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.