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The game, operating under the Open Gaming License, is Dungeons & Dragons the way it was over twenty years ago, and it is designed to permit fans to take the game and run with it, creating supplements, campaigns and adventures on their own, some of which are already available on Lulu.com.
The system is exactly what you remember D&D was before a long string of developers and two separate companies left their grease spots all over it. Roll 3d6. Elves can cast spells and use swords. A d20 decides most everything. While there is little here that I can’t recall from playing D&D in the cafeteria of my high school, there is an editorial elegance that was absent from actual D&D. Everything, from character creation to monsters and magic items is packed into 135 pages. I remember getting backpack burn on my shoulders from hauling the seventeen books I needed to play D&D from house to house. No more, says Labyrinth Lord.
The rules are straight forward, and almost all relate to combat. Anything not covered by combat, thiefly abilities, or a spell, is decided by an ability roll with a modifier of +4 to -4 depending on whether or not you brought enough Mountain Dew for the whole group to get some that night, ie the GM’s discretion. Skills? Never heard of ‘em. Choosing your own languages? Already done for you. Some would call this a failing of the system. I disagree. The strength of Labyrinth Lord lies in its simplicity. As the rules stand now, it is a quick, fun system for doing exactly what it was designed to do: kill nasty monsters. If you wish to use your poetic ability to curry favor with your liege, this game isn’t for you. If you wish to find whatever it is lurking just outside of your torchlight and stab it until it stops grunting, you’ve come to the right place.
Furthermore, no world is provided beyond a two page “labyrinth” and one page on an area called the “Known Lands” because the rules are designed to send you scurrying to your laptops to create your own world, and then share it with others. It did with me. I came up with a small region inhabited by three kingdoms: one elvish, the other dwarven, and finally one human. All three had recently been at war, and the current tenuous peace allowed adventurers to see what lay in the wilds beyond the three kingdoms. Oh, and there’s an organization called “The Society of Friends” which aims to promote peace and understanding between the three kingdoms, but is in fact, the thieves guild, and functions as the intelligence branch of every kingdom unbeknownst to the other two. It is this kind of do it yourself enthusiasm which makes Labyrinth Lord breathe and bleed, and it is catching.
As for the look of the book, it is nothing to write home about. You have a choice of retro-80s cover art, or a design featuring some knights that looks like the front piece of the Bayeux tapestry, both of which fit the mood of the game. Everything else between the covers is adequate and unremarkable, but considering the game is free if downloaded, I can find no fault in it.
So with 4th edition already in the paper-cut hands of gamers around the globe, why on earth play this game?
For the same reason collectors still ride around in model Ts. To return to a simpler time and a simpler machine. The rules of Labyrinth Lord make little room for anything outside of maiming or spell-casting, and despite the allowance of chaotic (read evil) characters, the focus rests squarely on the good. With decades of playing mercenary street samurai, morally ambiguous vampires, and warriors dedicated to the code of bushido, enough time has passed for nostalgia to set in for a purer form of gaming, when the good guys were all in your party, the bad guys were bad because a convenient and gibbering villager told you they destroyed his crops, and rooting them out was as easy as jumping through the hole of their cave, and going from room to room, killing everything that moved and searching the corpses. So strap on your short sword, break out the d4s, and let’s get moving.
