Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

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.

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

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.

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