The Labyrinth is the world between worlds, the maze that connects realities, and so much more. It’s a campaign overlay that lets your PCs world-hop between settings, experiencing the Ten Thousand Worlds and beyond that exist in all that is.
Once you get into the twisting realities of the Labyrinth, you discover that, as infinite as it seems, there are recurring groups and themes. A trickle of factions consistently populate the maze, for good and for ill.
Here is one that is perhaps both.
The Boatwrights
This faction is an order of Humanoids, consisting primarily of humans and fiendish sydereans (think of these as tieflings if you’re in a D&D mindset) who are changed by magical ritual and submersion in the waters of the river Styx. Their skin is often tinged with shades of blue, orange, or brown. More importantly, they are the masters of navigating the Labyrinth by the waterways that connect worlds.
What’s their deal?
The Boatwrights are not exactly a benevolent faction, but they have no love for the Void either. They have a fiendish bent, but they’re not what you might think of as classically “evil.” (Though you wouldn’t want to leave anything you value lying around.)
This faction is mainly concerned with building and maintaining a fleet of boats: galleys, barges, all the way down to their characteristic Styx gondolas. They ferry passengers and cargo on winding rivers through worlds. For their services, the Boatwrights collect tolls, usually paid in Styx coin.
Charun is the patron god of the Boatwrights, and from him they know of the watery routes between dimensions and worlds. Boatwrights are nomadic, but call any harbor home for a time.
Using the Boatwrights
In a Labyrinth campaign, the Boatwrights are one of the more reliable ways to get between worlds. Portals need keys, gates require high-level casters, and rifts come and go. But it’s a rare world that doesn’t have a waterway somewhere.
Even if your campaign doesn’t have a tributary of the Styx proper, it’s not too hard to imagine that it has some river with magical or mythical attachments. That’s all the Boatwrights need to sail into your PCs’ lives.
Boatwrights are experts are getting you where you need to go, as long as it’s on the water. They’ll take people or cargo of any kind and in nearly any quantity, with enough notice. They don’t especially care if it’s legal or moral, and for only a little extra, they’ll keep it quiet.
This is great for adventurers who need to get weird, bulky treasure home. It could also be a way to evacuate a village in the path of impending doom. If your destination is on the water, even remote locations or heavily guarded, the Boatwrights might just have an in. And, it almost goes without saying that Boatwrights are a fantastic way to get between worlds or planes or dimensions or wherever you want to go.
They are, in some ways, the economy level of travel. The travel might require a couple of stops along the way, but it’ll probably be cheaper and more reliable that timing lunar phases and holding a burning shillelagh or whatever it was you needed to get that moon portal open.
Boatwrights often behave foreign and gruff, but they do the job reliably for the agreed-upon price. They don’t need Styx coin for their work. They’ll take any valuable goods, although local currency might not always qualify in their estimation. Styx coin definitely gets their attention though.
Unfunny Money
Even if you don’t have an explicit link to the Labyrinth in your game, the Boatwrights can play a part.
Styx Coin is the fare often charged by Boatwrights to use their services, and a significant part of their economy. In some cultures, Styx coin is created when a caring person places a coin in a deceased person’s mouth before burial. It’s meant to pay the fare for the deceased’s soul across the Styx to the land of the dead.
But lately, someone has been flooding the river with Styx coins, many of them counterfeit. Even Arch-Duke Mammon in the Greater Hell of Tyver-Sarok has noticed the influx. While Mammon never says no to a coin, he nonetheless demands that the Boatwrights find out where this false money is coming from.
Try one (or all!) of these opportunities to bring the Boatwrights into your campaign.
1. A greedy necromancer has gone from small-time graverobbing to minting Styx coins. He places copper pieces in the mouths of zombies he raises and “mints” a small batch of Styx coins every midnight. He has a nice operation, feeding smugglers along the Styx a steady supply. The Boatwrights need some locals to run this operation down.
2. Sandar Gulper, a hezrou, and one of the High Captains at the Old Boatwright’s Harbor (see Labyrinth Worldbook for more details), has discovered a vein of quietus in a corner of your campaign world. Quietus is a magical metal mined beneath ancient graveyards that carries the pallor of death. When alloyed with copper, the result makes nearly undetectable Styx coins. Sandar has never been above corruption. Is this a new way to skim, or is she making a play for something bigger?
3. A powerful paladin of the Radiant Order, Isolde, is on a multi-world killing spree. For every being she kills, one of her followers places a copper coin in its mouth—and she’s been killing a lot. On the one hand, she’s bringing order to lawless places. But a wave of souls bearing Styx coins is clogging the capacity of the Boatwrights wherever she goes. The Boatwrights don’t want to pick a fight with the Radiants. But they need some way to regulate this traffic, and paying the PCs to act as deniable intermediaries might just work.
Explore the twisting passages that connect planes of reality with the Labyrinth Worldbook!
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