Hmmm. First RPG bought this – year? I’m not sure. I think the first set of RPG rules which arrived in print was the Kobold Press Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide and Monster Manual, which arrived last month.
This inspired me to start a series of posts comparing Tales of the Valiant and Level Up! Advanced 5th Edition with the original 2014-edition D&D 5th edition and the forthcoming D&D 5.5e, or is it D&D 2024? It’s certainly no longer OneD&D…
It grew out of Project Black Flag, back during the days of the OGL fiasco. Or at least, that’s when Kobold Press admitted to it. And the free version of the ruleset is still available as Black Flag Roleplaying with a public-domain SRD. As you would expect, the full, paid-for version has more detail, and I’m going to work through this detail over the next few months, along with A5E and D&DNew (once I receive my books; I wasn’t one of those privileged to receive an early copy).
We’ve tried playing under Black Flag/ToV rules a couple of times. First, playtesting a module from Lou Anders set in his Thrones and Bones Norrøngard campaign setting for both fifth edition and just recently with a Tales of the Valiant player’s guide.
What makes Tales of the Valiant interesting
Tales of the Valiant is unashamedly a D&D 5th edition clone, but they have made some changes as tweaks.
In particular, where 2014 has one origin category of “Race”, Tales of the Valiant splits this into “Lineage”, the genetic portion of your origin, and “Heritage”, the upbringing portion.
We recently had a session 0.5 starting a new open-world campaign set in the Scarlet Citadel, and we did character creation using Tales of the Valiant rules. The players agreed this made for a better creation experience. We ended up with:
- A Kobold (medium size, has similarities to DragonBorn) druid
- A Frostborn Barbarian raised as a Cottager (in a halfling village – kept banging her head)
- …and two others I’ve forgotten. Once I get reminded I’ll update this.
The Frostborn lineage is a half human, half frost giant which Lou very kindly sent as an advance view on his Thrones & Bones ToV player’s guide, and it seemed to really resonate with the player’s concept. She is 7½ feet tall but brought up by halflings.
Are you feeling lucky?
The other new rule is Luck, which replaces Inspiration (which I am very bad at remembering to give). It can be given by the GM, but it is also accrued whenever you fail an attack roll or a save.
Luck points can be spent to add to the roll on a check – attack or skill, or you can spend 3 luck points to re-roll a d20 used for the check.
You can have a maximum of five luck points. If you already have five and you gain another, you have to roll a d4 and immediately reset your luck to the value of that roll.
We used this during the playtest of Lou’s module. Well, we tried to, but we weren’t very good at remembering. It seems a nice idea, and certainly the choice of spending multiple points seemed to work quite nicely, but I’m sure we missed a lot of the times luck points should have been gained from the failed checks. Maybe with more familiarity we would get better at remembering it.
Conclusion
I’m certainly intending to keep going with Tales of the Valiant, and will welcome ToV characters at my open table as well as 5e characters. (If you can make it to Edinburgh, and you’re interested in joining my open table sometimes, please get in touch).
I’m also studying the rules in detail, and may well take some into my main campaign as house rules.
One thought on “RPGaDay 2024 Day 1 – First RPG bought this year”