TTRPGs I’m Currently Playing: Cypher System + It’s Only Magic

It can’t have escaped notice that I written something like fourteen thousand words on “new kinds of D&D” on the ‘cano so far this year, and all of those pieces ended with a kind of “well, not really what I’m playing these days but seems neat!” Which brings up the obvious follow-up question: what am I playing these days? Well…

Something that I think is really under-theorized in TTRPGs are GM Playstyles. Every decent RPG these days has a list of player archetypes: the actor, the puzzle-solver, the rules lawyer, etc, but very rarely do you see GM style addressed in anything more detailed than a reminder that it’s not a competition and you need to support your players.

I think a big part of the reason for that is that GM Style ends up being closely linked to the design of the particular game itself. Most games—and I realize the word “most” is a load-bearing word in this sentence—support multiple player styles, but generally have a much narrower list of “right” ways to run them.

The result of that is that most people who run games, especially those of us who've run multiple systems, will find one and glom on—“this is the game I’m running from here on out.” We can’t always articulate why, but you’ll settle into a ruleset and realize how much easier and more fun it is to run, and I think that’s because it’s a game where the designer runs games the same way you do.

I’ve said before that 5th edition D&D is the first version of that game that I didn’t feel like was fighting me to run it the way I wanted to. I genuinely loved the whole 3.x family, and that’s probably the ruleset I have the most hours with at this point, but at least once a session I would say both “bleah, I don’t remember how that works,” and “man, I don’t care. Just roll something and we can move on.”

A big part of that is I like to run games in a more “improvisational” style than D&D usually assumes—and just to be crystal clear, I’m using “improv” in the formal, technical sense as a specific technique like with Improv Comedy, not as a synonym for “ad lib” or “just making things up.”

And it’s not that you can’t Improv D&D, it’s just that for any given mechanical encounter you need to know a lot of numbers, and so the game tends to screech to a halt as you flip through the Monster Manual looking for something close enough to run with.

(My go-to guidelines were when in doubt, the DC was 13, and the players could always have a +2 circumstance bonus if they asked.)

So with that as prologue, let me tell you about my favorite tabletop RPG out there: Monte Cook’s Cypher System.

Like a lot of people, Cook was somebody whose name I first learned due to his being one of the three core designers of 3rd Edition D&D, along with Johnathan Tweet and Skip Williams. Tweet, of course, was the big name rockstar developer, having done both Ars Magica and Over the Edge, and was supposedly the guy who came up with most of the d20 system’s core mechanics.

Cook, though, was one of those people I realized I already knew who he was despite not knowing his name—he was one of “the Planescape Guys,” and was the one who wrote the modules that brought Orcus back.

After 3.0 came out, Cook did a bunch of weird projects like the criminally underrated Ghostwalk, and got hit in one of the early waves of layoffs. He started his own indie company, and ended up as one of the first people to explore selling PDFs on their own as a business model. (Which sounds absolutely ancient now.)

I thought his indie stuff was some of, if not the best third party 3e D&D material out there. But even more so, I found his stuff incredibly easy to use and run. This was a guy who clearly ran games the way I did. By contrast, my reaction to Tweet’s stuff, who I respected and admired tremendously, was to stare at it and think “but what do I do, though?”

Cook also had a blog—I think on LiveJournal, to really emphasize the 2004 of it all—which had a huge influence on how I ran games, mostly because I’d get halfway through a post and already be shouting “of course!”

He also did a mostly-forgotten game published variously as Arcana Unearthed and Arcana Evolved that I thought was the best version of 3rd edition; it was the game 3.0 wanted to be without all the D&D historical baggage. One of the many neat things it had—and this is foreshadowing—was a much cleaner & more comprehensive system for crafting magic items, including a very cool way to make single-use items. Want to store a bunch of single-use Fireball spells in marbles and distribute them to your fellow party members? You can do that.

Flash forward a decade. Just before 5e came out, Cook released his big magnum opus game, Numenera. I bounced off the setting pretty hard, but the rules, those I really liked.

Imagine the initial 3.0 version of D&D, and strip it down until all you have left are Feats and the d20. The core mechanic is this: everything has a difficulty from 1 to 10. The target number is the difficulty times 3. Meet or beat on a roll to accomplish the task.

And here’s the thing: that’s the only way tasks work. All you need to do to make something work in game is give it a difficulty score. Going hand in hand with this is that only the PCs roll. So, for example, monsters use the same difficulty score for what the PCs need to roll to hit them, and also what the PCs need to roll to avoid being hit by them. Occasionally, something will have something at a different level than the default, a difficulty 3 monster with stealth as level 6, for example. It’s incredibly easy to improv on this when you really only need one number, and you can focus on the big picture without having to roll the dice and do math yourself on the fly.

It's funny—on 3rd Edition/D20 Jonathan Tweet always got the credit for the clean and simple parts of the game ("Um, how about if Armor Class just went up?") and Cook got the credit for all the really crunchy rules & wizards stuff. Which made sense, since Tweet has just done Over the Edge, and Cook had just spent years working for ICE on Rolemaster. So, building his own system from scratch, Cook ends up with something from the "bare minimum number of rules to make this playable" school, whereas Tweet’s 13th Age went completely the other direction.

Alert mathematicians will have noted that difficulty levels higher than 6 are impossible to hit on a bare roll being above 20. Rather than modifiers to the roll, you use things to increase or decrease the difficulty level. (When the game came out, I cracked that Cook had clearly won a bet by making a game where the only mechanic was THAC0.)

Most of where the PC’s options come from are their Abilities, which are effectively 3e D&D feats. They’re some thing a PC can do, a power, a bonus to some kind of task, a spell, a special attack.

Players can also have skills, in which they are either trained or specialized, which decrease the difficulty by one or two steps respectively. A player can use up to two “Assets” to decrease the difficulty by up to another two steps, and they’re delightfully abstracted. An Asset can be anything: a crowbar, an NPC assisting, a magic gauntlet, a piece of advice you got last session about where the weak point was. They’re as much an improv prompt for the players as they are a mechanic. If you can decrease the difficulty down to zero, it’s an automatic success, and you dont have to roll.

Which brings me to my two favorite features of the mechanics.

First, the PCs have three Stats—Might, Speed, Intellect—but rather than scores, they’re pools. Your skills & abilities & assets represent your character’s baseline normal everyday capabilities. Your Stat Pools represent how much extra “oomph” you can deploy under pressure. So if you’re trying to Bend Bars & Lift Gates, and having a friend help with a crowbar didn’t get the job done, you can spend some Might points and really get that portcullis open.

Your pools also act as your hit points—physical damage drains your Might pool, psionic attacks drains your Intellect. Special powers or spells also spend pool points to activate.

“I have to spend hit points to kick the door open?” is a reaction most everyone has to this at first glance, but that’s the wrong approach. Your pools are basically a representation of how much “spotlight” time your character can have during an encounter, how much cool stuff they can do before they have to sit down and rest.

Because also, getting your points back is incredibly easy; there’s really no reason to ever enter an encounter—combat, social, or otherwise—without a full tank.

This works for all tasks, not just the punchy combat ones. So you get these great moments where someone will be trying to bluff their way past the border patrol and decide they’re going to be charming as hell as they empty out their Intellect pool, or yell that they’re going to bullet time as they dump their speed pool on a dodge check.

Which brings me to my single favorite RPG mechanic of all time: something called “The GM Intrusion.” At any point, the GM has the option to throw a wrinkle in and call for a roll anyway, usually when the party has cleverly knocked a difficulty down to nothing.

The examples in the book are things like a PC trying to climb a cliff with a specialized rockclimbing skill and a rope harness making the climb check zero, and then the GM says “well actually, it was raining earlier, so I’m gonna need a roll.”

But, the kicker is that the GM has to pay the PC for it. The GM offers up an XP for the Intrusion, and the player has the option to accept, or two spend one of their XPs to reject it. Actually, the GM has to offer up 2 XPs, one of which the player being intruded on has to immediately give to another player, which also does a really neat job of democratizing XP rewards.

Cypher is one of those games where “1 XP” is a significant item, players generally get 2–4 a session, upgrades cost 3 or 4 depending on what you want.

The place where this really works is if you use cards to represent those XPs. (They have a bunch of really cool XP decks for sale, but they’re dirt easy to make out of 3x5 cards or use repurposed playing cards.) A player saying “and that makes it difficulty zero!” followed by the GM silently sliding an XP card into the middle of the table is peak. I like to give the card a couple little taps before I say something like “so what really happens is…”

This gets objected to from some quarters, usually in the form of something like “putting your thumb on the scale is what I was already doing as a good GM, why should I have to pay for it?” And, well, that’s the reason, so that you have to pay for it. This makes the extra difficulty both explicit and collaborative. Instead of monsters suddenly growing an extra 30 HP they way they tend to do in D&D, here the GM has to openly offer the extra challenge, and allow the player to turn it down. Sometimes they’re just not in the mood, and would rather pay the XP to get past this to what they really want to do.

Like the stat pools, XPs aren’t just a score to make characters better. In addition to actual character upgrades, you can also spend them on things like retroactively creating an NPC contact, or acquiring a base of operations. They’re the currency the players get to use to wrest control of the game away from the GM.

Rounding out the mechanics are the Cyphers themselves. In simple terms, Cyphers are powerful, single-use magic items. In the original Numenera they were all assumed to be scavenged and barely understood ancient tech. So an item that acts as a single-use Fireball grenade might actually be an ancient power cell that no one knows how to use anymore, but they know if they mash these two metal bits together it blows up real good.

Later settings introduced more “subtle” cyphers, as appropriate for the world. In the game I’m running now, Cyphers have included a marble that if you throw it grows to the size of a bowling ball and does a tremendous amount of damage, a high-powered energy drink that does a bonus to any speed task, and “the advice your aunt gave you when you were young,” which they haven’t tried to use yet. (It’s a -2 to any task difficulty, as long as they yell “oh! That’s what she meant!” before rolling.)

PCs can only have a few Cyphers on them at a time, and are supposed to always be finding new ones, so the game operates on the assumption that the players always have a small set of very powerful one-shot powers they can deploy. It keeps the game fresh, while discouraging hoarding. Like XPs, these also work best on cards.

I saw someone complain that Cypher was just “the players and GM handing metaplot coupons back and forth,” and yeaaaahhhh?, I can see why you might get that impression but also that’s the completely wrong philosophy. There are definitely sessions that feel more like a card game, with XP and Cypher cards slapping onto the table. But this is what I was talking about with GM style; I like having a formalized, easy to deploy way where both the GM and the players can go “well, actually…” at each other.

Character creation is similarly stripped down, and is one of the signature elements of the system: you make your character by filling in the blanks of the sentence “I’m an [adjective] [noun] who [verbs].” The noun is effectively your character class, but they’re more like a starting template. The default nouns are “strong guy”, “fast guy”, “smart guy”, “talky guy”—Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Bard, basically. The other two let you pick up some specializations. In practice, those three choices just determine which ala carte menu you get to pick your starting powers from.

That all lands somewhere around “rules medium”, in that you can probably fit all the mechanics on a single postcard, but the book is still 400+ pages long to fit all the Abilities and Verbs and all.

Despite the heft of the book, I’ve found it to be a system where the rules just melt away, but still give you enough framework to actually resolve things. When I really need the rules to back me up, there’s something there, otherwise, just say “sure, let’s call that difficulty 3,” and keep moving.

As I said, I bounced off the original Numenera setting pretty hard. Briefly: the setting is a billion years in the future, full of super-science and nanotech and post-plural-apocalypse. "Now", is roughly a medieval setting, where everyone runs around with swords fighting for feudal lords. But, instead of magic we have rediscovered super-science, monsters are the results of ancient genetic experiments, or aliens, or long-abandoned robots. Cook always enjoyed playing with the Arthur C. Clarke line about "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and here took that all the way up to eleven—the only magic is terribly advanced technology.

The other place he leans into his strengths is that his previous games (Ghostwalk, Ptolus, the setting for Acana Unearthed) had very cool, evocative, exciting setups, and then tended to have a tremendously boring resolution or explanation. Here, mysteries about but are fundamentally unexplainable. “Who knows, it’s weird!!” is the end of every adventure; a setting built around all cool setups that can never be explained or resolved ever. That’s a real “your mileage may vary” flavor if ever there was one.

But the problem is that all ends up just being “turbo D&D” but with different latin stems on the words describing the superpowers. Despite being a world dripping in nanotech, crashed spaceships, power armor, genetically-engineered robots, jetpacks, and all, for some reason the equipment chapter is all swords and polearms. Dude, I didn't buy a book with a robot on the cover to pack a halberd.

I can see why they decided to use this as the setting for the Torment-not-a-sequel. There are ways in which it’s a lot like Planescape, just without all the D&D baggage.

But there is something so deeply joyless about the setting. In the back, he has a list of Inspirations/Recommended Reading, which is both his homage to Gygax's similar appendix in 1E D&D, and also his list of primary sources. Nausicca, which is what I think the setting most resembles, is listed under movies, not books. Which means he only saw the movie, which is 90 minutes of crazy stuff happening, and not the book, where you get to find out what the heck is going on. And then he lists Adventure Time, and I'm all, Monte—where's the sense of fun? Ninjas never steal an old guy's diamond in this game. Maybe he only saw that episode where Bubblegum dies?

As an aside: later releases for Numenera did a better job of embracing the “weird superscience future” side of setting. I know this because despite bouncing off the game I kept picking up supplements for it because I wanted to find a way to make it work and I kept trying to figure out how to shear the rules away from the setting. They did a couple of other games with the same basic mechanics—including the spectacular “RPG for kids” No Thank You Evil which we played the hell out of.

Fortunately, they eventually pulled the combined rules from the other games and broke them out into their own book as just The Cypher System Rulebook. Like I said earlier, it’s a hefty tome, but it has all the “stuff” from the previous stand-alone games, along with a whole bunch of advice on how to lean into or out of various genres with the same rules, especially regarding how to make Cyphers work depending on the vibe and setting you’re going for.

Speaking of advice, the Cypher core book came out at roughly the same time as another book Cook did called Your Best Game Ever, which is a system & setting–agnostic book on “here’s how I think RPGs can and should work”. I cannot think of another example of this, where someone wrote a whole about RPGs, and then separately put out a book of “and here’s the rules I built specifically to support the philosophy of play from the other book.”

So not only does the Cypher core rule book have some of the clearest “here’s how this game is supposed to work and here’s how to make that happen” text I’ve ever read, but then if you have follow-up questions there’s another 230 pages of philosophy and detail you can read if you want.

This should happen more often. I’d love to read a “philosophy of RPG design and play” book from Tweet, or Robin Laws, or Steve Jackson, or the Blades in the Dark guy, or Kevin Siembada, or any of the other people who’ve been around making these games for long time. I don’t know that I’d agree with them, but I’d sure like to read them.

The “generic RPG” is a hill a lot of people have tried to climb, with mixed success. The obvious primary example here is GURPS, but then you have games like Shadowrun which are really four or five different games stacked on each other in the same cyber-trenchcoat.

Cypher is also a swing at the Generic RPG, but a better example of what it’s going for is the post-3.0 D&D d20 era, or the constellation of games “Power by the Apocalypse,” not so much one big game as a core set of bones you can assemble a game on top of. You could mix-and-match stuff from d20 Modern and d20 Future, but you’ll probably have a better time if you don’t.

The Cypher book doesn’t talk about settings but it does talk about genres, and has a long chapter outlining specific advice and tools for making the rules work under the narrative conceits of various genres. The list of genres is longer than I was expecting, there’s the usual Modern/Fantasy/Science-Fiction entries, but also things like Horror, or Romance.

The place where it really started to shine, though, is when then started doing “White Books”, separate genre & settings books to plug into Cypher.

On paper these aren’t that different than the sort of settings books GURPs or d20 would do, but the difference is that with Numenera covering the bases for all the classic science fiction & fantasy tropes, the White Books have the flexibility to get into really narrow and specific sub-genres. The generic stuff is back in the core book, these are all books with a take. They tend to be a mix of advice and guidelines on how to make the genre work as a game, a bunch of genre-specific mechanics, and then an example setting or two.

They did a fantasy setting, but instead of Tolkien/Howard/Burroughs–inspired it’s Alice in Wonderland. They did a Fallout-in-all-but-name setting with the wonderfully evocative name of Rust & Redemption that makes the mechanic of “Cyphers as scavenged technology” work maybe even better than in the original.

And then they did a book called It’s Only Magic, which might be the best RPG supplement I’ve ever read. The strapline is that it’s “cozy witchcore fantasy.” It’ a modern-day urban magic setting, but low-stakes and high-magic. (And look at that cover art!)

The main example setting in the book is centered around the coffee shop in the part of town the kids who go to the local magic college live in. The “ghost mall” is both a dead mall and where the ghosts hang out. It has one of those big fold-out maps where practically every building has an evocative paragraph of description, and you’ve knocked a skeleton of a campaign together halfway through skimming the map.

Less Earthsea and more Gilmore Girls, or rather, it plays like the lower-stakes, funnier episodes of Buffy. Apocalyptic threats from your evil ex-boyfriend? No. Vampire-who-can’t-kill-anymore as your new roommate? Yes. The Craft, but there’s three other magic-using witch clubs at the same school.

The other (smaller) example setting is basically Twin Peaks but the ghosts aren’t evil and the whole town knows about them. Or the funnier monster-of-the-week episodes of the X-Files.

It’s really fun to see what “Urban Fantasy” looks like with both “Cthulhu” and “90s goth vampire angst” washed completely out of its hair.

There’s the usual host of character options, NPCs, equipment, and the like, but there’s also a whole set of extra mechanics to make “casual magic” work. Cyphers as scented candles and smartphone apps! Theres a character focus—the verb in the character sentence—who is a car wizard, a spellcaster whose feeds all their spellcasting into making their muscle car do things. It’s great!

There’s a bunch of really well thought through and actionable stuff on how to run and play an urban fantasy game, how to build out a setting, how to pace and write the story and plot in such a genre. One of my themes in the all the RPG writing I’ve done this year has been how much I enjoy this current trend of just talking to the GM directly about how to do stuff, and this is an all time great example. The sort of work where you start thinking you probably know everything they’re going to say, and then end up nodding along going “of course!” and “great point!” every page.

It’s exactly what I look for out of an RPG supplement: a bunch of ideas, new toys to play with, and a bunch of foundational work that I wouldn’t have thought of and that’s easy to build on.

This is where I loop back around to where I started with GMing styles; whatever the term for the style I like is the style this game is written for, because this is the easiest game to run I’ve ever played.

Like I said, I tend to think of the way I like to run as “Improv”, but in the formal sense, not “just making stuff up.” Rules-wise, that means you need a ruleset that’s there when you need it to resolve something, but otherwise won’t get in your way and keep you from moving forward. You need ways the players can take the wheel and show you what kind of game they want to be running. And you need a bunch of stuff that you can lay hands on quickly to Improv on top of. I used to joke that I’d prepare for running a TTRPG session the same way a D&D Wizard prepares spells—I sketch out and wrap up a bunch of things to keep in my back pocket, not sure if I’m going to need them all, and with just enough detail that I can freestyle on top of them, but don’t feel like I wasted the effort if I don’t.

The example setting here is perfect for that. One of the players will glance at the map and say “you know, there’s that hardware store downtown,” and I can skim the two paragraphs on the store and the guy who runs it and have everything I need to run the next 30 minutes of the game.

Great stuff all around. Gets the full Icecano Seal of Approval.

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Edited to add on Dec 16: Regarding the list of people who I suggest should write books about RPGs, it’s been brought to my attention that not only did Robin Laws write such a book, but I both own it and have read it! Icecano regrets the error.

Read This Book Next! Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)

And the “New D&D” double volcano-asteroid summer comes to a close with the release of the 2024 revision of the 5th Edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Let me start with the single best thing in this book. It’s on page 19, at the end of the first chapter (“The Basics”). It’s a subsection titled “Players Exploiting the Rules.” It’s half a page of blunt talk that the rules are not a simulation, they assume good-faith interpretations by everyone, they don’t exist as a vehicle to bully the other players, and if a player is being an asshole tell them to stop. Other games, including previous iterations of this one, have danced around this topic, but I can not remember a rule book so clearly stating “don’t let your players be dicks.” I should add that this comes after a section called “Respect for the Players” that spends a page or two finding every possible way to phrase “If you are going to be a DM, do not be an asshole.” It’s incredible, not because it’s some hugely insightful or ground-shaking series of observations, but because they just say it.

(There are a couple people I played with in college—no, no one you know—that I am tempted to find for the first time in 20+ years just so I can mail them a copy of these sections.)

Let me back up a tad.

A running theme through my “New D&D” reviews this year has been: where were people supposed to learn how to play this game? At one point I posited that the key enabling technology that led to the current D&D-like boom was twitch, which finally let people watch other people play even if they didn’t already know someone.

Like I talked about last time, TTRPGs have this huge mass of what amounts to oral traditions that no one really wrote down. Everyone learned from their friend’s weird older brother, or that one uncle, or the guy in the dorms, or whatever. And this goes double for actually running the game—again, one of the reasons 10’ square-by-square dungeon crawls were so common was that was the only style of play the Red Box actually taught you how to run.

As much as “new player acquisition” was a big part of D&D’s mandate, that’s something it’s struggled with outside the era of the Red Box; text actually answering the question “okay, but literally what do I do now that everyone is at my kitchen table,” has been thin on the ground.

D&D tended to shunt this kind of stuff off into auxiliary products, leaving the Core Books as reference material. The classic example here is the Red Box, but as another example, if you go back and look at the 3.0 books, theres no discussion on what “this is” or how to play it at all. That’s because 3e came out alongside the “D&D Adventure Game” box set which was a Basic-eque starter set that was supposed to teach you how to play that no one bought and no one remembers. (The complete failure of that set is one of the more justifiable reasons why 3.5 happened, those revised books had a lot of Adventure Game material forklifted over.) 4E pivoted late to the Essentials thing, the 2014 5e had three different Starter Boxes over the last decade (with a new one coming, I assume?)

And this has always been a little bit of a crazy approach, like: really? I can’t just learn the game from this very expensive thick hardcover I bought in a bookstore? I gotta go somewhere else and buy a box with another book in it? What?

By contrast, the 2024 rules, for the first time in 50 years, really seems to have embraced “what if the core rule books actually tought you how to play.”

Like the 2024 PHB, the first 20 pages or so are a wonder. It starts with an incredibly clean summary of what a DM actually does, with tips on how to prep and run a session, what you need to bring, how do it. It’s got an example of play like the one in the PHB with a sidebar of text explaining what’s going on, except this time it’s explaining that the DM casually asked for what order the characters were in as they were walking towards the cave before they needed to know it so they could drop the surprise attack with more drama.

It’s got a section on “DM play style” which is something almost no one ever talks about. It’s got a really great section on limits and safety tools, and setting expectations, complete with a worksheet to define hard and soft limits as a group.

Then that rolls into another 30 pages of Running The Game. Not advanced rules, just page after page of “here’s how to actually run this.” My favorite example: in the section on running combat, there’s a whole chunk on what to actually do to track monster hit points on scratch paper. There’s a discussion on whether to start with the monster’s full HP and subtract, or start and zero and add damage until you get to the HP max. (I’m solidly an add damage guy, because I can do mental addition faster than subtraction.) I literally can’t ever remember another RPG book directly talking to the person running the game about scratch paper tracking techniques. This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about where we learned to play the game; this was all stuff you learned from watching another DM or just figured out on your own. This whole book is like someone finally wrote down the Oral Torah and I am here for it.

For once, maybe for the first time, the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide is actually a Guide for Dungeon Masters.

Like the PHB, you could sheer the first 30-50 pages off the front of this book and repackage them as a pretty great “Read This Book Next!” softcover for a new Red Box. From that point, the book shifts into a crunchier reference work, but still with the focus on “how to actually do this.” Lots of nuts-and-bolts stuff, “here’s how to work with alignment”, “here’s how to hotrod this if you need to”, the usual blue moon rules, but presented as “here’s how to run this if it comes up.”

In the best possible way, this all seems like D&D finally responding to the last decade and change of the industry. Like how Planescape’s Factions were a direct reaction to the Clans in Vampire, so much of this book feels like a response to the “GM Moves” in Apocalypse World. Those moves weren’t hugely innovative in their own right—there were a lot of reactions to PbtA that boiled down to “yeah, that’s how I already run RPGs”, but that was the point, those were things that good GMs were already doing, but someone finally wrote them down so people who didn’t have direct access to a “good GM” could learn them too. The effect on the whole industry was profound; it was like everyone’s ears popped and said “wait, we can just directly tell people how to play?”

For example: the 2024 DMG doesn’t have a section on “worldbuilding”, it has sections on “Creating Adventures” and “Creating Campaign” with “campaign settings” and worldbuilding as a secondary concern to those, and that’s just great. That’s putting the emphasis on the right syllables; this is much more concerned with things like pacing, encounter design, recurring characters, flavor, and then the advice about settings builds out from that, how can you build out a setting to reflect the kind of game you want to run. Fantastic.

However, the theme of this book is “actionable content”, so rather than throw a bunch of advice for settings around and leave you hanging (like the 2014 DMG,) this includes a fully operational example setting, which just happens to be Grayhawk. It’s a remarkably complete gazeteer, nice maps (plural), lots of details. This strikes me as a perfect nostalgia deployment, something that’s cool on its own right that also will make old timers do the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme.

Following that is a remarkably complete gazeteer of cosmology, offering what amounts to a diet Manual of the Planes. It does a really nice job of the whirlwind tour of what’s cool and fun to use from what they now call the “D&D Multiverse”, while making it clear you can still use any or all of this stuff on top of and in addition to anything you make up.

Something else this book does well is take advantage of the fact that there’s already a whole line of compatible 5e books in print, so it can point you to where to learn more. There’s a page or two on things like Spelljamming, or Sigil, or The Radiant Citadel, which is fully useful on it’s own, but then instead of being coy about it, the book just says “if you want to know more, go read $BOOK.” That’s marketing the way its supposed to work.

On a similar note, before it dives into Greyhawk, the DMG has a list of all the other in-print 5e settings with an elevator pitch for why they’re cool. So if you’re new, you can skim and say “wait, armies of dragons?” or “magical cold war you say?” and know where to go next.

(Well, everything in print plus… Dark Sun? Interesting. Everything else in the table is something that got into print for 5e, so the usual stuff like Forgotten Realms, Raveloft, and Planescape, but also the adapted Magic: The Gathering settings, the Critical Role book, etc. Mystara isn’t here, or any of the other long-dorment 2e settings, but somehow Dark Sun made the cut. Between this and the last-second name-change reprieve in the Spelljammer set, there might be something cooking here? sicks_yes.gif)

There’s also the usual treasure tables, magic items, and so on.

Between this and the PHB, the 2024 books are a fully operational stand-alone game in a way previous iterations of the “core rules” haven’t always been.

⚔

Okay, having said all that, I am now compelled to tell you about my least favorite thing, which is the cover art. Here, let me link you to the official web page. Slap that open in a new tab, take a gander, I’ll meet you down at the next paragraph.

Pretty cool right? Skeleton army, evil sword guy, big dragon lurking in the back. Cool coloring! Nice use of light effects! But! There, smack in the center, is Venger from the 80s D&D cartoon. My problem isn’t the nostalgia ploy, as such. My problem is that Venger is a terrible design. Even if you limit the comparison to other 80s toy cartoons, Venger is dramatically, orders-of-magnitude worse than Skeletor, Mum-Rah, Megatron, Cobra Commander. Hell, every single He-Man or She-Ra bad guy is a better design than Venger. Step that out further, every single Space Ghost villain is a better design than Venger. D&D is full of cooler looking stuff than that. This cover with Skeletor and his Ram Staff there instead of Venger and his goofy-ass side horn? That would be great. This, though? sigh

He shows up inside the book, too! Like the PHB, each chapter opens with a full-page art piece, and they’re all a reference to some existing D&D thing, a setting or character. And then, start of chapter 2, there’s Venger and his big dumb horn using a crystal ball to spy on Tiamat. And this is really the one I’m complaining about, because all the other full-page spreads are a cool scene, and if you want to know more, there’s a whole book for that. But for this, the follow up is… you can go watch the worst cartoon of the 80s, the DVD of which is currently out of print?

And I hear what you’re saying, it’s a nostalgia play, sure, yeah, but also, it’s 2024; the kids that watched that show are closing in on 50, or thereabouts. The edition that could lean into 80s nostalgia for the purposes of pulling in the kids back in was third, and I know because I was there. “That’s the bad guy from a cartoon your parents barely tolerated” is a weird-ass piece of marketing.

As long as I’m grousing, my other least-favorite thing is towards the end, where they have something called a “Lore Glossary.” On the surface, this is a nice counterpart to the Rules Glossary in the new PHB, but while the Rules Glossary was probably the single best idea in the new books, this Lore Glossary is baffling. It’s a seemingly-random collection of D&D “trivia stuff”; locations, characters, events, scattered across various settings and fiction. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why things get an entry here; Fizban and Lord Soth get entries but Tanis doesn’t, but Drizzt, Minsc, and Boo do. There’s an entry for The Great Modron March but not Orcus which, okay, spoilers I guess. It’s all details for settings rather than anything broadly applicable; the book was already too long, it didn’t need 10 more pages of teasers for other books. Both Venger and the main characters from the 80s cartoon (as “Heros of the Realm, The”) are in here too. Again, it’s just plain weird they leaned in that hard to the old show. I assume that someone on staff was a huge fan, that or there’s a book coming out next year that’ll make us all go “ohhhh.”

The last thing I have anything negative to say about is the new Bastion System. On it’s own, and having not taken them for a test drive yet, it seems cool? It’s a pretty solid-looking system for having a player or party create and manage their own base of operations, possibly with Hirelings. Ways to upgrade them, bonuses or plot hooks those upgrades get you.

I’m just not sure why they’re in this book? It feels like a pitch for a “Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook” or “Complete Guildhall” got left without a release slot, and they said “let’s put the best 20 pages of this in the DMG.” Everything else in the book is applicable to every game, and then there’s this weird chapter for “and here’s how to do a base-building minigame!” Sure?

Personally, I love hireling/follower/base-building systems in computer games, but stay far away from them on the tabletop. The base management subgame was one of my favorite parts of both BATTLETECH and the first Pillars of Eternity, for example, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the desire to run a tabletop game with something more complex than “Wait, how many GP do you have on your character sheet? Sure, you can buy a house I guess.”

There’s nothing wrong with it, but like the Lore Glossary I wish they’d tried to make the book a little shorter and 10 bucks cheaper instead. (And then gave me the option to buy the blown-out version next summer.) Actually, let me hit that a little harder: this is a $50 384 page hardcover, and that seems like it’s out of reach for the target audience here. I don’t know how much you’d have to cut to get down to 40 bucks, but I bet that would have been a better book.

Finally for everyone keeping score at home (that’s me, I’m keeping score) Skill Challenges are not in this one.

🛡

And so, look. This is still 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a reason they didn’t update the number, even fractionally. If 5e wasn’t your or your group’s jam, there’s nothing in here that’ll change your mind. If 5e was your jam, this is a tooled-up, better version. This book is easily the best official D&D DMG to date. Between this and the ToV GMG, it’s an unexpected embarrassment of riches.

I see a lot of chatter on the web around “is it worth the upgrade?” I mean, these books are fifty bucks a pop retail, there’s nothing in here that’s so earth-shattering that you should consider it if you have to budget around that fact. Like buying a yacht, if you have to look at the price tag, the answer is “no.”

Honestly, though, I don’t think “upgrade” is the right lens. If you want to upgrade, great, Hasbro won’t decline the money. But this is about teeing up the next decade, setting up the kids who are just getting into the hobby now. More so than in a long time, this is a book for a jr high kid to pick up and change their life. I’ve said before that as D&D goes, so goes the rest of the hobby. I think we’re all in good shape.

Tales of the Valiant: Game Master’s Guide (2024)

“New D&D” Double Volcano Summer continues, and, I guess, has moved on into Double Asteroid Movie Autumn?

Over the summer we had two revised 5th Edition player’s handbooks in the form of Tales of the Valiant and D&D (2024), and now their respective Dungeon Master’s Guides are arriving.

Once again, Kobold Press got out of the door first, with the Tales of the Valiant: Game Master's Guide

(As an aside, which I am putting in a parenthetical because I am too lazy to format a footnote tonight, I have always disliked “Game Master” as the generic form of “Dungeon Master.” I understand all the ways both legal and conceptual that “Dungeon Master” is undesirable as the general term, but “Dungeon Master” is a very specific kind of weird that that I think fits the role, whereas I’ve always found “Game Master” too generic. There are too many other kinds of games that could have a “Game Master,” but very few that could have a “Dungeon Master.”)

Let’s pause for a moment and ask the obvious question: why have a whole separate book for Dungeon/Game Master?

If we’re honest, the real reason that Dungeons & Dragons (and D&D-likes) are published as a triptych of rulebooks—Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual—is that’s how Gygax organized AD&D 1, and everything since has followed suit. Of those three books, the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” has always been the weird one. Like, you need a whole extra book for that? Most other games manage to fit “how to run the game” as a single chapter at the end of their single book.

(In this day and age it seems a little crazy to require three thick hardcovers for a TTRPG, but I’ll accept that it made more sense back when they were three thin—and cheap—hardcovers. I have the “orange spine” later printings of the 1e AD&D books, and all three next to each other, including their covers, is still thinner than the new 2024 PHB.)

Not that a dedicated “how to run this” book is a terrible idea. The basic idea of splitting the rules into a Red Box–style “read this one first,” “read this one next” pair makes a lot of sense.

D&D—and its close relations—have always had a bad habit where the books will present a list of rules and options, but won’t actually say when and how you might want to use those options. Some of this has been explicit over the years—wanting to “reward mastery” is the usual excuse given. The books were always stuffed full of a lot of “here’s what you can do” and not a lot of “and here’s when you would want to.”

There’s always been this huge blob of tribal knowledge, urban legends, and re-learned lessons that you have to absorb from somewhere to actually run the game well, and that stuff never used to get written down anywhere.

One of the reasons why everyone ran dungeon crawls in the 80s (or “dungeon crawls” in the forest on an island with hex maps) is that the Red Box/Blue Box did an amazing job explaining exactly how to run that, and then just… didn’t tell you how to do anything else.

In practice, though, that’s not really what the DMGs have been for. The original DMG from ’78 was more-or-less Gygax’s manifesto (and, as it turned out, final statement) on how the hobby he helped start should work. It’s one guy’s crazy vision fully unpacked. But not a whole lot of “okay, here’s what you gotta actually do.”

As such, the DMG became the book without a clear role in later iterations. As the game got updated, the content of the other two books was fairly obvious and is pretty well fixed: the PHB holds the core rules for the game and is the minimum viable purchase, the Monster Manual has a bunch of monsters. The DMG, though, was always sort of a grabbag, holding a mixture of blue moon rules, advanced options, advice, and material cut for space from the other two books. The clearest example of the DMG’s status is that when 3rd edition was revised into 3.5; the PHB and MM stayed nearly identical, but the DMG was essentially a ground-up rewrite.

The upshot of all this, though, is that the DMG is where each iteration gets to make a statement—this is what we, the people making this version, think the DM needs to know about. This goes even more so for D&D-adjacent books like this one, it’s an opportunity to freestyle, to show off.

Of course, this has been a mixed bag over the years: whatever else you can say about the respective qualities of their editions, the 4e DMG ended up as probably the best ever written, whereas the 2014 5e DMG was a haphazard collection of tables, lists, and half-baked advice.

So how did Tales of the Valiant do? TL;DR: Now this is the stuff. This is the sort of book where I could walk through practically every section pointing and going “oooh!”, but I’ll limit myself to the stuff that really stuck out to me.

Previously, I said the ToV player’s book felt like having a really experienced DM sit down and share their accumulated house rules and experience running 5e, and that goes even more so for this book.

This opens with a really good explanation about what the GM actually does. For example, this is the only book I can remember spelling out that part of the GM’s job is to be an event planner. It’s got an incredibly clear-eyed sixteen or so pages of advice about how to run a game. There’s the usual “types of player play-styles” breakdown, and a section on Session Zero.

But then there’s a section on what kinds of supplies you should bring, how to take notes, how to check in on players and make sure they’re having fun, what to do when someone doesn’t show up. Other iterations of other games have danced around this stuff, but I can’t recall a book that laid out this clearly “okay, here’s the job.” It’s great! I wish I had read this at 15!

This is followed some really solid advice about how to run a campaign, how to structure adventures, pacing, encounter mixes. There’s a section on different “flavors of fantasy” which is just a great “let’s get our terms straight” glossary, including examples of fiction in those categories.

The chapter on worldbuilding is similarly full of really solid advice—“here’s what you actually need to think about when sketching in a setting”, along with a bunch of “and here’s some fun detail you can use for color or to really dig in.” For example, the worldbuilding section on deities and religion feels like someone finally getting to flex a degree in the best way; the text makes a distinction between henotheism and polytheism, and then a page later there’s a sidebar on syncretism. It’s full of little details like that to help get up past “you know, like Gondor, I guess?”

The main bulk of the book are a solid batch of expanded & blue moon rules for the “three pillars”—combat, exploration, and social.

There are a lot of books that contain tables for randomly or semi-randomly generating or stocking dungeons, but this is the only one I can think of that explicitly talks about things like how the choice of entrance to the dungeon sets the mood for the dungeon as a whole. Furthermore, there’s also some good advice on when to use and not use elements like puzzles.

There’s a whole set of rules for running chases as a more abstract encounter that seem really run, more like something out of Feng Shui than a D&D-like.

And my beloved 4e Skill Challenges are in here! The basic structure of “you need 6 successful checks before 3 failures of any of these related skills” was such a great way to resolve any number of non-combat encounters. D&D-likes have long struggled with the fact that “fighting” is a mechanically complex and satisfying sub-game, and “not fighting” tends to be a bunch of talking followed by “okay, roll…. charisma, I guess?” And yes, the role-playing part is fun, but part of what makes the fighting fun is that mechanical complexity, and I’ve always wished for that kind of mechanical detail in the other two pillars. Skill challenges were such a great way to use more of your character sheet while “not fighting”, and I’m glad to see them again.

Speaking of ideas from previous iterations of D&D, the homebrew section here also brought back the monster template idea from 3e. This was a set of “features” you could plug onto an existing monster, if memory serves, things like “lycanthrope” and “vampire” were a templates, so you could make a, were-owlbear, vampire goblin, and so forth. Here that idea gets dusted back off with a whole set of templates you can apply to 5e monsters—including, delightfully, templates based on the 4e character roles. So now you can make a Kobold Striker, Controller Pirate, Leader Gelatinous Cube. Those roles, like a lot of 4e, felt like a great idea from a different game, and this feels like a much better way to deploy the concept.

Finally, the original AD&D DMG had something called “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading,” which was a recommended reading list of the sort of fantasy or sword & sorcery books that Gygax thought were appropriate as reference material. Since then, having a list of recommended & inspirational reading has been something of a tradition for RPGs. Other iterations of D&D sometimes has one, sometimes not; other RPGs frequently have them. I like these a lot, partly because I’m always looking for more recommendations, but also because it gives a great insight into where the designers are coming from—what books do they think you should go read to play the game right? It’s serves as a really nice bookend with whatever they thought was important to put in the “What is an RPG” section at the start.

The ToV GMG has the best reading list I’ve ever seen. Heck, if you get the PDF version, it might be worth the price all on its own. Not just novels, but films and TV, games, nonfiction. In addition to all the books you think it has on it, it’s also got Quest for Glory, Arcanum, and Disco Elysium on the list, which is enough to sell me, but it also has stuff like Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, Discworld, Zardoz, and Big Trouble in Little China. It’s a really broad list, but also, as the kids say, non-stop bangers. I recognized maybe just over half of the stuff on here, and I’m going to be using this a source of new material for a while.

Really, an all-around great piece of work. I have a teenager that’s learning how to run games, and I’m going to be leaving this in conspicuous places where he can find and read it.

Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger

Dungeons & Dragons is a weird game. I don’t mean that as some kind of poetic statement about role-playing games in general, I mean that specifically within the world of tabletop RPGs, D&D is weird. It’s weird for a lot of reasons, including, but not limited to:

1. It’s the only TTRPG with with actual “real world” name recognition or any sort of cross-over brand awareness.
2. For most of its existence, it hasn’t been a very good game.

And then for bonus points, it’s not even one game! Depending on how you count it’s at least six different related but totally incompatible games.

The usual example for a brand name getting turned into a generic noun is “kleenex”, but the thing where “Dungeons and Dragons” has become a generic noun for all RPGs is so strange.

It’s so much more well known that everything else it’s like if all TV shows were called MASH, as in “hey, that new MASH with the dragons is pretty good, ” or “I stayed in and rewatched that MASH with the time-traveller with the police box,” etc.

There was a joke in the mid-90s that all computer games got pitched as “it’s like DOOM, but…” and then just pitched the game regardless of how much it was actually like Doom; “It’s like DOOM except it’s not in first person, it’s not in real time, you don’t have a gun, you’re a pirate, you’re not in space, and instead you solve puzzles”. D&D is like that but for real.

Which is a testament to the power of a great name and the first mover advantage, because mechanically, the first 30-or-so years of the game were a total mess. In a lot of ways, RPGs became an industry because everyone who spent more than about 90 seconds with D&D in the 70s, 80, or 90s immediately thought of ten ways to improve the game, and were right about at least eight of them. (One of the best running bits in Shannon Applecline’s seminial Designers & Dungeons is how many successful RPG companies literally started like this.)

And this mechanical weirdness isn’t just because it was first, but because of things like Gary Gygax’s desire to turn it into a competitive sport played at conventions, but also make sure that Dave Arneson didn’t get paid any royalties, and also show off how many different names of polearms he knew. As much as RPGs are sold as “do anything, the only limit is your imagination!” D&D has always been defined by it’s weird and seemingly arbitrary limits. So there’s a certain semi-effable “D&D-ness” you need for a game to be “Dungeons & Dragons” and not just another heroic fantasy game, not all of which make for a great system. It’s a game where its flaws have become part of the charm; the magic system is objectively terrible, but is also a fundamental part of it’s D&D-ness.

The upshot of all that is that for most of its life, D&D had a very clear job within the broader TTRPG world: it was the game that onboarded new players to the hobby, who then immediately graduated to other, better games. The old Red Box was one of the great New Customer Acquisition products of all time, but most people proceeded to bounce right off Advanced D&D, and then moved on to Ninja Turtles, or Traveller, or Vampire, or GURPS, or Shadowrun, or Paranoia, or Star Wars, or any number of other systems that were both better games and were more tailored to a specific vibe or genre, but all assumed you already knew how to play. It wasn’t a game you stuck with. You hear stories about people who have been playing the same AD&D 2nd Edition game for years, and then you ask a couple of follow-up questions and realize that their home rules make the Ship of Theseus look under-remodeled.

Now, for the hobby at large that’s fairly healthy, but if your salary depends on people buying “Dungeons & Dragons” books specifically, I can see how that would be fairly maddening. The game, and the people who make it, have been in an ongoing negotiation with the player base to find a flavor of the game that people are actually willing to stick around for. This results in the game’s deeply weird approach to “Editons”, where each numbered edition is effectively a whole new game, always sold with a fairly explicit “Look! We finally fixed it!”

This has obviously been something of a mixed bag. I think a big part of the reason the d20 boom happened at the turn of the century was that for the first time, 3rd edition D&D was actually a good game. Not perfect, but finally worth playing. 4e, meanwhile, was the best-designed game that no one wanted to play, and it blew up the hobby so much that it created both Pathfinder and served as one of the sparks to light off the twenty-teens narrative RPG boom.

Another result of this ongoing negotiation is that D&D also has a long tradition of “stealth” updates, where new books come out that aren’t a formal revision, but if you pull the content in it dramatically changes the game. AD&D 1 had Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, AD&D 2 had those Player’s Option books (non-weapon proficiencies!), Basic had at least three versions (the original B/X, the BECMI sets, and then the Rules Cyclopedia). 3rd had the rare Formal Update in the form of the 3.5 release, but it also had things like the Miniatures Handbook (which, if you combine that with the SAGA Edition of Star Wars, makes the path from 3 to 4 more obvious.) 4e had Essentials.

2024 is a radically different time for tabletop games than 2014 was. As the twenty-teens dawned, there was growing sense that maybe there just wasn’t going to be a commercial TTRPG industry anymore. Sales were down, the remaining publishers were pivoting to PDF-only releases, companies were either folding or moving towards other fields. TTRPGs were just going to be a hobbyist niche thing from here on out, and maybe that was going to be okay. I mean, text-based Interactive Fiction Adventure games hadn’t been commercially viable since the late 80s, but the Spring Thing was always full of new submissions. I remember an article on EN World or some such in 2012 or 2013 that described the previous year’s sales as “an extinction level event for the industry.”

Designers & Dungeons perfectly preserves the mood from the time. I have the expanded 2014 4-volume edition, although the vast majority of the content is still from the 2011 original, which officially covers the industry up to 2009 and then peeks around the corner just a bit. The sense of “history being over” pervades the entire work, theres a real sense that the heyday is over, and so now is the time to get the first draft of history right.

As such, the Dungeons & Dragons (2014) books had a certain “last party of summer vacation” quality to them. The time where D&D would have multiple teams with cool codenames working on different parts of the game was long past, this was done by a small group in a short amount of time, and somewhat infamously wasn’t really finished, which is why so many parts of the book seem to run out of steam and end with a shrug emoji and “let the DM sort it out.” The bones are pretty good, but huge chunks of it read like one of those book reports where you’re trying to hide the fact you only read the first and last chapters.

That’s attracted a lot of criticism over the years, but in their (mild) defense, I don’t think it occurred to them that anyone new was going to be playing Fifth. “We’re gonna go out on a high note, then turn the lights out after us.” Most of the non-core book product line was outsourced for the first year or so, it was all just sorta spinning down.

Obviously, that’s not how things went. Everyone has their own theory about why 5th Edition caught fire the way no previous edition had, and here’s mine: The game went back to a non-miniatures, low-math design right as the key enabling technology for onboarding new players arrived: Live Play Podcasts. By hook or by crook, the ruleset for 5E is almost perfect for an audio-only medium, and moves fast, in a way that none of the previous 21st century variants had been.

And so we find outselves in a future where D&D, as a brand, is one of Hasbro’s biggest moneymakers.

Part of what drove that success is that Hasbro has been very conservative about changes to the game, which has clearly let the game flourish like never before, but the same issues are still there. Occasionally one of the original team would pop up on twitter and say something like “yeah, it’s obvious now what we should have done instead of bonus actions,” but nothing ever shipped as a product.

5th edition has already had its stealth update in the form the Tasha/Xanathar/Mordenkainen triptych, but now we’ve got something that D&D really hasn’t had before: the 2024 books are essentially 5th Edition, 2nd Edition. Leading the charge of a strangely spaced-out release schedule is the new Player’s Handbook (2024).

Let’s start with the best part: The first thirty pages are a wonder. It opens with the best “what is an RPG” intro I have ever read, and works its way up though the basics, and by page 28 has fully explained the entire ruleset. To be clear: there aren’t later chapters with names like “Using Skills” or “Combat”, or “Advanced Rules”, this is it.

The “examples of play” are a real thing of art. The page is split into two columns: the left side of the page is a running script-like dialogue of play, and the right side is a series of annotations and explanations describing exactly what rule was in play, why they rolled what they rolled, what the outcome was. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

This is followed by an incredibly clear set of instructions on how to create a character, and then… the rest of the book is reference material. Chapters on the classes, character origins, feats, equipment, spells, a map of the Planes, stat blocks for creatures to use as familiars or morph targets.

Finally, the book ends with its other best idea: the Rules Glossary. It’s 18 pages of The Rules, alphabetical by Formal Name, clearly written. Theres no flipping around in the book looking for how to Grapple or something, it’s in the glossary. Generally, the book will refer the reader to the glossary instead of stating a rule in place.

It’s really easy to imagine how to repackage this layout into a couple of Red Box–style booklets covering the first few levels. You can basically pop the first 30 pages out as-is and slap a cover on it that says “Read This First!”

Back when I wrote about Tales of the Valiant, I made a crack that maybe there just wasn’t a best order for this material. I stand corrected. It’s outstanding.

Design-wise the book is very similar to it’s predecessor: same fonts, same pseudo-parchment look to the paper, same basic page layout. My favorite change is that the fonts are all larger, which my rapidly aging eyes appreciates.

It’s about 70 pages longer than the 2014 book, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that both books have the same number of words and that the extra space is taken up with the larger text and more art. The book is gorgeous, and is absolutely chock full of illustrations. Each class gets a full-page piece, and then each subclass gets a half-page piece showing an example of that build. It’s probably the first version of this game where you can flip through the classes chapter, and then stop at a cool picture and go “hang on, I want to play one of THOSE”. The art style feels fresh and modern in a way that’s guaranteed to make everyone say “that is so twenties” years from now; the same way that the art for the original 3rd edition books looked all clean and modern at the time, but now screams “late 90s” in a way I don’t have the critical vocabulary to describe. (Remember how everything cool had to be asymmetrical for a while there? Good times!)

Some of the early art previewed included a piece with the cast from 80s D&D cartoon drawn in the modern style of the book. At the time, I thought that was a weird piece of nostalgia bait: really? Now’s the time to do a callback to a 40-year old cartoon? Whose the audience for that?

But I was wrong about the intent, because this book is absolutely full of all manner of callbacks and cameos. The DragonLance twins are in the first couple of pages, everyone’s favorite Drow shows up not long after, there’s a guy from Baldur’s Gate 3, the examples of play are set in Castle Ravenloft, there’s Eberron airships, characters from the 80s action figure line, the idol from the old DMG cover, a cityscape of Sigil with the Lady floating down the street. It’s not a nostalgia play so much as it is a “big tent” play: the message, over and over again, is that everything fits. You remember some weird piece of D&D stuff from ages ago? Yeah, that’s in here too. Previous versions of this game have tended to start with a posture of “here’s the default way to play now”, with other “weirder” stuff floating in later. This takes the exact opposite approach, this is full-throated “yes, and” to everything D&D. So not only does Spelljammer get a shoutout in the 2 page appendix about the planes, but rules for guns are in the main equipment chapter, the psionic subclasses are in the main book, airships are in the travel costs table. Heck, the para-elemental planes are in the inner planes diagram, and I thought I was the only person who remembered those existed.

And this doesn’t just mean obscure lore pulls, the art is a case study in how to do “actual diversity”. There’s an explosion of body types, genders, skin tones, styles, and everyone looks cool.

Theres a constant, pervasive sense of trying to make the tent as big and as welcoming as possible. Turns out “One D&D” was the right codename for this; it wasn’t a version number, it was a goal.

Beyond just the art, 2024 book has a different vibe. There’s a whimsicalness from the 2014 version that’s gone: the humorous disclaimer on the title page isn’t there, there isn’t a joke entry for THAC0 in the index. If the 2014 book was an end-of-summer party, this is a start of the year syllabus.

The whole thing has been adjusted to be easier to use. The 2014 book had a very distinct yellowed-parchment pattern behind the text, the 2024 book has a similar pattern, but it’s much less busy and paler, so the text stands out better against the background. All the text is shorter, more to the point. The 2014 book had a lot of fluff that just kinda clogged up the rules when you were trying to look something up in a hurry, the 2024 book has been through an intense editing pass.

As an example: in the section for each class, each class ability has a subheading with the name of the power, and then a description, like this:

Invert the Polarity Starting at 7th level, your growing knowledge of power systems allows you to invert the polarity of control circuits, such as in teleport control panels or force fields. As a bonus action, you can add a d4 to attempts to control electrical systems. After using this power, you must take a short or long rest before using it again.

Now, it’s like this:

Level 7: Invert the Polarity Add 1d4 to checks made with the Sonic Screwdriver Tool. You regain this feature after a short or long rest.

For better or worse, it’s still 5th edition D&D. All the mechanical warts of the system are still there; the weird economy around Bonus Actions, too many classes have weird pools of bonus dice, the strange way that some classes get a whole set of “spell-like” powers to choose from, and other classes “just get spells.” There still isn’t a caster that just uses spell points. Warlocks still look like they were designed on the bus on the way to school the morning the homework was due. Inspiration is still an anemic version of better ideas from other systems. Bounded accuracy still feels weird if you’re not used to it. It’s still allergic to putting math in the text. It still tries to sweep more complex mechanics under the rug by having a very simple general rule, and then a whole host of seemingly one-off exceptions that feel like could have just been one equation or table. The text is still full of tangled sentences about powers recharging after short and long rests instead of just saying powers can used used so many times per day or encounter. There’s still no mechanic for “partial success” or “success with consequences.” You still can’t build any character from The Princess Bride. If 5th wasn’t your jam, there’s nothing here that’ll change your mind.

On the other hand, the good stuff is largely left unchanged: The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is still brilliant. The universal proficiency bonus is still a great approach. Bounded Accuracy enables the game to stay fun long past the point where other editions crash into a ditch filled with endless +2 modifiers. It’s the same goofball combat-focused fantasy-themed superhero game it’s been for a long time. I’ve said many times, 5e felt like the first version of D&D that wasn’t actively fighting against the way I like to run games, and the 2024 version stays that way.

All that said, it feels finished in a way the 2014 book didn’t. It’s a significantly smaller mechanical change that 3 to 3.5 was, but the revisions are where it counts.

Hasbro has helpfully published a comprehensive list of the mechanics changes as Updates in the Player’s Handbook (2024) | Dungeons & Dragons, so rather than drain the list, here are the highlights that stood out to me:

The big one is that Races are now Species, and Backgrounds have been reworked and made more important, and the pair are treated as “Origins”. This is massive improvement, gone is the weird racial determinism, and where you grew up is now way more important than where your ancestors came from. There’s some really solid rules for porting an older race or background into the new rules. The half-races are gone, replaced by “real Orcs” and the Aaisimar and Goliaths being called up to the big leagues. Backgrounds in 2014 were kinda just there, a way to pick up a bonus skill proficiency, here they’re the source of the attribute bonus and an actual Feat. Choosing a pair feels like making actual choices about a specific character in a different way that how previous editions would sort of devolve that choice into “choose your favorite Fellowship member”.

Multi-classing and Feats are flushed out and no longer relegated to an “optional because we ran out of time” sidebar. Feats specifically are much closer to where they were in 3e—interesting choices to dial in your character. The they split the difference with the choice you had to make in 5e to either get a stat boost or a feat, you still make that choice, but the stat boost bumps up two stats, and every general feat inclues a single stat boost.

The rules around skills vs tools make sense. At first glance, there don’t seem to be weird overlaps anymore. Tools were one of those undercooked features in 2014, they were kinda like skills, but not? When did you use a tool vs a plain skill check? How do you know what attribute bonus to use? Now, every attribute and skill has a broad description and examples of what you can use them from. Each tool has a full description, including the linked attribute, at least one action you can use it for, and at least one thing you can craft with it. And, each background comes with at least one tool proficiency. You don’t have to guess or make something up on the fly, or worse, remember what you made up last time. It’s not a huge change, but feels done.

Every class has four subclasses in the main book now, which cover a pretty wide spread of options, and sanity has prevailed and all subclasses start at level 3. (In a lot of ways, level 3 is clearly the first “real” level, with the first two as essentially the tutorial, which syncs well with that if you follow the recommended progression, you’ll hit 3rd level at the end of the second session.)

The subclasses are a mix of ones from the 2014 book, various expansions, and new material, but each has gotten a tune up top focus on what the actual fantasy is. To use Monk for example, the subclasses are “Hong Kong movie martial artist”, “ninja assassin”, “airbender”, and, basically, Jet Li from Kiss of the Dragon? The Fighter subclasses have a pretty clear sliding scale of “how complicated do you want to make this for yourself,” spanning “Basic Fighter”, “3rd Edition Fighter”, “Elf from Basic D&D”, and “Psionics Bullshit (Complementary)”.

Weapons now have “Weapon Mastery Properties” that, if you have the right class power or feat, allow you do do additional actions or effects with certain weapons, which does a lot to distinguish A-track fighters from everyone else without just making their attack bonus higher.

The anemic Ideals/Flaws/Bonds thing from 2014 is gone, but in it’s place there’s a really neat set of tables with descriptive words for both high and low attributes and alignment that you can roll against to rough in a personality.

On the other hand, lets talk about whats not here. The last page of the book is not the OGL, and there’s no hint of what any future 3rd party licensing might be. The OGL kerfluffle may have put the 2014 SRD under a CC license, but there’s no indication that there will even be a 2024 SRD.

There’s basically nothing in the way of explicit roleplaying/social hooks; and nothing at all in the way of inter-party hooks. PbtA is a thing, you know? But more to the point, so was Vampire. So was Planescape. There’s a whole stack of 30-year old innovations that just aren’t here.

Similarly there’s no recognition of “the party” as a mechanical construct.

There’s nothing on safety tools or the like; there is a callout box about Session Zero, but not much else. I’m withholding judgement on that one, since it looks like there’s something on that front in the DMG.

There’s very little mechanics for things other than combat; although once again, D&D tends to treat that as a DMG concern.

The other best idea that 4e had was recognizing that “an encounter” was a mechanical construct, but didn’t always have to mean “a fight.” This wasn’t new there, using games I can see from where I’m sitting as an example, Feng Shui was organized around “scenes” in the early 90s. Once you admit an encounter is A Thing, you can just say “this works once an encounter” without having to put on a big show about short rests or whatever, when everyone knows what you mean.

Speaking for myself, as someone who DMs more than he plays, I can’t say as I noticed anything that would change the way I run. The ergonomics and presentation of the book, yes, more different and better player options, yes, but from the other side of the table, they’re pretty much the same game.

Dungeons & Dragons is in a strage spot in the conceptual space. It’s not an explicit generic system like GURPS or Cypher, but it wants to make the Heroic Fantasy tent big enough that it can support pretty much any paperback you find in the fantasy section of the used book store. There’s always been a core of fantasy that D&D was “pretty good at” that got steadily weedier the further you got from it. This incarnation seems to have done a decent job of widening out that center while keeping the weed growth the a minimum.

It seems safe to call this the best version of Dungeons & Dragons to date, and perfectly positioned to do the thing D&D is best at: bring new players into the hobby, get them excited, and then let them move on.

But, of course, it’s double volcano summer, so this is the second revised Fifth Edition this year, after Kobold’s Tales of the Valiant. Alert readers will note that both games made almost the exact same list of changes, but this is less “two asteroid movies” and more “these were the obvious things to go fix.” It’s fascinating how similar they both are, I was expecting to have a whole compare and contrast section here, but not so much! I’m not as tapped into “the scene” as I used to be, so I don’t know how common these ideas were out in the wild, but both books feel like the stable versions of two very similar sets of house rules. It kinda feels like there are going to be a lot of games running a hacked combo of the the two.

(To scratch the compare-and-contrast itch: At first glance, I like the ToV Lineage-Heritage-Background set more than the D&D(2024) Species-Background pair, but the D&D(2024) weapon properties and feats look better than their ToV equivalents. Oh, to be 20 and unemployed again!)

The major difference is that ToV is trying to be a complete game, whereas the 2024 D&D still wants to treat the rest of the post-2014 product line as valid.

As of this writing, both games still have their respective DM books pending, which I suspect is where they’ll really diverge.

More than anything, this reminds me of that 2002-2003 period where people kept knocking out alternate versions of 3e (Arcana Unearthed, Conan, Spycraft, d20 Star Wars, etc, etc) capped off with 3.5. A whole explosion of takes on the same basic frame.

This feels like the point where I should make some kind of recommendation. Should you get it?That feels like one of those “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Maybe?

To put it mildly, it hasn’t been a bump-free decade for ‘ol Hasbro; recently the D&D group has made a series of what we might politely call “unforced errors,” or if we were less polite “a disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking.”

Most of those didn’t look malevolent, but the sort of profound screwups you get when too many people in the room are middle-aged white guys with MBAs, and not enough literally anyone else. Credit where credit is due, and uncharacteristically for a public-traded American corporation, they seemed to actually be humbled by some of these, and seemed to be making a genuine attempt to fix the systems that got them into a place where they published a book where they updated an existing race of space apes by giving them the exciting new backstory of “they’re escaped slaves!” Or blowing up the entire 3rd party licensing model for no obvious reason. Or sending the literal Pinkertons to someone’s house.

There seems to be an attempt to use the 2024 books to reset. There seems to be a genuine attempt here to get better at diversity and inclusion, to actually move forward. On the other hand, there’s still no sign of what’s going to happen next with the licensing situation.

And this is all slightly fatuous, because I clearly bought it, and money you spend while holding your nose is still legal tender. Your milage may vary.

My honest answer is that if you’re only looking to get one new 5e-compatible PHB this year, I’d recommend you get Tales of the Valiant instead, they’re a small company and could use the sales. If you’re in the market for a second, pick this one up. If you’ve bought in to the 5e ecosystem, the new PHB is probably worth the cover price for the improved ergonomics alone.

Going all the way back to where we started, the last way that D&D is weird is that whether we play it or not, all of us who care about this hobby have a vested interest in Dungeons & Dragons doing well. As D&D goes, so goes the industry: if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, when D&D does well the rising tide lifts all boats, but when it does poorly D&D is the Fisher King looking out across a blasted landscape.

If nothing else, I want to live in a world where as many people’s jobs are “RPG” as possible.

D&D is healthier than it’s ever been, and that should give us all a sigh of relief. They didn’t burn the house down and start over, they tried to make a good game better. They’re trying to make it more welcoming, more open, trying to make a big tent bigger. Here in the ongoing Disaster of the Twenties, and as the omni-crisis of 2024 shrieks towards its uncertain conclusion, I’ll welcome anyone trying to make things better.

Tales of the Valiant

In order for this game to make sense, you have to remember why it exists at all. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ “lawyer-proof” variant of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created as a response to the absolute trash fire Hasbro caused around the Open Game License and the 5th Edition System Reference Document early last year.

Recall that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, started making some extremely hinky moves around the future of the OGL—the license under which 3rd party companies can make content compatible with D&D. Coupled with the rumors about the changes being planned for the 2024 update to the game, there was suddenly a strong interest in a version of 5th Edition D&D that was unencumbered by either the OGL or the legal team of the company that makes Monopoly. As such, Kobold Press stepped up to the plate.

Because history happens twice, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, this is actually our second runaround with D&D licensing term shenanigans spawning a new game.

For some context, when 3rd Edition D&D came out back in 2000, in addition to the actual physical books, the core rules were also published in a web document called the System Reference Document, or SRD, which was released under an open source–inspired license called the Open Gaming License, OGL. This was for a couple of reasons, but mostly to provide some legal clarity—and a promise of safe harbor—around the rules and terms and things, many of which were either taken from mythology or had become sort of “common property” of the TTRPG industry as a whole. The upshot was if you followed the license terms, you could use any material from the rules as you saw fit without needing to ask permission or pay anybody, and a whole industry sprung up around making material compatible with or built on top of the game.

When the 4th Edition came out in 2008, the licensing changed such that 3rd party publishers essentially had to choose whether to support 3 or 4, and the rules around 4 were significantly more restrictive. The economy that had grown up under the shade of 3rd edition and the OGL started, rightly, to panic a little bit. Finally, Paizo, who had been the company publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Hasbro until just about the same time, stepped up, and essentially republished the 3.5 edition of D&D under the name “Pathfinder.”

There’s a probably apocryphal line from Paizo’s Erik Mona that they chose to create Pathfinder instead of just reprinting 3.5 because “if we’re going to go to the trouble of reprinting the core books we’re going to fix the problems”. (Which has always stuck in my mind because my initial reaction to flipping through the core Pathfinder book the first time was to mutter “wow, we had really different ideas about what the problems were”.) Because Pathfinder wasn’t just a reprint, it was also a collected of tweaks, cleanups, and revisions based on the collected experience of playing the game. There was a joke at the time that it was version “3.75”, but really is was more like “3rd Edition, 2.0”.

When 5th edition came out in 2014, it came with a return to more congenial 3rd edition–style licensing, which reinvigorated the 3rd party publisher world, and also led to an explosion of twitch stream–fueled popularity, and unexpectedly resulted in the most successful period of the game’s history, and now a decade later here we are again, with a different 3rd party publisher producing a new incarnation of a Hasbro game so that the existing ecosystem can continue to operate without lawyers fueled by Monopoly Money coming after them (and yes, pun intended.)

(This isn’t the only project spawned by last January’s OGL mess either; Paizo’s Pathfinder 2 “remaster” was explicitly started to remove any remaining OGL-ed text from the books, it’s not a coincidence that this is when Tweet & Heinsoo chose to kickstart a second edition of 13th Age, the A5E folks are doing their own version of a “lawyer-proof 5th edition.”)

However, Tales of the Valiant had to deal with a couple of challenge that Pathfinder didn’t—primarily, vast chunks of 5E just aren’t in the SRD.

The 3rd Edition SRD had, essentially, the entire game, minus a few minor details and trademarked names, including quite a bit a material published after the core books. For Pathfinder, Paizo could have taken the SRD, bound it as-is, and had a ready-to-play game.

The 5E SRD, on the other hand, has significantly less. Looking at that SRD, vast sections of the game are missing—every Class only has a single Subclass, there’s only a single example Background, there’s only a single Feat, the 5E rules for personality traits & roleplaying hooks—ideals, bonds, flaws, and so on—aren’t present, various monsters aren’t present, the Alchemist class isn’t there, nothing from any book other than the three original core books is there, only the “core” races are there and the races with subraces only have a single example, and so on and so on. All of these gaps needed filling with new material on top of the other mechanical tweaks and cleanup.

The result is that Tales of the Valiant ends up in a sort of “neither fish nor fowl” situation; it’s not just a cleaned up 5E because it literally can’t be, but on the other hand it’s not different enough to give it a clear hook or independent identity.

But with that out of the way, it’s pretty great.

The initial release for ToV is two books—a Players Guide and Monster Vault. (Supposedly, Hasbro has also been getting stropy about other companies using the name “Player’s Handbook” which is why both Kobold and Paizo have moved to other titles.)

The writing in both books is outstanding. This is all, broadly speaking, the same material as the 5E Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, but every section is better written, clearer, generally shorter and more concise. It reads like someone took the original 5E books and ran them past a really, really good editor. All of the language has been made much clearer—for example, spell “levels” are now “circles” to avoid confusion with character levels.

Most of the changes are excellent. The whole thing reads like a set of well-presented house rules by a group of really good DMs who have been running this game for a decade, which I’m pretty sure is what it is.

However, for better or worse, it’s still 5E. All the weird edges of that game are still here—the strange economy around bonus actions, there’s still too many weird custom per-class mechanics around pools of dice, Bards are still mostly just junior wizards, the “other two” arcane spellcasters are still underbaked, there still isn’t a caster that just uses spellpoints.

There’s still just too much—too much complexity without getting anything for it. The core book is 370+ pages, which seems increasingly absurd.

It’s not a secret that 5E was game made by a small team on a short deadline, the game was barely finished, and as a result on a pretty regular basis the rules throw up their hands and depend on the DM to sort things out. As such, many of the changes feel like the result of a decade of people having figured things out— for example, the rules around tools vs skills are clearer, the list of tools is shorter, there are actual rules for hiding, the rules are all reorganized.

Other changes are more structural, but still in the “obvious fixes” category—every class gets subclasses starting at level 3 now, and at the same levels thereafter, although the many of the new subclasses have a certain “golden arcs” to 5E’s “golden arches” quality. For example, Mage Blades are now Spell Blades, and can mix cantrips with physical attacks when using multiattack, which is… pretty great, actually? And a couple of the classes, like Warlock, have been pretty extensively overhauled, with just regular-ass spell slots.

The big ticket changes are all improvements:

“Race” has been replaced with a dual system of “Lineage” and “Heritage”. Lineage is, essentially, your species, and Heritage is where you grew up. This immediately lets you easily cook up some unusual combo—urban Orcs, nomadic Halflings. Backgrounds work similarly to 5E, but the list is new and grant some actually useful bonuses. “Inspiration” has been replaced with the much more flexible and interesting “Luck”. Spell lists have been reorganized around 4E-style “power sources” instead of being unique per class. 5E’s optional Feats have been replaced with Talents, which are, effectively, 3E’s Feats. Like 3E, those Talents are everywhere; your background gives you one, you can pick them on a pretty regular basis as an upgrade option. This is one of several changes that brings back something from 3E. As another, magic items—and magic item upgrades— have prices again. And the revised text around using attributes and skills make them feel a lot more like how the 3E skills worked. I’ve often said my personal ideal version of D&D would be a 3E-5E hybrid, and ToV very much has that feeling.

And, thank goodness, alignment is gone.

(For the full list of changes, see: Tales of the Valiant: Conversion Guide )

The books themselves, like all of Kobold’s books, are very nice. For a small press, they’re outstanding. The usual full-size hardcovers, full color, nice layout, good art. As a nice touch, the covers of the two books represent the same scene, but a few minutes apart.

Uncharacteristically, my favorite of the two volumes was the Monster Vault. This is where the aspect of “collected house rules from a good DM” really shines. The layout is not that different from the 5E Monster Manual, but very cleverly rethought to be useful during play. Each monster gets at least a one whole page, with a nice piece of art and a really thoughtful layout of stats. For example, the book doesn’t waste space with the monster’s stats, it just lists their stat modifiers, which are also their saving throw modifiers. The monster name is always—and only—the first thing in the top left corner of the page, which makes the book so much easier to navigate than either 3rd or 5th edition’s “YOLO!” approach to page layouts.

Every creature gets at least half a column of description, and this is where removing alignment becomes an asset to design. Without alignment as a shorthand, they give each monster an actual personality. To wit: Red Dragons are still bad guys, but instead of just being “chaotic evil”, now they’re assholes. Continuing with the dragons as the example, the metallic ones are still mostly “good”, and the chromatic ones are “bad”, but each kind gets a distinct set of ticks and behaviors. Green dragons are now something like Nazi scientists, Copper dragons are friendly but love a fight, and so on. It’s a really solid set of role-play hooks and ways to deploy them in a game.

This also really shines as a way to distinguish things like oozes or creatures acting on instinct from monsters you’re going to fight because they thought about it and want to take your stuff.

And then there’s the section on encounter design. Encounter design in 5E is notoriously tricky, mainly because the “challenge rating” system in the core rules is blatantly untested and unfinished. The 5E books barely cover it, one more subsystem that ends with a shrug and “you can figure it out?” The ToV Monster Vault has pages and pages on how to design encounters, how to use the existing challenge ratings to compare opponents to the party’s level, notes on adjusting difficulty, you name it. It’s clearly the work of a group that’s played this game a lot, and have really figured out how to make this part sing.

It’s probably the best D&D-style “monster book” I’ve ever read.

The Player’s Guide is a little more of a mixed bag. Again, the layout is clear and well-thought, each class has an icon representing it when it comes up in the rules. Character creation is presented in a different order, which isn’t really better or worse, so much as it shows there just isn’t a best way to present 5E’s overly-complex material.

It also pulls in a bunch of material that 5E leaves in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Magic items, for example. It really is the only book you need to play the game, which makes me intensely curious about the ToV Gamemaster’s Guide which is coming out later this year.

But while the organization is different from the 5E Player’s Handbook, I’s be hard pressed to say it was better.

It’s also remarkable what isn’t here.

The section on “what is an RPG” is perfunctory to the point of being vestigial. There’s actually less material on role-playing and the like here than in the 5E books. There’s essentially nothing on how to actually play; there’s nothing here on how the authors intend this game to work in practice, I guess that’s left up to youtube?

There’s fewer mechanics for role play hooks than even 5E had. The thin-but-workable Ideals/Bonds/Flaws system wasn’t in the SRD, but hasn’t been replaced with anything. The section on using Charisma skills is basically the same content as the 5E book, and that was thin at time. (Meanwhile the 4E non-combat skill challenge system is just sitting there, waiting for someone to rediscover it.) (Edited to add: I went back and checked, and in fairness skill challenges were a DMG item in 4e, not in the PHB.)

There’s a section on Safety Tools, but it’s less than a page. The phrase “session zero” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, which seems insane for a 300+ page RPG book published in the 2020s.

All of that would be acceptable in a small game, but this this book is 60 pages longer than the 5E book, which was already too big. And this isn’t the early teens anymore, where we were having serious conversations about if the TTRPG industry was going to keep existing. This is the twenties, and whatever else that means, TTRPGs are a huge business now, and narrative and character–focused play is in. It’s a strange set of oversights for an otherwise well-designed game.

Finally, Tales of the Valiant is… not a great name? It’s not terrible, but it’s a surprisingly hard name to use in a sentence. And that’s a lot of syllables. And something I’ve learned about myself over the last couple thousand words is that I can’t spell “Valiant” right the first time. (You know what’s a great RPG name? Mörk Borg. That’s the new bar, guys.)

But in case this hasn’t come through clearly, I like it. A lot. As it stands, it’s the best version of 5E out there. Well, at least for the moment, because the shadow of the incoming 5th edition update is looming on the horizon.

It’s not clear to me where this game sits in the broader hobby. Is there room for another D&D-alike? I’m not sure this makes a compelling case why you should play this instead of Pathfinder or 13th Age or the new 5E itself. I don’t understand who the target audience is supposed to be.

The folks that want to play Dungeons & Dragons are going to play that. The whole OGL trashfire/5th edition update ended up going a different direction than any of us expected a year ago; I think the ’24 update is going to be a lot better than we expected, the license terms actually got better, not worse, and I’m sure sure what the sales pitch is for “it’s like D&D, except slightly different.” There’s no hook, no “here’s why this is cooler.”

My overall response is that I wish Kobold had used Hasbro’s total surrender over the licensing to pivot, and to build up a more-different game. Pathfinder succeeded because 3rd edition went away and 4th edition, whatever its strengths, was a very different game. That not what happened this time, and a flavor of 5E is going to stick around for a while yet.

To be fair, I’m not really in the center of this particular crosshairs anymore either. I mean, the game I’m running now is a “cozy witchcore” modern fantasy game using the Cypher system, where we’ve never even bothered to fill in the player character’s attack bonuses on their character sheets. (Off topic but: it’s really fun to see what Modern Fantasy looks like once it has both “Lovecraft” and “90s goth vampires” washed completely out of its hair.) Thats miles away from D&D’s home turf of “fantasy-flavored superheros”. That said, we’ve got a D&D game we’re talking about kicking off, and if we do I’ll advocate heavily for using this instead.

And that’s the review in a nutshell: next time I want to run a game with Magic Missle in it, this is the one I’m going to run.

It’s a cool game by a cool company, making something good out of a stupid situation. Check it out.

Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)

There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.

After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.

Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.

As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)

Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:

First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.

Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.

This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.

The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.

It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.

But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.

In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.

(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)

After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”

Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”

Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)

Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.

Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)

Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.

The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.

The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.

(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)

The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.

Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.

There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.

Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.

In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.

After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.

And then he died in the gym at 49.

One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.

And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.

As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.

What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.

(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)

And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.

Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.

---

This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.

There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.

The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.

I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.

It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:

AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?

DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.

One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”

And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.

If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”

In other words: Don't Panic.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)

I’ve been Extremely Online pretty much since that was a thing you could be. Being Online is a condition that’s not well described or represented Offline. Most books or movies about scenes I was a part of, either directly or tangentially, tend not to be very accurate, not get the vibe right. I read books about computer games, say, and tend to leave with a sense of “huh, that’s not how it was for me at all.” Online is even worse; this is probably because Online is always describing itself to itself, and there’s no room for a slow, non-networked, Offline description.

Patricia Lockwood, who apparently dodged a thousand years of jail, used to be fairly active on the outer edges of what used to be called “weird twitter.” It turns out, poets were really good at twitter’s strange limitations, go figure. She wrote a book a few years ago called No One is Talking About This, which I had been looking forward to very much, but only just now finally had a chance to sit down and read.

This book is the single best description I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be Extremely Online. Specifically, it’s simply the best description of what it was like to read twitter too much in the late twenty-teens. The timing is accidentally perfect, it’s the perfect eulogy for that phase of the internet that existed between the recession and the pandemic; the five websites full of screenshots of the other four era, before the Disaster of the Twenties really got rolling.

But more generally, it perfectly encapsulates the Online Condition. The way The Online expands and consumes all your mental and emotional bandwidth, and the way Real Life sort of falls away, unable to match the dopamine flow. The way your head is full of all this stuff that no one else around you knows, or recognizes, or cares about. The Online doesn’t become more real than The Real, exactly, just more present, and faster, and louder.

But this book isn’t about any of that. This book is about what it’s like to be Online when Real Life suddenly becomes Extremely Real. And the result isn’t that suddenly Real Life becomes real again, it’s that neither seems real, and you float in this twilight realm between the two spaces, unable to engage with or believe either of them.

The way neither space can act as an escape valve for the other, and the realities continue to diverge past the point where you can hold both in your head, and you find yourself in both places, gasping out, for different reasons, No One is Talking About This.

I’m generally a fast reader. I don’t intend to humblebrag here, despite leaving this sentence in—I’ve always read fast, I tend to gulp books down. (I also walk fast and talk fast, and should probably do something about my caffeine intake.) This is a short book, but it took me a long time to read, because I couldn’t make it very far before I had to put it down and just sort of process the last couple of pages. It was very, very funny, but it got much further under my skin than I was expecting.

I enjoyed it very much. Strongly recommended.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2006)

This book has been on my list for ages, at least since it won the Hugo. Thanks to the dual prompting of the new show and some light peer pressure, I finally read it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: I liked it a lot. Great book! You should read it.

But my goodness, this is a book I wish I could have read in the original language. There’s a very distinctive style and rhythm to the language, especially the dialogue, that I can only describe as “artfully clunky”, lots of people shouting declarative statements past each other. I’d love to know what percentages of that are a) the author’s style b) an artifact of the translation c) that’s how Mandarain sounds. I suspect it’s 30:70 a and c, but I’d love to know.

For a 400+ page book, there are surprisingly few characters with major “speaking parts”.

My favorite was Shi Qiang, the grizzled police detective. Speaking of cultural and stylistic differences, that character is clearly supposed to be the hard-charging pragmatist, and as such, he felt the most in-line with the baseline of the way American technothriller/science fiction characters act. And so it kept making me laugh how constantly he would say or suggest something that seemed pretty straightforward to me, and then all the other characters would fall all over themselves about how rude and inhuman the detective was. I really enjoyed the cultural differences embedded in the fact that the other characters can barely comprehend how rude that guy is, and meanwhile I’m reading it thinking “the other guys in Miami Vice would make so much fun of this guy for being too polite”.

On the other hand, Wang Miao, the character we spend the most time with, has a certain blank “video game protagonist” quality. Mostly he’s there to be shocked at the detective, solve puzzles, and deliver exposition, in that order.

In a lesser book, the third character with the most time on page, Ye Wenjie, would be the antagonist, and while her actions are opposed to those of the first two characters, the book refuses to be that straightforward. She’s really the book’s main protagonist, as her actions are what cause the plot to start moving, in many ways she manages to have the most agency of anyone in the story, despite her not realizing it.

I really, really enjoyed how hard the author worked not to editorialize on the characters. There’s the group that in an American novel would absolutely be the “bad guys”, and here the author just describes them with a tone of “well, what do you think?” Maybe the best deployment f the “villain has a point” trope I have ever seen.

The overall structure of the book was a lot of fun. Roughly speaking, it was: 100 pages of warmup laps, making sure the reader knew who everyone was and where they were, 200 pages of post-cyberpunk techno-thriller modern-day science fiction, then 100 pages of absolute unchained insanity. A++.

It’s the sort of book where the author has had some fun ideas about how physics could work, and what that would mean, and would like to tell you about it. (The all time grand-champion for “let me tell you my ideas about physics” is Masamune Shirow’s Orion which is less of a graphic novel than it is an illustrated physics textbook for a cosmology worked outwards from “how can we power spaceships with spells?” It’s incredible, and I can’t believe they keep remaking Ghost in the Shell but still haven’t done Orion even once.)

There’s plot point that hinges on a common pop culture misunderstanding of “quantum entangling”, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does jump out if you read those kinds of ars technica articles. Which isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to have an exchange along the lines of a human saying “but the no messaging theorem!” and the aliens saying “haha, your puny earth science has much to unlearn!!” But this is mostly there to enable the real fun crazy ideas around computers, and higher dimensions, and particle physics, and ways civilizations can (or can’t) cope with their surroundings. One of the things I genuinely like about the book is that is spends ~300 pages being a real-world hard science fiction book, and then in the last 100 or so starts doing things that would make Star Trek blush, but since you’re bought in it all works, and the end can get away with a lot.

“Hard science fiction” in the classic mid-century sense of “square-jawed Science Men think through a math word problem for 8000 words” has fallen out of vogue, and this book isn’t a throwback so much as it is a revival. Rehabilitating the (sub)genre while keeping the post-seventies innovations of the broader science fiction literary community. From the discussions on the web, I notice this seems to be a lot of younger people’s first “hard” SF, and to be clear, I think that’s great. I’m kind of a reverse-hipster on this one; I have a strong “if you like that, buckle up, there’s a whole section of the library you are going to flip over” reaction. (Wait’ll these kids discover that Clarke book that’s essentially a set of full engineering plans for a space elevator in novel form.)

The key factor in making all that work is grounding the story in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having the story take place in the shadow of the real-world horrors, and the plot spin out as a serious of consequences of that disaster give it a sense of social realism that glues together all the VR games and nanomaterials and sophons.

Finally, it doesn’t technically end on a cliffhanger, but I adore the double-punchline the book ends on. Incredible last scene.