, and how much was delusion.

• The Labyrinth holds secrets

This mixture between the real and the unreal, between the physical and the mental, contributes to one of the reasons one would go into the labyrinth.  You might seek to "get" somewhere, but for the most part, one goes into the labyrinth to understand something.  House Kain initiates seek to understand their limits, while House Sabine seeks to master the secrets of time and the future.  If the Labyrinth is a dungeon, it's an occultish sort of dungeon, where the "riches" find within are riches of lore and wisdom, rather than physical wealth.

• The Labyrinth explores themes of time and alternate realities

I had a lot of fun writing up the Skairos, and one of the themes of the Skairos was uncertainty. They were designed to be multiple possible things at once.  The original idea was to allow the GM to decide, and I still think that's a good idea, but this uncertainty, the "quantum instability" of the concept of the Skairos has infected everything they were associated with, including the Labyrinth.  Obviously, they have something to do with time (hence their association with the time-exploring Akashic Order), but could they not have something to do with alternate realities and false possibilities?  When one walks the Labyrinth, is part of the surreal experience that one is walking through a maze of alternate possibilities?

Psi-Wars is still ostensibly sci-fi, and its "dungeons" should explore sci-fi themes.  I puzzled on this, because I kept returning to the imagery of stone and monsters, rather than steel and mutants, and I think I've settled on why: the sci-fi themes of the Labyrinth are not that it's an ancient ruin of a long dead, highly-advanced civilization (such as the ruins of the Eldoth), or that it's the results of a monstrous automation run amuck (as with Terminus).  Rather, it's the result of some sort of temporal or time-line-shifting technology.  The Labyrinths represent a technology of temporal geometry; their mysteries and dangers more that of Fringe or the Twilight Zone than they are Blame!, Lovecraft or Event Horizon. The Skairos who created it are more Ultraterrestrial than Extraterrestrial.

• The Labyrinth is a dungeon

It's dark, it's confusing, you must delve into it, and it's full of traps and monsters. it's definitely the sort of place where we can draw inspiration from DF, with the caveats of fulfilling the thematic requirements above.

I also happen to think Monster Hunters could really do with a series on "Bad Places," the hell-catacombs haunted by a demon, or the tomb complex of a mummy or the decaying ruins home to a ghost or a vampire.  I find that as I work on the "monsters" of Psi-Wars, I also need to define the environments in which they live, which gives me a lot of ideas for Monster Hunters in general.