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.
Meet one of the most evil and nihilistic factions in the Labyrinth . . . which is saying something when there are void cultists around.
Servants of Nidhogg
The Servants of Nidhogg are servants of the Void, led and inspired by the greatest and most powerful of the Void dragons, the Devourer of the World Tree, Nidhogg.
Carrying out what he believes to be Nidhogg’s dark commands, is the most powerful of the Void Saints: Nargoth. Nargoth was once a scribe in the Great Chantry of the Voidmother, but in the Lost Tome of Nargoth, he has written about how he left the order abruptly, millennia ago, due to violent disagreements over how to bring about the Irrevocable Apocalypse.
The Chantry says he was expelled for heresy. Regardless of the origin of the schism, Nargoth took a number of irreplaceable volumes of Void magic, oracles, and history with him, as well as some of the Scribes of the Chantry, who became the founding members of the Servants of Nidhogg.
What’s their deal?
The Servants’ first temple was established centuries ago in the dwarven port city of Helmhaven. The Servants supported a violent uprising against the vile, corrupt oligarchy that ruled the town with a mailed fist.
When the revolutionary fervor was at its bloody peak and the streets of Helmhaven ran red, Nargoth and the Servants used the violence to power a dark ritual. They opened a yawning void rift to the Corpse shore, in the sky above Helmhaven harbor (further angering the Great Chantry).
The Spawn of Nidhogg roared through the rift and devoured the terrified populace, bodies and souls. Using the victory as a model, Nargoth sent his Servants throughout the Labyrinth to disperse more chaos and acrimony. They use this to open more rifts, sow more death, and spread more destruction among the Ten Thousand Worlds to accelerate the coming of the Irrevocable Apocalypse.
Using the Servants in your World
The Servants seek to bring about the apocalypse promised by Nidhogg and Nargoth, mainly by sowing chaos and fear, and promoting unrest and violent mayhem throughout the worlds of the Labyrinth.
Their normal strategy is to first seed a world or community agents to undermine law and order, setting neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member. Once these voices are established, they send “prophets” proclaiming the inevitability of the end times and the Irrevocable Apocalypse.
When the resentment and chaos among the populace becomes violent, the Servants of both groups fan the flames, encouraging nihilistic violence and wanton destruction, which serves as a mass ritual to open a rift to the Void.
As the dark stars of the Void align overhead, the servants complete the ritual, opening a void rift to the Deep Void and summoning Void monsters. They further death and horror these being bring strengthens the Void’s hold over that world, and eventually, the Servants of Nidhogg hope, all worlds.
See the Labyrinth Worldbook for more details on the Servants of Nidhogg, its members and leaders, and its various worlds and strongholds.
Serve at Nidhogg’s Leisure
Even if you don’t have an explicit link to the Labyrinth in your game, the Servants and their death and destruction can be a terrifying and relentless threat to your campaign world. Try one or more of the following methods to bring the Servants into your campaign:
1. In looting some treasure hoard, the PCs find rotting pieces of parchment, covered with bloody Void Speech runes. These are scraps from the original Lost Tome of Nargoth. Any PC or NPC who even attempts to read the runes, becomes afflicted with a terrible curse. Every day at sundown, the afflicted character must make a DC 15 WIS save or lose 1 point of Wisdom. A remove curse or lesser restoration spell only stops the progression of the curse for one day. A greater restoration or wish spell stops the progression of the curse, but does not restore the lost Wisdom. The only way to stop the curse and reverse its effects is to destroy the remnants of the Tome. They can only be destroyed by the breath of an ancient red, black or void dragon, or by subjecting them to a daylight spell while on an altar dedicated to the sun goddess, Solana.
2. The characters encounter Servants entering the local communities, proclaiming “The End is Near!” Normally the local authorities would deal with these doomsayers, but those authorities and their families have strangely fallen into rancor and chaos. Perhaps they’re even under the surreptitious control of the Servants’ enchantments, and they attempt to imprison or assassinate the PCs (See the actions of the villain Iago in the Shakespeare play Othello or Leland Gaunt from the Stephen King novel Needful Things for examples of how friends and families might be turned against each other).
3. A cunning necromancer stole back the Libram of Perpetual Twilight from the Servants’ Blighted Root Temple. Dreadhelm, the void knight bodyguard of Nargoth, hunted and killed the foolhardy necromancer, but not before he hid the Libram in a deep dungeon ruin on the PCs’ homeworld. Now the cursed tome draws undead and crazed monsters to the cave complex where it is hidden beneath an ancient crypt. The PCs must defeat the zealous monsters guarding the Libram, and find a way to destroy it or hide it, to keep it from Dreadhelm, Nargoth, and the Servants who relentlessly seek it. If the PCs (or any NPC for that matter) who attempts to open and read the arcane locked volume, may be subject to the same Wisdom curse as described in option #1 (above). The Libram may also be destroyed using the same methods as listed above, or by the use of a wish spell.
Explore the twisting passages that connect planes of reality with the Labyrinth Worldbook!
This campaign overlay connects your world with anything you can imagine!
Read more at this site