Noctis Labyrinth (Part 2)

This is the second part and conclusion to our Noctis Labyrinth critical analysis. You can find part one here.

Ludo

As usual in this genre of games, scarcity and the displacement of precarity are expected to get buy-in of player characters and continuous adventuring; for players, they keep promising they gonna see some weird shit. Noctis Labyrinth does not deviate much from this.

For the most part, the engine is the one inherited from World of Dungeons: keep going from challenge to challenge, and whenever things seem unsure or to be hitting a lull, summon the Die of Fate.

Characters are motivated by treasure, as that is the main source of character advancement. Quests in Noctis Labyrinth give considerable XP compared to World of Dungeons, but the main driver of advancement is going to be the amount of silver appropriated. This looter-approach is downplayed through these three adventures — there is little direct treasure, so any wealth you can take by force pale to the rewards of quests.

The unique addition to the engine of Noctis Labyrinth is Reputation. Reputation is broken down into total reputation with a faction and last quest reputation. The higher your reputation with a group, the better and more rewarding the jobs they give you; however, people only really care for your latest achievement: the more reputation you gain from a job, easier it is to get a better one next time.

Brad

I think that by changing its focus to the idea that quests will give more xp than you can steal it helps focus the players on doing each job rather than the classic “we kill the monster and then steal literally everything that isn’t nailed down” approach of classic gaming.

Lucrécia

Noctis Labyrinth requires the least reading of any game I have brought for critical analysis. It is designed so you need to do as little reading before as possible, and for the most part it holds true.

It lays out a very good procedure to open the book and start playing out of the gate, and it is one of those games where the book is a helpful and welcomed tool during play; Noctis Labyrinth is a delight to have open on the table, where it is a treasured shared activity for all involved to peruse it and discover new information together as a social process.

I said for the most part, because even the no-prep procedure assumes familiarity with World of Dungeons. It is still a three pages booklet, but the game goes much better the more people have read those three pages before. So I guess that is my recommendation? Read World of Dungeons and open with the Quickstart guidelines. Will take you twenty minutes.

Brad

Yeah, even if your players are staunch “We won’t read the books” this shouldn’t be too hateful for them, and once they have read World of Dungeons and put themselves into the proper mindset, it will flow with ease.

Ludo

So, for the most part, this game is associated with a movement that embraces "playing the game wrong" in the way we define it for our framework; as such, it is pretty sturdy and can accommodate and deliver its artistic contribution even with unorthodox ways you may interact with the game.

That said, that same movement also comes with many assumptions; namely that its games should be able to be run on anything that “can run B2”1. I think you would not have many problems running Noctis Labyrinth in any framework of the frontier adventurer-explorer game movement.

However, this is not without its cave-ats. The interconnection that I praised Noctis Labyrinth so much for, the way it stands out against the assumed ideology reproduced by the frontier-adventurer genre, is made of connections maintained by systems of relationships and very deliberate negative space. Because of this, they may easily be lost or even subverted when transplanted to another game.

Brad

I think that playing Noctis wrong mechanically should be allowed, I cannot stop you. But try your hardest to cling to the ideology and world elements, any game can have a bleak and bitter setting, but not many are willing to layer sandwich properly with layers of hope and community.

Lucrécia

Being an adventure for World of Dungeons, licensing expanding Noctis Labyrinth does not to seem a concern. However, World of Dungeons itself is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution.

As I mentioned before, you can take the setting of Noctis Labyrinth and play it on most common roleplaying games.

Noctis Labyrinth is designed to be easily expanded upon. It creates an adventuring hub for exploring the Labyrinth; you can drop most adventures in the Red Desert and adapt them to run with Noctis Labyrinth’s interwoven systems.

Noctis Labyrinth gives a lot to think about ways of seeing and how important that is to create an environment where systems of interconnected relationships can be formed. Roleplaying games have been trying this since their inception, with middling success; the usual answers is either making it part of what is commonly thought as “lore” and expected to be enforced by the play group, hard-coded in rigid rule systems, or let entirely to empty spaces and prompts.

The fact that Noctis Labyrinth achieves so much with narrative positioning and establishment of locations cannot be easily described and reproduced. However, playing Noctis Labyrinth, expanding it with other adventures and seeing how the connections change when using DCC or BX instead can lead for many interesting discoveries by designers. It certainly made me think about how most fail at achieving these relationships and how deceptive simple this game´s success may seem.

Don’t sleep on its achievements due to its simple straightforwardness.

Brad

Before reading this, Lucrécia said that I would be delighted by it. I already mentioned my adoration of sword and sorcery, my love of desert worlds, and she was right. I love Noctis, my only complaint that lies outside the veins of this critique is that I want more.

I think that Noctis could rule in dozens of systems, and I want to see it in some of my favorites, but unlike a lot of other fan favorite settings, where you have to transplant them to enjoy them, Noctis sings in World of Dungeons.