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 of the . . . unsavory factions for you to use in your campaign.
The Great Chantry of the Voidmother
This faction consists primarily of humans, the plane-hopping satarre, and the insect-legged selang. This dark clerical order records the vile words of Nidhogg, the god-wyrm of the Void that gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, in the drowning depths of the Outer Void, attempting to destroy the tree and all the worlds that nestle in its branches.
What’s their deal?
The Chantry is an overtly evil order with a monastic bent that has a vile, nihilistic nature. They worship the Void and the gods who dwell there, seeking divine power from the nothingness.
The faction is mainly concerned with recording the rages and ravings of mad Nidhogg as he claws and devours the deepest roots of Yggdrasil. As they record his every squeal and utterance, Chantry members hope to wrest foul insights and magic that give them power over life and death, Light and Void. They hope these arcane corruptions will give them gruesome new abilities and help them hasten what they call the Irrevocable Apocalypse: the fall of the universe back into the True Void.
They worship the True Void, seeing figures such as Nidhogg, the Black Goat, Vardesain, and the White Goddess as heralds, oracles, or avatars of the True Void, whose purpose is to end everything.
The Chantry is divided into two primary sects: the all-male Scribes of the Black Star, who visit the Corpse Shore to transcribe the horrifying ravings of Nidhogg onto gruesome scrolls of Void Speech and bring the recorded vocalizations and ravings back to their Cathedral of Silence. There, bookish and bearded scribes reproduce the words into great black tomes brimming with raving Void Speech.
The other half of the Chantry, the distaff Sisters of the Outer Void, takes these volumes to their cloisters in the dark city of Soriglass in the Outer Void. From there, chantry knights and doomspeakers distribute them across the Labyrinth. Hundreds of hidden Chantry chapters, scattered like canker sores across the Ten Thousand Worlds, study them for insight and power.
Using the Chantry in your World
In a Labyrinth campaign, the Chantry makes for a classic fantasy foe, one without remorse or possibility of redemption. They should cause no qualms when they are defeated or destroyed. Cultists from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, the movies of the Sam Raimi, and the Indiana Jones trilogy are all examples of irredeemable villains akin to the Great Chantry cultists.
Scatter Chantry priests anywhere you want senselessly irredeemable villains. They can do a raving madness kind of thing; appears as black-wearing, hollow-eyed, emotionless killers; or be a small army of psychopaths, cruel and charming in their commitment to nihilism.
See the Labyrinth Worldbook for more details on the Great Chantry, its members and its various lairs and worlds.
The Creeping Void
Even if you don’t have an explicit link to the Labyrinth in your game, a faction in pursuit of an Irrevocable Apocalypse can be a powerful creeping threat.
Perhaps an outpouring of newly-created undead creatures issues from an underground temple long thought to have been sealed off. The Great Chanty has imported a ripper (see Labyrinth Worldbook), a monster that creates rifts to the Void, established a rift in the lowest level of the dungeon that leads straight to the Void.
Once the party reaches the rift, they learn that it’s not a portal—there’s no off switch. The Void is leaking into the world, destroying and corrupting what it touches. Worse, this one of several rifts arrayed at strategic points around the world. If left to tear at the fabric or reality, they will eventually rend the whole garment, releasing the Void to unmake everything that is. A race to heal or sew shut these rifts is on!
Bring the Chantry into Your World
Try one or more of the following methods and drop-ins to bring the Chantry into your campaign:
1. The inhabitants and livestock of a border village in the foothills of a mountain range have begun to sicken and forget their families and gods. The cause is a hidden Chantry monastery in the mountains at the source of the local river. They are filling the river with a Void-tainted pestilence as a test of using Void-imbued diseases to destroy a whole civilization, erasing history, art, and religion from their members’ minds. The only way to save the village (and perhaps the entire world) is to clear out the Chantry presence and destroy the creature or artifact that issues the pestilence.
2. A giant Black Portal to the Void yawns open somewhere in the kingdom. A squadron of Chantry necromancers riding skeletal horses and blackguards on fiery nightmares thunders through. They pursue a cryptic prophesy from Nidhogg concerning an artifact in the area that will hasten the Irrevocable Apocalypse. It might be an arcane or divine artifact that an NPC organization has sworn to protect—perhaps a sphere of annihiliation or the Void card from a deck of many things. Or perhaps the “artifact” is a person: a paladin, a ruler, or even one of the PCs.
3. Kaestryn Thelle is the Sisterhood’s most effective spy and nihilistic evangelist. She disguises her form with a hat of disguise and her thoughts with a ring of mind shielding. Kaestryn travels across the Ten Thousand Worlds to deliver the words of Nidhogg and the prophecies of the coming apocalypse. Perhaps the PCs clear out a hidden chapter of the Great Chantry, and find notes in Void Speech remarking on the imminent arrival of Kaestryn. The party can try and set a trap or ambush, to capture her and extract crucial information about the Sisterhood and the Great Chantry. Capturing her, while difficult, would be the easy part. Especially once the Voidmother sends a flight of blackguards to retrieve her (see #2, above).
Explore the twisting passages that connect planes of reality with the Labyrinth Worldbook!
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