I backed the Labyrinth setting for Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press on Kickstarter. Several months ago, my gaming group started playing through the Labyrinth Adventures campaign, starting with the first module The Lost Book of Mektar. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a rough start, but this is my review of the first adventure. There are major plot spoilers in this review, but my recommendation is to skip this adventure entirely, so I respectfully assert that it doesn't matter.
The plot hook is intriguing. You're summoned by a mechadron named Scriv, who works in the library of the Keepers of the Keys. Scriv has recently discovered that a rare occult tome called the Book of Mektar is missing from the stacks. The last person known to have checked out the book is Jeyna Solis-Schwirtz. Unfortunately, Jeyna is recently deceased, and when her sister Margeaux went into her house to look for the book (and to manage the estate), she was accosted by contraptions of her late sister's design. The player characters are asked to go into Jeyna's mansion, locate the book, and bring it back to Scriv.
For me, this has all the right ingredients. It's about a mysterious tome from an inter-dimensional library, and its main location is a mansion of madness. It's a great idea for a starting adventure.
At the start of the adventure, Margeaux Solis lets the players into the home of Jeyna Solis-Schwirtz. Upon meeting them, she mentions that while they're looking around, it would be great if they could find the deed to the property. Secondary goal established, Margeaux wishes them good luck, and departs.
I played Margeaux as charming and sincere as possible, eager to provide information and eager to reward the player characters for an honest day of work. But my players were super suspicious of her. What's she up to? What's she really after? What does she want with the deed to the estate? I couldn't dissuade them from creating a whole conspiracy about Margeaux's intentions, and frankly I didn't want to. Any mystery is good mystery in an RPG adventure, so I let them think what they wanted to think.
Several rooms of the house are locked, so the implication is that they're meant to rummage around the house for keys to open doors. As they rummage, they come across clues about what happened to Jeyna, and what's happened within the house since her demise.
Her death turns out to be entirely, utterly inconsequential. She accidentally electrocuted herself while tinkering on a generator. Her death has no bearing on the adventure, and this may as well have been any abandoned home with an ancient tome somewhere inside it.
There's an elaborate sub-plot throughout the house about Jeyna's mechadron staff. Most of them are still functional, but two of them are missing. This seems important until it's discovered that one got disassembled by a plant in the solarium (I guess it forgot that there was a feral plant there), and the other is locked in a room by accident. The fact is, you may as well just have a mechadron butler tell the player characters where to go next, because otherwise you're going to burn through several game sessions while the player characters meander around an empty house devoid of meaningful encounters.
Should the players gather a few clues, they're likely to correctly surmise that Jeyna's twin brother, Edmin Solis, has previously broken into the estate. There's evidence (in the form of a note in Jeyna's handwriting) that Edmin frequently needs money, so they'll probably incorrectly assume he was here looking for Jeyna's will, or the deed to the house. There's a little evidence that he might have been looking for a book (for example, he's searched through Jeyna's library), so there's a chance that maybe Edmin has acquired the Book of Mektar.
Better keep looking, just to make sure.
Actually, what's happened at this point is that the players have solved the mystery of the first part of the adventure. Edmin does have the book, and he intends to sell it to a baddie named Varnissus, who's going to use the book to summon a demon. But from the player characters' perspective, Edmin is just one more place to search. They have no reason to believe the book is valuable or that Edmin intends to sell it, and they have no confirmation that he definitely possesses it. In the minds of the players, they have to keep searching the house until they can confirm that it's definitely not there. Plus, they have a property deed to find, which to their mind is of equal importance.
There's no way to say it nicely. The house, as dungeons go, is just plain boring. It's the home of a friendly mechanist, and while there are a few "puzzles" (if you count searching through a house to find some cogs that fit into an automaton so you get the key to a locked door a puzzle) and literally 2 threatening encounters, there's not a whole lot of interest here. It's not like searching through a haunted house and uncovering a bunch of undead threats, nor searching through a dungeon with wandering monsters and abandoned magic items. It's just searching through a suburban house, with some wind-up toys in it.
Aside from the mechadron staff, there's a sculpture of a demon that might attack the player characters, should they wind it up. My group actually did this, but once it attacked they just left the room and barricaded the door until it wound down (it takes a minute). There are no stats for this construct in the adventure or in the Beadle & Grimm supplement I bought, so I accidentally ran it as a very high level demon (it was the only demon I could find in the B&G box). Anyway, it all worked out.
There are a few awkward optional encounters, too. Players can meet Jeyna's ghost, but she's not malevolent and is actually pretty helpful. I used this encounter in an attempt to spice things up, and it went well enough, except that solving her death isn't anyone's goal and so feels inconsequential.
Another optional encounter is with Arvex and the Vexers, a rival adventuring group also searching the house for the same book. There's no reason for the Vexers to be aggressive, but I brought them in to add some excitement to the module, and basically forced combat. Their motivation is confusing though, and the encounter feels very much like an encounter for the sake of combat (which, incidentally, it is.)
Other than the book being the title of the adventure and the main quest provided at the start, nobody in this adventure seems to really care about the Book of Mektar. Scriv cares about it because it's a missing book and could be dangerous, and that starts the adventure. But after that, literally nobody "on screen" cares about it.
Margeaux has no knowledge of it. Jeyna took it from the library but didn't find it useful to her electrical engineering studies, so she set it aside and forgot about it. The mechadron staff are mostly concerned with finding the butler automaton. Edmin only takes it because he heard it was valuable to Varnissus, neither of whom we meet until the very end of the adventure. I think it's hard to get the player characters excited about finding a lost library book when there's nothing apparently more urgent than a card catalogue that needs updating.
After 3 sessions of searching a mundane house for mundane clues about a nonspecific mystery, I all but insisted that the player characters leave the house to go hunt down Edmin. My players had all the clues they needed, they just hadn't searched the whole house yet to convince themselves that the book and, just as importantly (in their mind), the deed were definitely not there. They never did find the deed, incidentally.
The second part of this three part adventure is 5 sentences long. It's a not to the game master that there is no second part, and that all paths to Edmin lead to Varnissus' warehouse. I'm not exaggerating, that's really what the second part is:
This part of the adventure is more of an interlude than a full act. If the characters haven't uncovered enough information to point them in Edmin's direction, have Scriv [...] contact them to alert them that Edmin has been selling objects stolen from his sister's house to satisfy his mounting debts.
Presumably the outline for the adventure existed prior to writing, so there had to a second part even though there wasn't a second part. I can't help but think that some of the empty house ought to have been sacrificed during the writing process for an eventful Part 2.
The final act of the adventure takes place in a warehouse, where Varnissus and his henchmen are preparing to summon a demon using the Book of Mektar. By the time this happened in our game, the players were done with this adventure and just used Command and Expeditious Retreat to literally be handed the book and then make a run for it. I didn't argue.
Using the time-tested technique of taking all the problems I had with the module and flipping them on their head, here are some ideas on how to make this module more exciting. I haven't tried any of these yet, personally.
Jeyna is evil. She stole the book intentionally, and she wanted to use it to summon a demon, but she died before she could.
Jeyna's house is evil, too. She's evil, so her house is full of dangerous experiments and minor demons.
It's part of the quest to solve Jeyna's death. Was she murdered? This will affect how her estate is divided up, so it needs to be solved!
Edmin stole the book before Jeyna's death, and even left a note of apology. It seems he's found a buyer for the strange tome, so he's going to go sell it for 4,000 GP and there's nothing Jeyna can do to stop him. He even mentions the name of his buyer, probably a mutual acquaintance of his and Jeyna's, so the player characters have a lead on who to question next.
Everything happens in the house. The player characters search the house, it's boring until they uncover Jeyna's life's work: A portal to an inter-dimensional space known only as The Labyrinth. They can abandon the adventure and step through the portal there and then, or they can bookmark it and return to it later.
If they continue searching the boring house, they eventually happen upon Edmin, there in the house. He runs from them, making his way to the basement, or to an attic, or whatever. Following him reveals that he and his cultist friends are using the Book of Mektar for a summoning. Edmin makes it clear, through his ranting and raving, that Jeyna was too stupid to realise the true power concealed in the book. She'd tossed it aside, discarded it because she didn't understand its meaning. He alone has the power to summon the dark powers revealed in the book. He starts the summoning, and the characters have to stop it.
The lost book is a ticking time bomb. The Book of Mektar is a powerful magical artefact, and doesn't need a person to help it fulfill its diabolical destiny. The book itself has been pre-programmed by Mektar to "mature" in 200 years, and that was 200 years ago. The book is literally going to summon a demon any minute now. You've got to find it before that happens.
I generally like a house-based RPG adventure. One of my favourite board games is Mansions of Madness and one of my favourite Call of Cthulhu source books is, well, also called Mansions of Madness. I love the The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh I love Death House.
But they don't always work. For example, House of Lament turned out to be a dud, despite reading like a very fun adventure (branching paths, a seemingly entertaining Spirit Board, lots of mysteries). In my opinion, Lost Book of Mektar must be added to the list of failed attempts to make an abandoned house an adventure. Without a lot of re-working, this module is a poor introduction to a roleplaying games, a poor start to a campaign, and a weak example of what a multi-dimensional setting is all about.
Cover image by Kobold Press.