ToV: The Nerrath Campaign

I miss Nerrath.

My brother and I were recovering from a hard time in our lives, and we used D&D 4E to work through it. We escaped to Nerrath to get away from a world that abandoned us and forced us to fight for ourselves. Restarting all our roleplaying here felt like a fresh start, and it served as a microcosm of our fight to regain a sense of normalcy.

For about four years it lasted, until another tragedy struck with my brother's health, and D&D 4E moved to the Essentials line, a 4.5E that started to abandon the game, similar to D&D 2024. We discovered how badly 4E sucked at the higher levels. We got over his health issues together, but D&D 4E died on the vine, and 5E never replaced it.

My brother played a ranger, and the 5E ranger always sucks. If there is one class Wizards will never understand, it is the ranger, and this is their curse. The ToV ranger is so much better, and at least they keep their role-playing wilderness powers. They are not just a "map combat class" like they are in 2024 D&D.

With my brother gone, there are times when I want to come back here and enjoy the world again.

Tales of the Valiant would do this world justice and play like I remember it. It would be slightly "Kobold Press" flavored, but that is not a bad thing, given how much D&D 2024 has changed the game into something unrecognizable and heavily censored. ToV has a few issues, too, like removing alignment, which drains the game of direction and motivation. I can add an alignment system if I want, so it is not a huge problem.

Kobol Press' monsters and additions feel more fantasy-oriented than D&D, which skews more towards pseudo-modernism. I like the clockwork and kobold elements; they feel fun and a bit silly, and there should be more of that in games. The void influence is also extraordinary and extra-worldly, without feeling too planar.

The Kobold structure of the place is better than D&D's tired "Great Wheel" model, and much more open. The Labyrinth exists as the "world between worlds" and allows travel between worlds without going too gate-happy. This is a much more sane model of universe structure, like how the Eleven Hells are next to the Elemental Plane of Fire, and the Celestial Realm is adjacent to the Plane of Air. It all makes sense.

The Labyrinth model also better simulates the world model of 4E, where interconnected worlds are all in the same area of the universe. The later D&D 4E releases sabotaged us with this "all-in-one" planar model, where stating worlds became MMO starting zones and were unimportant to the grand scheme of things. D&D 4E assumed you would end up on the planes, and the homeworlds were unimportant.

We took the opposite view, in that you could find creatures from level 1-30 in the world, and there were places you did not go. ToV supports that worldview nicely.

In the Labyrinth, you could have a "level 20 world" where nothing below a CR 20 exists, and we had that world in our D&D 4E game. Even houseflies and common rats were CR 20; traps were all certain death CR 20 killers, and this world was insane, but a lot of fun to treasure-hunt for the good stuff. If you can get in and out without dying, you often can find something extraordinary.

We expanded the world with many new locations, which turned out to be fun additions full of flavor. Going "beyond the map " was an adventure to find "what was out there," and that was always fun. The home base was always Fallcrest, but we had several base towns and other places outside of here that served as adventure hubs.

I could see the Fallcrest area being a spot on the Labyrinth. All the lineage options are there, if you include the Dragonborn from the Labyrinth Worldbook, and we will need to wait for the Player's Guide 2 for the Drow (but easily addable in Shard as a custom lineage), and the gang is all here.

We did have a character from Midgard in our D&D 4E game! So, in our continuity, the worlds were linked, and a possible ToV version of Nerrath is likely, given that Nerrath is likely destroyed and forgotten, with the reality shards lying out there for the ToV gods to reconstruct in a ToV form.

The ToV would be slightly different, with the Kobolds and Clockworks running around, but they are cool and thematically fit the "Lost 4E" vibe. Similarly, Aasimar and Tieflings are replaced by the Sydereans (of both celestial and fiendish flavors). I don't mind the changes, and it reflects the world being rebuilt in the Koboldverse, rather than being left to die in the Wizards-verse.

I still stay on the Kickstarters and new books for ToV for this reason.

A chance to go back and be there again.