Style and Tone

How would you live within a rigid hierarchy, and how would you adapt as that hierarchy started to shift? How will you treat those who mean you no harm, but who must be harmed to keep your own neck off the line? Would you hold on to hope in the face of a world that promises to never change, or would you let it go and live only for yourself? The world can give you a purpose. Is it the right one?

This is a game about hope in the face of the hopeless. Labyrinth aims to present a grounded, hierarchical, and authoritarian society much like those that predominated in the history of our own planet, and a great catalyst for change — the emergence of the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth serves also as a place to explore the setting's mysteries, as well as a focal point to explore the wider setting and its politics. Player characters might spend their time exploring the Labyrinth either for personal gain or for their faction, schmoozing with an expedition's leader, or even handling a family matter back in their homeland.

Labyrinth is high fantasy, but it is not noble. Though major political change within the setting is possible, players should not see this as a game about overthrowing the feudal order. Rather, it is a game about existing within those hierarchies and those societies, where players might sometimes find themselves at liberty to act and other times might find a superior breathing down the back of their neck.

It is thus a game about life going on despite everything, and about how our actions might turn the world towards a brighter future even as we ourselves spend our whole lives in darkness.

We expect Labyrinth to have major Player-versus-Player and Player-versus-Environment elements, with escalating conflict between playable factions. Some of this conflict will be between relative equals, though we also expect more unbalanced or colonialist conflict to play a large role, with player characters on both sides.

As any creative project, Labyrinth is deeply inspired by other fiction. The most notable examples in our minds are:

• Crusader Kings
• Dungeon Meshi
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Final Fantasy XIV: Online, in particular the arc from the A Realm Reborn to Endwalker expansions
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
• Kill 6 Billion Demons
• Stormlight Archive
• World of Warcraft

Nothing lasts forever. Empires rise and fall, Lives are lived and the living die, rivers wear down their banks and take up a new path, and glaciers grow and retract as their season comes and goes. Change occurs both on timescales that are very human — the months and years as children grow and elders age — and timescales that are so long as to be incomprehensible — the fall of an empire born a thousand years ago.

Labyrinth is a game about all of these timescales intersecting with one another. For some, the emergence of the Labyrinth is a coming-of-age, a chance to prove themselves to a family that they will one day lead or to a world that has never embraced them. For others, the Labyrinth is just another adventure in a long career. While for political actors, its emergence has brought opportunities they never thought they'd get, and the promise of its greatest treasure is enough to drive the world inexorably closer to war.

A Queen lords over a duke. The duke lords over a countess. The countess lords over a baron. The baron lords over the gentry, and the gentry rule over those bonded to them. None of the societies portrayed in Labyrinth look like this, exactly, but they all bear a striking resemblance. Does the Queen act with malice, when she gives orders to her dukes? Does the duke? How about the gentry, or even the urban artisan with no man directly above or below him, but who still benefits from the labour of the peasant?

Labyrinth seeks to explore both the extraordinary and the ordinary within such structures. Hierarchical society does not persist from the malice of a few cruel people. More often than not, each feels like they lie on the knife-edge between comfort and poverty. If a man of the landed gentry steps out of line, or fails to fulfil his duty, he is likely to find himself tumbling towards the latter. Much better, then, to aim up — even if so doing is at the expense of one's lessers.

Colonialism and imperialism are, in a sense, a nation's own hierarchy extended out beyond its borders. Soldiers of low status are elevated by the blade over an occupied population, and those who can place themselves in positions to profit from the arrangement are likely to advance handsomely.

The civilisations of the Labyrinth will change as they come to terms with new powers intruding, either to resist them violently or to negotiate a bitter compromise. The people of those civilisations, too, will be forced to change — to take up the sword to protect their families, or to bow before an imperial delegation. Likewise, we aim to show that the same process forces change in the conquering empires. How does it affect the psyche of an imperial knight, assigned to watch over an occupied settlement? How does it affect the empire itself, to build itself to be ready for conquest?

As a theme in Labyrinth, environmentalism is the recognition of hierarchy and colonialism affecting things beyond the person. The construction of empire is the construction of a hierarchy that places people atop the rest of nature, and the exploitation of land for its resources harms the land, and in so doing harms those who have little choice but to live off it long after a colonising force has moved on.

The Labyrinth is a living environment, with ecosystems complex and robust enough to support tens of thousands of permanent residents. It is also, for those who have come to its doors, a place to find great wealth. How will character's other motives drive how they interact with those ecosystems? Will they live sustainably, or take all that they can as fast as they can? How will that shape the environments that remain?

Countless millions are born, live, and die without any higher 'purpose', having lived as peasant farmers or been sent to war and their deaths all too young. Likewise, while one born into the aristocracy certainly has the resources to choose a purpose for themselves, how many will really do so rather than living up to the purpose assigned to them at their birth or falling short of any purpose whatsoever?

Whatever their background, the player characters of Labyrinth are those lucky enough to have the chance to choose their purpose for themselves. How do they relate this to their background, and to those in their family who either could not or did not do the same? What purpose will they find, and how will it stand up to the tumults of an often-cruel world?