The Nerrath Campaign, Part 2

With the release of the Player's Guide 2, we have the missing options to cover the popular player options introduced in D&D 4E's default setting, Nerrath. We have drow, dragonborn, and elemental scions. We have the Vanguard class. We have all the major options to cover this setting now in the core rules.

Why Nerrath?

I have memories of this place, back when D&D 4E was new and interesting, and the game played more like a battle chess version of D&D, and we were heavy into miniatures and tabletop play. It has almost been 20 years since D&D 4E's release, and that is a bit of a sobering thought.

We had fun here.

This helped us get through a tough time in our lives and revitalized our love of fantasy gaming. While I loved Pathfinder 1e as D&D 4E faded, my brother still held onto D&D and had hopes for 5E. Sadly, 5E never lived up to the hype for us, since the classes he played in the 2014 version were terribly designed (ranger, rogue). A few weak classes killed the first few years of 5E, and we never came back.

Tales of the Valiant does a better job with both classes and brings the fun back to the game with them. I wish he could have played there with these rules. With the Player's Guide 2, we have the rest of the missing pieces of the puzzle. The torch of Nerrath has been passed to ToV.

Thematically, D&D 4E was best at launch, but when Wizards shifted level 10 and higher play to the planes, the game started to fall apart. We loved the challenging world from level 1 to 30, where it felt epic and cool. Orcs starting at level 6 made them the first "tough monsters" that you feared showing up, and you felt a natural progression of the creatures as you leveled.

We also loved the build-your-own monsters in D&D 4E, something D&D 2024 got rid of. Thankfully, ToV's monster creation tools are much better than both games.

Nerrath was a perfect DIY setting once you got beyond the edges of the map. We had some wild areas, arguably more DCC-like gonzo fantasy-inspired amazing fantasy landscapes, such as entire seas falling off a waterfall, amazing abandoned ancient torus gates as large as a mountain, and all sorts of wild landscapes and epic-fantasy tropes. The world was as epic and cool as the characters, with an extreme mid-2010s vibe throughout.

People forget.

Nostalgia blinds you.

That Eberron vibe of an extreme fantasy world was cool. Dungeon Crawl Classics owns gonzo, speculative, extreme fantasy these days, as Wizards gave it all up to chase "the feels." We gave it all up for nostalgia, and the company ended up tarnishing the memory with identity marketing and a flood of low-quality releases at the end of D&D 2014.

The Forgotten Realms was a boring, old, stuffy setting compared to our Nerrath. This was before the world figured out D&D 4E was an embarrassment, mainly due to a lack of proper testing, and that lack of testing continued into D&D 5E. They rolled it all back and pretended they were an old-school game, and then the identity marketing team took over when Tasha's came out, and the wool was pulled over our eyes, and the game was not "a return to old school values."

Part of me wants to run this campaign as a solo experience, and another part of me feels it should be left to memories. Whatever I choose to do, ToV gives me the tools to do it, and the game feels like home.

Is Character Sheet Complexity the Level Eight Wall?

By the company's own numbers, most games never go past level eight.

Why is that?

I get the feeling that the invisible wall is created by the complexity of the character sheet and by how the game is evolving towards VTT-only play. My level fourteen multiclass character with a 16-page physical character sheet would be nearly impossible to run without a VTT.

Perhaps by level eight, the tipping point is reached for tabletop players in terms of being able to manage a typical 5E character sheet, and it forces people away from the game. The percentage of gamers who prefer tabletop play is shut out, and the participation level drops.

Nobody can be expected to flip through a dozen printed pages every turn to manage a character during their turn. And, no, phones are not the answer. Some groups ban phones at the table to reduce distractions, so stop forcing us to put character sheets on them.

Ignore this, and it is like a cereal manufacturer discovering why people don't buy their cereal, which is that the packaging was so full of holes that it kept going stale on the shelf. It was a great cereal, but few could find a box worth eating.

5E is a game that eventually forces you to play with a VTT. This is a major source of profitability and a huge design flaw. If you don't like it, don't play, and there are better games for high-level play.

It is what it is.

Multiclassing

I really don't like multiclassing. To do it well and make it work is hard, and it is not just "well, my story says I have become a bard for a while, so I guess I will level bard!"

If you start treating classes as jobs and story progression, you will make a mess out of your character.

The character sheet will blow up, get so complicated, spells will double up, and you will end up losing character power and falling behind the others. It is a constant headache; you may love the "get something cool" as you pick different class levels and combine things, but you will fall behind those who do not multiclass if you do not plan (aka, read the cheat guides), and make your picks from a very small viable pool of combinations.

Most multiclass combinations will make you unhappy in the long run.

Multiclassing takes very careful planning to make it work well, and your choice must be extremely limited and focused on gaining only the powers you are trying to get. If you do not plan, you will make your character worse as you level.

Other classes will be dropping 12d6 damage attacks at level 14, and you will be throwing around two or three d10. You won't feel you are "keeping up," and others who stick to one thing will have their high-level features become available, and you will have to wait, and possibly never get them.

You will have great versatility, but you will fall behind compared to others. If you never play past level 12, you will likely never care and welcome the short-term versatility. If you play into the late game, you are either exploiting the rules and OP, or you did not plan and are completely hosed and worthless.

My multiclass character sheets blow up, and I need spreadsheets to track spells.

There are times when I would rather bolt on an external progression system to a character than simulate external path progression. Sure, somebody writes and bolts on a gladiator system for 5E, rather than make a gladiator class. At least, any character could be a gladiator, and the system isn't "messing with my build" by forcing me to take levels in gladiator just to be able to excite the crowd and gain support.

With a bolt-on system, I am a wizard 7 and a gladiator rank 3. Thank you. Keep your silly ideas out of my character build. Later on, I can level up another bolt-on system and become a rank 4 pirate, and not affect my wizard progression or knowledge. Oh, and I can still get my level 20 class feature with these bolt-on systems active. Without bolt-ons, I am a wizard 7/gladiator 3/pirate 4, level 14 total, and unhappy I can't cast spells as a level 14 caster.

Then you have the problem that online character creation systems don't support bolt-on systems. It is a constant headache that a point-buy skill-based system (like GURPS or Champions) just does not have. There are certain campaigns with organic ability and skill progression that I absolutely will not play with 5E since it can't do those sorts of games as easily as GURPS, Champions, Savage Worlds, or a point-buy system.

Yes, I like 5E, but they are forcing a class-and-level system game to do things it was never designed to do. It will start off great, but eventually get worse and worse as the different-shaped pegs are forced through the square hole.

I am happy that Tales of the Valiant, by default, makes mutliclassing optional. I would not play with it at my table or in my games. Most of the time, without careful planning, allowing unlimited multiclassing makes players unhappy and increases complexity to the point where its value is questionable.

Plus, ToV's classes are fun enough without multiclassing, as you get something nearly every level. For the complexity and mostly junk builds that multiclassing adds, I don't see the point.

If Kobold Press delivered a "multiclass strategy guide" with successful combinations that I could automatically green-light and allow, that would be another thing, since the designers thought through these builds and made them more widely known. Players could have a book to consult for winning builds and strategies, so they would not make mistakes they would later regret. A guide like this could make "class synergy rules" to buff weaker combinations and make those viable.

But leaving it up to players (or myself) to stumble through is a pain I don't want to deal with, not in a system where character sheets balloon to dozens of pages at higher levels.

If most of the choices are bad ones, and only 5-10% are viable builds, why do I want this in my game?

Mail Room: Player's Guide 2 Hardcovers

I got the shipping notification for the hardcover Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 from the crowdfunding campaign, and they should be arriving very soon.

I love owning both physical books and PDFs, not needing to sign in to D&D Beyond to read what I bought, and not having "digital DLC" or "partnered releases" become part of the core system. Once D&D Beyond closes down, you will not have any of the "DLC" you purchased. Parts of your game will become lost forever, and your digital copies will also be gone.

Don't laugh, content companies larger than this have wiped out the movies and music of millions of customers before, and D&D could be sold to new owners at the drop of a hat. You are one press release away from losing everything you purchased.

Wow, it is like Tales of the Valiant is the "normal game," and D&D is the "digital nightmare."

Life is normal over here.

There is no drama.

I have my books and PDFs, and the complexion and feeling of the game is completely different.

I own these books and digital copies.

The game is mine, and I am not renting it from someone else.

The Not D&D Side of the Hobby

I am happy over here on Shard Tabletop, enjoying my Open 5E implementation of the rules, and also finally getting around to cracking open some of the books I collected for the 2014 edition.

And I hear D&D Beyond is busy adapting other systems to 5E D&D, and creating exclusives over there that I do not care about (5E Cthulhu, 5E Pathfinder), rented books with no physical copies or PDFs to own? Why would I even bother?

Tales of the Valiant (and Level Up A5E) are Open 5E these days, and you could still hold onto 2014 D&D, but sooner or later, some contractual support for those will run out, and support on whatever VTT you use will be dropped. I don't trust Wizards of the Coast anymore. I am not supporting their walled garden or the Apple-ifi-cation of D&D. Count me out, I run Linux over here.

If I can't run Linux on my hardware, then I don't want it.

I feel strangely immune to the D&D drama, and  I haven't cared about it in months. I skip right over those clickbait Wizards drama videos. Who cares about D&D vs. Daggerheart? I play ToV and have 10 years of books to work through, and likely 50 years of megadungeons. I am good, thank you. I've bought enough.

Tales of the Valiant is my "game engine" for 5E, and I do not care about the vacant lot that is the 2026 D&D release schedule. I have the Kobold Press crowdfunding to jump on board with. Player's Guide 2 is on its way!

I have Night Hunters to look forward to! Look at all this cool stuff! Who cares about "web release" classes and powers from Wizards? These are hardcopy books with to-own PDFs! This is 5E Horror!

The world is much more fun outside of Wizards D&D, more interesting, and offers much more to look forward to and collect. The lack of drama, cool releases from Kobold Press, and my not caring about D&D YouTube make my time with ToV very enjoyable.

ToV and Generic Fantasy Monsters

When I was sorting through my books, I had the option to pull in the Expanded Monster Manuals, and this would force me to draw in the 2014 Monster Manual, and then I stopped.

Why include these?

My ToV Monster Vault has all the monsters I need, with better ToV support and the game's own take on these creatures. Also, why do I want to start pulling in Wizard's product identity monsters (beholders, mind flayers, displacer beasts, etc.)?

My OSR games do fine without any product identity monsters, and when they are there, if I want them, I prefer the basic mix of generic creatures to the official "Wizards blend." Once I start adding IP-specific monsters, my world becomes part of the D&D Multiverse, and I do not want that. I am fine without them, and this frees me up to discover new terrors and beasts instead of falling back on the old standbys.

I am a massive fan of the generic, OSR-style monster lists. I can put them in any world, and then use that as a "soup stock" for a base monster list while I develop my own.

Now, the ToV lists are different, and a bit more Migard-focused, but I have not experienced most of them before, and if I am playing ToV, then all my worlds are on the Labyrinth anyway. The ToV monsters fit there, and are universe-coherent. The special ToV dragons make sense, while variant D&D dragons would feel out of place.

So, for now, those non-ToV monster books are in storage, and I will play with what I got.

And the ToV Game Master's Guide includes 35 pages on how to create monsters! This is an incredible addition to the game, 10% of the book, and you can make monsters by starting at a CR and going from there. If I wanted all new monsters in an all-new world, I could have them. Do I want to make CR 4 "security robots" that are controllers? I got them in a few steps. Making my own creatures was one of the best parts of D&D 4E, and I heard they got rid of the rules in D&D 2024, which is a shame.

The players never knew what to expect, and I could toss together memorable NPC villains with the system, like a kobold baker who could throw wads of sticky dough to slow or entangle, or even blind characters or create dust clouds to interfere with missile fire with flour. That NPC was so hilarious; he stuck around, became a favorite enemy of my players, and eventually won the kobold cook over to work as a chef in town.

This is the process of crafting a campaign, figuring out which books you want to use, and brainstorming with the tools you have.

Mail Room: Player's Guide 2 (ToV)

The Player's Guide 2 was released today for backers, and I am enjoying this. More soon.

My Labyrinth: Midgard

I am building my Labyrinth and putting together some of the best third-party 5E settings, centered around the official Kobold Press world, Midgard. So, of course, I will start here, in one of the best non-D&D world settings out there, and one that feels better supported with gazetteers, adventures, history, and current events.

Midgard feels better constructed than the Forgotten Realms at this point; it is not stitched together from novels, has not undergone so many sweeping changes and retcons, and the entire world feels grounded and cohesive. There is no video game, so there isn't that distraction hanging over the campaign. There are times when I want the video game to stand on its own, and the campaign setting to stand on its own. I have seen a game come in and take over a setting, and it feels like the setting will never escape the pop-culture moment, and shall forever serve it as fan service.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game, but I want to move past it. I am ready for new characters and adventures, and the ones they keep putting on the covers of books need to be retired, lest they become the Realm's next version of the unkillable GMNPCs, which the setting has long suffered from.

Midgard forces me to create new iconic heroes, and nine times out of ten, those will be the PCs.

Also, once I start putting the "TSR/Wizards worlds" in there, they will slowly begin to take over the campaign. They are too comfortable and familiar. You can always "fall back to Waterdeep" and "find a safe place." I want players to feel like a fish out of water, without any comfortable place to lean on, and to be forced to care for and learn about a new and different place.

The best campaigns I ever ran were "fish out of water," where the players were caught entirely off guard, forced to survive, learn about new places and people, and show how clever and resourceful they were to adapt. They had to get to know people, figure out who they could trust, take some bumps along the way, and live in an entirely new world.

Familiarity and comfort are the opposite of excitement and adventure.

Even in the modern era, with the melting pot of 1001 races and cultures, Midgard still holds up far better than most other settings, where new races and backgrounds don't seem to have a history with the world, and everything feels like it was recently dropped in. While Midgard feels more malleable, the other settings' decades of history hold them back. I played in the original versions of Greyhawk, the Treams, Mystara, and all these different races were not in the setting. They exist outside the lore, have no homelands, and have no history; all of them feel transient.

They have all been retconned into the world with no history or reason.

Eberron was one of the few worlds that tried to make sense of the different lore, and that was the last we saw of the company trying to create a setting for the game, rather than play on nostalgia and shoehorn in the new stuff alongside the old. Midgard is not as well-known, and it has a lot of room for my own creations, so it feels more open to change.

Granted, you can say they are "new planar arrivals" in any setting, but Midgard has a stronger connection to the Labyrinth. This less planar, more grounded dimensional passageway feels like The Ways from the Wheel of Time books. I like the Labyrinth a lot, and it is the glue that holds the universe together.

The Labyrinth beats the stuffing out of the D&D Multiverse in comparison to creating a fantasy universe framework. The D&D Multiverse is too closely tied to gods, the old alignment wheel, and there is no mystery to the structure or composition of the planes. It focuses too much on the home of the gods, and not enough on what D&D lumps together in the "Prime Material Plane." The Labyrinth pushes the gods into smaller homes and places greater focus on actual campaign worlds and the connections between them.

Where the D&D Multiverse is god and alignment-centered, ToV's Labyrinth is strictly campaign-world-focused. The Gods have no structure, and if you wanted "Norse god home" you could insert it into the Labyrinth without needing to change much else, or reflect what the Chaotic Neutral god home is, what the Neutral Evil go home is like, and all the silly structure and symmetry the concept is enamoured with.

The Midgard worldbook also cautions against having too many fantastical ancestries in a party, and advises focusing on a few; with too many, the party begins to feel more like outsiders and a motley band of wanderers. Connections and mixing in are essential in a world like this. If you are in the Northlands, play a Northlands mix of ancersteries, have some connections to the place, and fit in better. A frog person, a dhampir, a dark elf, and a trollkin in these lands are going to raise some eyebrows.

Midgard and the Tales of the Valiant cosmology setup is much stronger than D&D's, and it reduces the importance of the outer planes in the setting, and instead puts the focus squarely on campaign worlds, where it should be. Ever since D&D 4E, the outer planes have felt too crucial to the D&D setting, reducing the campaign world to MMO starter zones, and making them feel like places that you forget and move on from once you have planar travel.

In the Labyrinth, I can focus on two or three campaign worlds and never have any travel to the outer planes. The lands, peoples, and places are still significant. These random-planar cities and other outer enclaves, all trying to recreate the magic of Planescape (but failing), do not diminish the importance of the core campaign worlds. Midgard will always be the "prime campaign world," and that will ground the campaign.

When I used the planes in AD&D, nothing was habitable for any extended period, and some outer planes, if you tried living in them, would change you physically and mentally. If you live in the Beastlands for too long, you will develop animal-like features and slowly transform into an animal. Pandemonium? You will slowly go insane. The Abyss? You slowly turn into a demon, grow horns and hooves, and your alignment shifts permanently toward chaos and evil.

Valhalla? You grow wings, your hair turns blonde, you never want to leave, a pegasus shows up and asks to be yours if you stay, and you adopt the northland's accent like a Norwegian or a Swede. Or you turn into a troll or dark elf. The Spider Queen's plane? You all start to slowly turn into dark elves, driders, or, most likely? Insects. You wake up with giant bug eyes, -2 CHR, and get a +2 on perception checks. You decided to stick around and never paid attention to the constant buzzing that drove the halfling insane. The dwarf turned into a giant centipede last night, and we can't find him.

There is no absolute save for these effects, and they will get you, since you are only mortals. The longer you stay, the worse it gets, and the worse the saving-throw penalty I will give you. There are no tourists in the outer planes. Sorry, you are mortals, and these places have far too much power for you to withstand or comprehend.

Some planes do not have air or water, or will dissolve you alive. Others are the insides of living beings. Some lack the third dimension. Others have nonsensical geometry, and you will step into a wall and get lost forever. Save versus spells, fail, and the character sheet gets torn up.

People's brains these days cannot comprehend how alien my outer planes are, or how terrible they are to visit. This is the only way to run them, or they become permanent campaign suburbs that take over the game and render all the game worlds as meaningless starting zones.

But that sort of almost Lovecraftian absolutism is needed, or else the planes are "just another place," and they mean nothing at all.

The art in the Kobold Press books is fantastic, and it feels more like fantasy than the Realms. The current Wizards team is leaning too hard into modernity, and D&D feels like an anime version of Harry Potter, with too many steampunk overtones. Fancy trench coats and Victorian-era suits with vests and ties are not medieval armor, and the art does not match the feeling I want. I want plate armor to look heavy and impose a restriction. It is not fashion; it is armor with a practical, life-saving use.

I want armor to feel like it is needed and saves lives; it is not a fashion choice.

And the Labyrinth forces a geography on players. If the exit to a new world is in a particular world, they will need to start there. The gate spell may not be used, as the spell description mentions.

"Deities and other planar rulers can prevent portals created by this spell from opening in their presence or anywhere within their domains." - ToV, Player's Guide, page 283

When you exit, you are forced to "start here," wherever "here" may be. There could be a couple of exits in the same world, and travelling between them is dangerous, but faster than the alternative. This gives the referee some control over the "gate game" and forces players to deal with the locals when they pop out. Campaigns can be ruined by "too many gates" or "gate rooms" where travel between worlds becomes too easy, and you just use a transport hub to get anywhere you want to go.

Midgard has maps, cultures, places, fascinating lore, and a story behind every place in the world. I can read the book for hours and be inspired to create adventures here. This world still feels like a fantasy to me, and that gritty, down-to-earth touch of life without technology feels true here.

Once you dig in, you will find this is a fantastic setting that does everything you want it to. It does feel like Paizo's Golarion, in that there are dedicated areas for every type of adventure, but they feel distinctly different than Pathfinder's offerings. Where Golarion's themepark areas seem very on the nose, Midgard's areas are more subtle and have their own identity.

Choosing Midgard as the campaign homeworld for my version of the Labyrinth feels like a good choice, as does keeping the TSR/Wizards worlds off the cosmos so we can focus on this world, and not fall back on comfort or nostalgia.

Midgard is a solid choice, and a great place to begin.