Labyrinth Lord

Labyrinth Lord

Labyrinth Lord is a fantasy role-playing game and a Dungeons & Dragons retro-clone by Daniel Proctor and Goblinoid Games, and one of the first such retro-clones of Dungeons & Dragons when Wizards of the Coast released the OGL (Open Gaming Licence) way back in 2007. As of writing this, October 2024, Daniel Proctor has teamed up with Pauli Kidd to rewrite Labyrinth Lord into a second edition which is out for public consultation.

I first played Labyrinth Lord somewhere between 2015 and 2016. Not wanting to buy new books at the time for something I might not be into I purchased the cheaper digital copy of the main rulebook from Drive-Thru RPG and printed the material I needed to play. I enjoyed playing Labyrinth Lord back then and when the games stopped I put my stuff away hoping someone would run another game soon.

Fast forward to 2023 and 2024 and with RPG Saturday running (quite successfully by now) I decided to run a game of Labyrinth Lord myself. If it was successful I can always run something more.

As I had only printed those pages relevant to my character back in 2015, I had to print the remainder of the book and now read the rules more carefully as I was going to be in the driving seat. Once I had that sorted I decided to put together a primer for my players so that could have the relevant information to them at the table without having to flick through the rulebook.

Now all I had to do was think of a scenario - I had been reading an Isekai story on Royal Road where one of the main antagonists to the main character was creatures wielding Void Magic (something akin to the descriptive effects of the Sphere of Annihilation in D&D). I took this as my inspiration and considered a crazy mage doing some research in his tower, and through his own hubris or through some error, has connected to the Void and summoned Void wielding creatures to this reality. I then envisioned the characters would be sent to the wizards tower to help fix the problem.

I needed a tower for this crazy wizard so I set about outlining on graph paper something which I could use and thus Hrogroth's Tower was born. The scenario itself was quite straight forward - guards and adventurers from the realm have been sent to the tower but no-one has returned and passers by report the tower looking deserted. You are tasked to finding out what happened and report back, and if you can fix whatever has occurred then so be it. It would be very much a dungeon crawl in reverse and apt for Labyrinth Lord.

I had envisioned this running for three sessions – but through various factors, this didn't go to plan and it ran for four sessions with a massive break in the middle! Whilst this was a bit of a bummer, good fortune smiled on me as one of my players gifted me the Labyrinth Lord rulebook, companion and reference screen as they said there was more chance of me running Labyrinth Lord games than them if the future – Thanks Tony!

My hand-drawn maps worked well for the first session, but I thought it would be nice to have something better to hand to the players. So I turned to the internet to look for a 'quicker' way to compile all the maps I needed for tower. I narrowed my options down to two browser based programs, Dungeon Map Doodler (DMD) and Dungeon Scrawl (DS).

I first used Dungeon Map Doodler. It's not a bad programme and quite straightforward to use. I produced a set of maps within a few days which included various dungeon furniture which I thought would be relevant for players to fight around. Happy with the result I went to print two copies, one for me to use as a reference, and one for the players to scribble over. When I went to print these I realised I had black background for the most part and it nearly killed my printer. Only having printed out one set of maps I decided to revisit these for the future, but as luck would have it, the next session was upon me so I used my single printed copy as reference material only, describing what the players saw. It was during this session I realised I didn't need to have all the furniture listed on the players map, although it would be convenient for me. I want back to DMD to edit the maps and ran into my first problem, editing. Editing maps in DMD isn't as easy as creating from scratch and after a day of so of not being happy, I looked elsewhere.

I moved over to Dungeon Scrawl, which has a slightly higher learning curve (hence my initial reluctance to use this at the start) but after another day of messing about, and having not only all the hand-drawn maps, but the maps from DMD at hand, I was able to get to grips with the DS software. Not having to put the furniture in made an easier time of it, and having learned my mistakes from my first map run I decided to use a grey background to make my life easier when printing. It was when I was printing these maps out a thought occurred to me – I could use these maps as an in-world document, a map of Hrogroth's Tower by the City Guard or whatnot. I annotated the maps as though previous adventuring parties had used them and left them on the second floor for the party to find.

I was really pleased with both Dungeon Map Doodler and Dungeon Scrawl and knowing their limitations now would definitely use them again.

I enjoyed Labyrinth Lord and the game went well. The players all seemed to enjoy it too and through the discussions post sessions I had asked if there was interest in more. There was a resounding yes so I picked up Stonehell Dungeon a mega-dungeon adventure to throw at the players for my next game. I look forward to more Labyrinth Lord in the future.

J