My Labyrinth books came today, and I have the World Book and Adventure book, along with the early backer coin. What I love about Tales of the Valiant is all the core books coming out this year, and there is a considerable level of excitement around a new game forming and taking shape, with all the options and settings that are being created.
D&D 2024 does not have this level of support. We have a second Player's Guide, the Labyrinth setting books, and a second Monster Vault. Kobold Press is outdoing Wizards in the D&D 2024 launch year. While Wizards is losing its leadership, Tales of the Valiant is forging ahead with exceptional 5E support.
And the game is far better designed than either the 2014 or 2024 D&D versions. ToV is a premium version of the 5E game, designed to front-load the fun and fix all the problems. It does not eliminate the humanoid monsters or hide them with bland, generic templates. It maintains the status quo with many of the favorites and does not introduce unpopular changes that were seen in the 2024 D&D edition. Nothing sucks, and that is a considerable achievement.
Of course, the product identity monsters owned by Wizards are not here, but then again, those are tired and need to be retired to the Monster Hall of Fame. They were new 45 years ago in AD&D, but we need new monsters now. The purpose of them back then was to give us monsters that we had never seen before. 45 years later, we have seen them so much that they have outlived their usefulness and novelty.
This is an excellent book that links together thousands of campaign worlds and gives you room to create many of your own. You don't need to drag in a Great Wheel, a thousand planes, infinite realities, product identity IP locations, and all the gods of every setting to have an interconnected universe.
This product supports all Open 5E settings and creators, providing a framework for us to explore them from. This is an essential and key product for establishing an open framework outside of Wizards' IP that supports third-party creators without requiring any ideas from D&D.
The strategy Kobold Press is following to build Open 5E is ingenious. They are clever little critters.
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