https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/northlands-norse-adventures-for-dandd-2024-and-tov/
The Northlands Kickstarter has pre-launched, so sign up to be notified for launch! This is both 5E and ToV compatible, and seeing more Norse-themed adventures and backgrounds is always good.
I would love to see a GM's Guide 2 that focuses on the structure of the 5E rules and makes some dramatic changes to them. The Kobold Press team has some amazing rules designers, and I would love to see them tear the system down and rebuild it in interesting and new ways.
We need a compelling Grimdark mode for the game, with a tighter gameplay loop similar to Shadowdark, but not a direct copy of it. We need time limits and a gameplay mode that creates tension and encourages faster play.
We need a Narrative mode for the game that moves it more towards the systems introduced in Daggerheart, but not directly copying that game, so people who want to have "narrative swings" based on mechanics have a system to play with.
We need a Horror mode with fear and insanity effects, similar to those found in Call of Cthulhu, for those eldritch investigations and horror games.
We need a Cozy mode that removes rules from the game and eliminates the need for players to play in a cozy manner. If players want to play anthropomorphic hedgehogs baking cookies, on adventures to find those ingredients, and saving others in semi-perilous situations, let them do that in ToV.
We even need an Old School mode that introduces Vancian magic, limits resting, and brings the game more in line with classic old-school play.
Kobold Press has an opportunity here to experiment with the structure and flow of the game. ToV is its own game, and they can twist and bend the rules in any direction to make ToV a new game, different from D&D.
They need to take that chance, and move in that direction.
Every time I reorganize my shelves, the space for Tales of the Valiant gets smaller and smaller. I had so much bloat in my library, it was killing what is arguably the best 5E implementation ever made. The reduction of books helps the game since it becomes more focused on the good content, and the fluff and filler are removed.
It has a better chance of surviving now with three shelves than with eight.
But still, outside forces are working against me. Shadowdark is the biggest threat to this game. Shadowdark does not require expensive online character creation tools, and the time investment in learning to play the game correctly is minimal. Shadowdark's game loop is tight: map, characters, initiative order, movement, torches, timer, monsters, and darkness.
Shadowdark is like the old Dungeon! boardgame, but more like D&D. The movement is turn-based and tight. The clock is ticking. Everyone goes on their own turn. Movement is important. Being innovative and efficient is critical. Resource management is a concern, and carrying capacity is a must, as you need to haul everything out alive. Light is your lifeline. No one can see in the dark.
Shadowdark is almost an "Advanced Dungeon!"
Shadowdark's gameplay is super tight, and it makes D&D 5E look like an abstract story game like FATE in comparison. With D&D, what am I doing? Will the DM please read the text box to us now? Where are we? What is going on? The looseness of D&D makes the game very difficult to get started and approach. With Shadowdark? Map. Characters. Roll for initiative, that is your turn order. Everyone sits clockwise in that order. You are first, please move.
Is Shadowdark too brutal and unforgiving? No way, there are mods in the game to make it more pulp-action and heroic. Roll your stats any way you want, do 4d6 and drop the lowest for heroes, but, honestly, the modifiers don't matter as much here.
Tales of the Valiant needs to compete with that, especially in a time where D&D is going down like a cruise liner versus an iceberg battle, and so many players are jumping ship for other games. I like 5E, I like the heroic heroes, but there is a point where "easier elsewhere" wins. I can do overpowered heroic heroes in Shadowdark easily:
Give all casters a 1d4 damage, range 60' "attack cantrip" as a shoot-y power; if you miss having that, and you don't need to make a casting roll for this, as you always have it. You say what it is: fire bolt, force missile, holy smite, shocking jolt, ice lance, and what have you.
But I am still searching for that compelling game hidden in Tales of the Valiant. I know it is there, 5E did have a certain magic to it, but the hobby is slowly moving on. It needed to be released years ago, and it still is an excellent version of the game.
I just need to keep trying to find it.
That thing to me that says, "You have to play this!"
What is the soul of Tales of the Valiant?
I like that it's a setting-neutral 5E implementation, without the plethora of product identity gods, monsters, and other Wizards' IP mixed in here. The game feels like a clean-room 5E, ready to be dropped into any setting and start playing.
In that sense, it feels like an OSR game. But ToV is not an OSR game.
What is the soul of the game? It is a feeling and a reason to exist. It can be a place, such as Night City, which is the soul of the Cyberpunk game. It can be like the original D&D setting, Mystara, and the B/X and BECMI rules for that world. But a game's soul is more than a setting; it is a reason to be. GURPS does not have a specific setting, but it does have a soul in that it can be anything, anywhere, and at any place, and you can be anything.
A game's soul can be the system that defines the characters, encapsulates advancement, and establishes the level of heroism they can attain. Tunnels & Trolls is another excellent game, a fantasy game with no specific setting, but it has a definite sense of purpose and belonging. This is the game of strange tunnels under the surface of a savage world, filled with balrogs, trolls, and diabolical traps and puzzles. There is a feeling that unifies the game as a whole.
ToV needs to be more than "not D&D."
This is setting-neutral 5E, but we also have a setting here, Midgard and the Labyrinth, and that can encompass many worlds and places. So any D&D setting can be dropped into unify the rules behind ToV, and you can pull in whatever you want. The adventures and monsters in 2014 D&D will need to be replaced by ToV equivalents, since 2014 encounters will be a step weaker for ToV characters.
Midgard is an ideal home and feels close to the soul and spirit of this game. Midgard and the worlds strung across the Labyrinth form a strong backbone to this game and universe. Perhaps it is best to focus here and rebuild outwards.
There are plenty of great ideas for campaign worlds in the Labyrinth books. Perhaps the soul of the game can be found here, in newly created worlds built only out of your imagination, without legacy product identity IP weighing your thoughts down, and returning the bad guys to the same old beholders, mind flayers, githyanki, and other monsters overdue for the Monster Hall of Fame and retirement dungeon.
If a 2014 D&D adventure has a lot of custom monsters, that will be a harder thing to port over. You can still run these, but you will need to bump encounters up by a CR level to balance them to a good place. 5E is often concerned about balancing encounters, which is a flaw of the system. So many classic settings will need conversion, and many of the 5E mega dungeons will be a more complex conversion. It can be done by replacing and then creating new encounters, adding hit points, and tossing an extra die of damage here and there, but it is a little more work to do it this way.
D&D had a soul. It lost its meaning when modern writers took over and self-inserted themselves everywhere, making the entire game about identity instead of heroism, and rendering gold worthless in some post-capitalist statement. Instead of finding themselves through the game, like ham-fisted writers, they simply wrote themselves as the hero, ignoring the hero's journey, starting everyone off as awesome, and the story becomes a tedious journey to even greater awesomeness.
Tales of the Valiant shares that unfortunate legacy, but the danger is higher, and the balance better. The Player's Guide 2 will help, since the rest of the party archetypes will be filled out, and we will have a better view of the classes and roles of heroes. I need to find the essence of this game to better grasp what it means to be a fan, and to dream and play within this system. In other games, like Dungeon Crawl Classics, the soul is palpable and feelable, and you know the game when you pick up the books.
In ToV, I need to find the game's heart and soul.
https://koboldpress.com/black-flag-roleplaying/
This one is a surprise: Tales of the Valiant has a new Creative Commons license. This is a very nice development, and it provides another wonderful gift to the community, allowing them to build games and support adventures.
Thank you!
There is also a new free quick-start guide, which is more of a "how to roleplay" book with a few sample character sheets to review. It feels like a free flyer that you could pick up in a hobby shop. The pre-gen art in the guide (above) is beautiful and makes me want to play these characters.
This level of support and dedication to the game gives me hope in these challenging times for 5E.
While I am keeping my Tales of the Valiant books, I am divesting in most of my 2014 5E library. They are not the types of experiences and adventures I am looking for, and my 5E group fell through due to the decline of D&D as a hobby. Where there was once excitement about playing Ravenloft and other classic settings, now there is disinterest and apathy towards starting a game and experiencing those adventures.
I have decided to start again with a smaller Tales of the Valiant library, instead of keeping a ton of worthless D&D 2014 books around. The uncertainty surrounding D&D 2024 killed enthusiasm in my group, as the community was hesitant to buy the new books. A few of my group's most important players were part of that group, and the rest of the new players were uncertain about making the jump. In the end, D&D 2024's weak reception and low sales sealed the deal; nobody wanted to play, and no one wanted to buy books that had any uncertainty about whether they would be usable.
For 5E to survive on my gaming shelves at all, it needs to lose a significant amount of weight and approximately 80% of my 5E library. My Kobold Press books will likely be the last 5E books I own.
The entire 5E ecosystem is in a critical, life-ending state. Years of junk content, tons of interesting Kickstarter books, and add-on after add-on have turned a once-simple, fun game into an overwhelming mess of a pile of mutant flesh. The game is unplayable in this state. My library needs to lose weight, and most of its books.
The only way this game will have a chance of competing with other games, such as GURPS, Old School Essentials, and Dungeon Crawl Classics, is to tighten up, refocus, and deliver a concise, streamlined, and compelling experience.
I need to give ToV space and room to "find itself."
If I have seven shelves of 5E books sitting there telling me otherwise, I will never be able to do that.
Tales of the Valiant is still my 5E game; I have not walked away. I grew tired of the paid character creation systems out there and how expensive they were, and instead, I am collecting my most essential books on the Shard tabletop, one at a time. I loved having all the options, but it was not worth the cost.
Shard VTT is still my go-to 5E system, but it is just hard to support with all those subscriptions. One book at a time, I will get back to where I was.
ToV, like every other game, has to justify itself and answer the question, "Why play?" For many games, the answer to that is, "Because everyone else is playing." You will find the current Daggerheart surge behind this, and time will tell if it is a game with staying power or was just a fad. Some games emerge at the end of a boom, leeching onto try to provide something new, but the larger, crashing market is doomed to take them down anyway.
I have seen this at the end of the Atari VCS era, where new consoles with better games and graphics appeared, and they were all still doomed to fail since this was a larger consumer spending pattern shift than the market looking for something better than what they had. D&D's fall will kill the larger roleplaying market, and it will go back to being a niche hobby, and that is a good thing.
Companies don't want to hear that, and I don't either, but you do not get a market leader this large, with over 95% of the market going down, and nobody else gets affected. When D&D screws up, everyone suffers.
I am still excited for ToV and Shard VTT. I have other games that I like, too. Check my blog list. The biggest "threats" to ToV on my shelves? GURPS for realism, and Dungeon Crawl Classics for the fun factor and fantastic art. My copy of Daggerheart is still on the shelf, and Cypher System is the superior narrative experience and player-to-GM narrative token economy, even in fantasy.
Old School Essentials is such a fantastic game, too, with a very tight set of rules that is hackable and captures the core essence of the gaming experience in a minimalist, best-laid-out, and expressive set of core rules in tiny books. Shadowdark is taking a back seat to OSE these days as I explore that game.
And Kevin Crawford's "...Without Number" games are masterpieces. My copy of Ashes Without Number is due here very soon.
I am rebuilding my ToV to be a less-booky, core, tight, and compelling experience. These are the games that attract my attention. The age of bloat killed D&D. While I love the new options in the Kobold Press hardcovers, I am being very stingy going forward on which ones make it into my core set of books.
I have cancelled most of my Shard Tabletop subscriptions for Kobold Press books, since I could not justify paying over $30 per month to have that much stuff I never use. It's hard to justify spending that much money just to create ToV characters, and the "paid model" of the game is the worst part about 5E. It's like a "book a month" subscription plan. It was fun to have it all, but ultimately a waste to spend money on. I will pick up a book here and there and rebuild slowly.
5E is a fatally flawed system since it requires too much backend support for character creation. The game was designed around a constant paid-support model, and it shows. Wizards made it this way, and it is an exploitative system designed to get you paying money for convenience. I can play OSR games and run the character sheets by hand. Even GURPS has free (with supporter tips) and excellent pay-once options.
I will create them by hand, thank you. I will suffer.
I remember the days before computers when you did not need corporate web support and always-online character creation tools. In some ways, the hobby has taken a turn for the worse. This is why people play TSR-era games and not Wizards-era games.
I still love ToV and support the game, but 5E is a system with root-level problems.
There are plenty of third-party "hardcore" tweaks for ToV and 5E, and all of these work seamlessly with Tales of the Valiant. These will affect game balance, so use at your own risk! However, if you want a more deadly game and don't want to switch rules systems to a game like Shadowdark, these may be just what you are looking for.
5E Hardcore Mode is the only hardcover of the bunch, a small book, but it presents a set of optional rules that is about the most deadly of this bunch. This set makes the most significant tweaks to the rules, including penalizing unskilled checks heavily. They also make substantial tweaks to spells and spell slots, and limit the maximum level to ten. If you like the ToV rules as they are, this would be a poor fit for you, since it proposes the most dramatic changes to the core system.
This book is almost an entirely new game using a 5E rules base, and if you like how you gain levels, spells, and powers, you may look elsewhere. As a fun total conversion, the system delivers on the hardcore play style, making it an entertaining mod for 5E. I like the hardcover, though; it is a nice format.
5E Hardmode is a long-time favorite of mine, since it provides options that you can toggle on and off to adjust difficulty. This one has options to remove spells, a single death save (rolled after combat ends), healing at zero hit points, random rest replenishment, limiting dark vision, boss monsters, party retreats, chases, and permanent injuries. ToV has already made a few critical fixes to its dark vision, so some of these issues have been addressed by Kobold Press.
They have a strange rule where they double ability uses that are restored on a short rest, and only return those on a long rest. This may lead to bookkeeping issues on character sheets, and I am not a fan of that.
I liked this set since it has many common-sense options, and they are all optional. You can pick and choose a few, or go all in. They make as few changes as possible, but they are the most impactful.
Grim Reality is new, and it has three levels of difficulty in many areas, including survival. The current book is missing a few tables, and the author is working to rectify this issue; however, otherwise, this is a solid, configurable, and adaptable set of realism rules with varying levels of difficulty. They cover wounds, survival, exhaustion, healing, diseases, encumbrance, combat, environmental, and mental survival rules. This takes 5E to the level of a full-on survival game, and I love the depth and realism they give to each area.
They recommend not using all the rules, but picking a few modules for the genre of game you are playing and ignoring the ones you do not want to focus on. I like these rules; they are all optional, and you can set them easier or harder in each area. In fact, you could turn on a rules section for just a part of the adventure, such as having a desert-survival hexcrawl use the moderate survival settings, and then turning it off and ignoring it while the characters are in dungeons and towns.
Once they get those charts added, this will be my new go-to book for hardcore play. Highly recommended, although this utilizes AI art, and I wish it were available in print.
You have many options to mod in hardcore play, and a few excellent sets of rules that work seamlessly with ToV. It is nice not having to switch to a new set of rules like Shadowdark to get that same experience, and you can stay where you are comfortable and used to, using all the same class powers and spells as usual, only with a more "hardcore lens" to view your game through.
We have a new Live Play section on the sidebar, since Tabletop Bob over on YouTube is making ToV live plays! Help support the community, give him some support, and subscribe to our ToV channels! Let's watch these and help others find tremendous, positive, and entertaining ToV content for us to enjoy.
I would rather be watching ToV live plays than Wizards clickbait videos any day. These are perfect to leave on during workouts or dinner, allowing you to simply let it play and fill your gaming life with the things that interest you and positivity.
In the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide, there are three ways to earn luck:
Now, an attack roll means any attack roll, melee, ranged, melee spell attack, or ranged spell attack. Some interpret this to also include a successful enemy save versus a spell when cast as an attack, such as using a Hold spell on a bandit, and the bandit making their WIS save.
Characters can have a maximum of 5 luck, and if you gain another point of luck when you have 5, roll a d4 and reset your luck to that. Use it or lose it!
You spend your luck two ways:
Luck can't stop a critical miss or create a critical hit! Luck can't be used on the same roll that created it. These are the complete rules for luck, and they replace D&D's inspiration mechanics.
Now that narrative story games are popular, let's tweak luck to make this more interesting. We are going to turn luck into a narrative resource and borrow a few concepts from other games to tweak Tales of the Valiant into more of a story-like roleplaying game, such as Cypher System or Daggerheart.
This borrows a little from Cypher System's XP mechanics, where you can trade away or gain XP for narrative shifts, and these can be done on both the player and game master side. Cypher System calls them "GM Intrusions" and "Player Intrusions," but we will name them "Narrative Twist" or just "Twist" for short.
A player can spend 3 luck to change the narrative slightly according to their desires. Now, this is a slight change, such as losing the trail of an enemy, and the player wanting to "stumble upon them anyway." Or a player saying a door is unlocked when the question is open. A goblin fumbles a reload and, luckily, spills his quiver of arrows all over the floor. The player states a minor happening or fact, and it is now so.
The game master must approve of the shift or can change it to something plausible. These can't cheat death or do anything more than the reroll could, but it takes the reroll mechanic and gives it another interesting narrative use. They could be used in combat to create a complication for an enemy, or they can be used narratively to say a crowded inn still has a room available.
If you have five luck, and you have no way to spend it, consider suggesting a beneficial twist to the game master to burn that down and create an opportunity for the party and yourself.
Limit this to one twist per turn for the party if it gets too intrusive and overused.
The game master can offer a player a "potential twist," which is often a complication or other adverse outcome, in exchange for awarding the player three luck points. Your bowstring snaps. You drop your weapon. You lose the trail of the bandit. The door is locked with a good lock. The guards wander by and hear something.
The game master does not need to say what it is, just that the offer is out there, and the player can either accept or reject the potential twist. If rejected, don't tell them what it was, and move on.
This should focus more on the narrative than on turning a miss into a hit in combat, and it rewards the player who takes on a bit more adversity in the narrative on their own. This is a good tool for quickly recharging a player's luck pool, but at the cost of something happening in the narrative that may (or may not be) bad.
And this does not always have to be a negative! This could be a twist or other change in what was expected. Keeping them from always being a hardship makes them a bit more tempting to take, and it increases the uncertainty of "if I should", increasing tension. A game master could use this to let the player find a new dungeon in the middle of nowhere, something that is neither good nor bad, but it changes the narrative. An NPC could run up, asking for help. A shady character may be in the tavern tonight with unknown motives. The princess is in another castle.
