I bought the bundle because of the blurb that says it shows you how to combine multiple biomes and a hex map with real geography. Honestly, the few bullet points are not very helpful—nothing is in-depth. There is only a single hex flower graphical example of a hex map.

I bought this as part of the bundle. Overall, I thought the bundle was not a good value based on the content and instruction guides, especially part 3, where the blurb said that it would teach you how to build hex maps with real-world terrain examples. They only provided a single, simple hex flower example. It's not worth it at all.

I bought this as part of the bundle. Overall, I thought the bundle was not a good value based on the content and instruction guides, especially part 3, where the blurb said that it would teach you how to build hex maps with real-world terrain examples. They only provided a single, simple hex flower example. It's not worth it at all.

I stole some of the stuff in there for my 5e game. What they did with the barbarian and ranger class is great. This is what I imagined the 2024 rules to be and it's backwards compatible too. I am going to buy the ToV PHB and MM and either mix and match or switch completely to ToV.

Tales of the Valiant: The Death of My Minmax Power Trip – A Totally Objective Review by Someone Who's Definitely Not Mad

Rating: 1/5 Stars (because my Crossbow Expert build doesn’t make me feel like God anymore)

I came into Tales of the Valiant hoping for balance, polish, innovation, and clean design. Instead, I was horrified to discover that Kobold Press had committed the unforgivable sin of… not letting martials stack six feats and delete bosses in one turn.

What happened to real design?! Like in 5E 2014, where:

Fighters got Extra Attack and some feats and said, "I do damage now."

Paladins could nova smite like they were power-tripping anime protagonists.

Monks only did one thing well (stunning things), but boy was that one trick FUN until it failed!

But Tales of the Valiant? Nah, these monsters thought:

> “What if we limited Smite? What if we gave martials more than just damage boosts? What if we asked you to actually think in combat?”

Disgusting.

Worst of all? They gave casters more tools. Like one new mechanic that lets them check HP as a bonus action (gross! You want me to use that tactically?!) and some streamlined spell language. HOW DARE THEY.

Even more egregious, Kobold Press had the audacity to:

Introduce a universal Luck Points mechanic (ugh, more tracking? I already have to remember how many dice I rolled.)

Design classes with internal synergy instead of relying on broken feats to do the heavy lifting

Attempt to create a balanced 5E-adjacent system that doesn't exist solely to feed my need for feeling superior via math exploits

The betrayal is real. No GWM? No Sharpshooter cheese? No Paladin nuke builds that ignore encounter pacing? Why even live.

And don’t get me started on monks. You took away my ability to roll four Stunning Strikes per round? HOW WILL I FEEL IMPORTANT NOW?

Conclusion: Tales of the Valiant is a disaster if you define “balanced gameplay” as “I want to abuse mechanics and feel like a god while the wizard rewrites reality and the bard seduces the dragon.” If you’re one of those players who likes thoughtful class design, meaningful decisions, and a game where everyone contributes, then sure—maybe this is for you.

But as someone whose entire sense of fun is built on feat stacking and power spikes, this game is a tragedy.

0/10. Would rather play 5E with 12 house rules and cry when the monk can’t land a single stun.

Final Verdict: ToV didn’t kill balance—it killed my toxic relationship with 5E mechanics. And I’ll never forgive them.

The good: The production values are great. Has an old-school feel to a lot of the dangers, and very few encounters are the boring old “bag of hitpoints” type.

The Bad: Threats are super disconnected from each other narratively. Map design feels weird sometimes. Relatively few rewards for overcoming the arbitrary-feeling challenges. Encounters are crazy dangerous in ways not immediately obvious on first reading. There are a lot of encounters where players are expected to do or not do specific things which run counter to a veteran player’s instincts.

Spoilers follow:

The first floor expects the players to do some side-quests in town before actually going down, so they’d be second level. No one has ever done this any of the times I’ve run it.

The first floor also has a giant hole that constantly vomits undead in a never ending stream so the DM can “restock” floor one with monsters. The module expects players to “figure out” it’s an endless stream and just ignore it until they can seal it off after doing things in the lower floors. If you’ve run more than a few games of DnD, you know this is a TERRIBLE assumption to make. Players will never want to leave a knife at their back. I had one party actually try to descend INTO the hole to shut it off. (There’s no provision in the adventure for this, not even a cop-out line telling you to “improvise.”)

Floor two has a setpiece encounter with an ooze monster... that has a reach of 5 ft and a 10ft movement speed. In a huge room. This is a set piece that is entirely torn apart by cantrips. Weird design decision. If you want to run this, give it at least a 15 foot reach so it can smack people some before it dies.

By contrast, the alchemist in the next room which made it is CRAZY DANGEROUS. At the level she’s encountered, her “Take this, swine” ability is effectively an instant kill move on anything within 5 feet of her. It deals around 10 acid damage minimum with the potential for about 46 on a max roll (2d8+3d6+3d6+2d6), leaving them prone, restrained, not breathing, and with their gear melting. Her minions breathe tons of damage with no attack roll and explode on death for more. She also has an environmental hazard that the party and I just ignored because things were going crazy as it was. You can just leave her alone, but she’s got a hair trigger and just bothering her too much will set her off.

Floor two also has another problem. It describes only one door as locked, one as hidden, and gives no direction on any door from that point onward. Which means an unlucky level 2 party can walk directly towards the caster/demon combo that is supposed to be a challenge for level 5 parties. Which happened on my second attempted run through this module. They tried to negotiate, which led to a betrayal and hilarious misunderstanding, but it still would’ve been a TPK had one of the party not rolled well on his death saves.

Floor 3 is where I called it quits. There is a huge “murder hallway” which has no narrative reason to be there- they’re supposed to have been barracks underneath a fortification, why would the builders have constructed a murder hallway in the middle of their sleeping quarters/workshops? They didn’t carve this place DURING the siege, it was before.

The real reason I called it quits is because there are dire owlbears and lich hounds. The dire owlbears are bags of hit points and damage with a CR 5. The party tore through three of them no problem, that’s okay. They’re supposed to do that. The lich hounds have MORE hp, can knock players prone then tear at them for extra damage as a bonus action, fly, pop into and out of an alternate dimension to ignore terrain obstacles, and Resist non-magical damage and a few elements. And are CR 4 for some reason. Oh, and if you don’t have a magic weapon (which you won’t at this point unless you’re given one by a class ability), then there’s nearly 2,000 HP worth of Lich Hounds to chew through. That doesn’t count the HP of the Owlbears or the occupants of the floor who are adding to your problems.

It’s a challenge all right. There’s a ton of good, inventive, and surreal puzzles and fights, and the Roll20 module is well-constructed for easy use. But with the weird expectations of player behavior and the borderline unfair “Gotchas” it expects me to spring onto the party… it just wasn’t fun for me to run.

A far more accessible way to play 5e. By that I mean you can actually access a pdf from the publisher. Compared to official 5e, this ends up being more of a revision and reorganisation of the rules rather than a brand new game. I think it is well worth the money if you want to play 5e. I was also very happy with the changes to subclasses (all start at level 3) and with the changes to the fighter class.

It is a good alternative/supplement to 5e in my opinion, especially if you have gripes with the way a certain company does business.

Written content is alright (though I have not had a chance to playtest it); my one complaint is the disrepency between the male armor (full coverage, rather practical aside from two goblins with exposed torsos) and the female armor (cleavage, midriff, and/or leg area unprotected on two of the three female characters).

The book starts with a brief history of hexcrawls to show why people have and still like them. Then a section on if hexcrawls are right for you. Assuming they are, the last section outlines the main steps of creating a hexcrawl

If you're thinking about a hexcrawl campaign and are on the fence, start here. This will either outline why a hexcrawl isn't for you or show you the road the rest of the series seeks to pave toward creating one. Either way you should feel more confident about your choice

Not much by way of mechanics but thats what the other books are for. I really like the series and this is a good intro

Good resource for putting factions to use in your sandbox with an actual mechanic and procedures.

Not that much of arcanepunk in it. Includes Warframes with are Powered Armors but no real lesser items like powered gauntlet or something you would hand out as a game master as the Powered Armors are game and fun breaking. It is mainly something campaign level items but not enough to have real arcanepunk ideas like you would have for steampunk

--1 out of 5 stars--

The Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide, viewed in a vacuum, is closer to a 2-2.5 out of 5 tabletop RPG, but in the context of acting as a substitute ruleset to replace official 5e Dungeons & Dragons, it is lowered to 1 out of 5. TOV is simply a worse version of the 2014 D&D rules, adding a massive martial/caster divide that was not present in official 5e, by both strengthening spellcasters needlessly, and taking away the tools martial characters required for their contributions in battle. Casters always offered more utility in 2014 5e but martials offered unparalleled damage.

In TOV nearly every martial class is a “trap build” waiting to happen. Select subclasses, if built in an exacting manner, can come close to keeping up with equivalent builds from the 2014 D&D PHB. Taken as a whole, martial classes have become unplayable, save for edge cases. Paladins are limited to a single smite per turn, lowering round to round damage output. The feats martial characters relied on for damage supremacy, Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter, have analogues in TOV that are inadequate, leaving martial damage badly lagging compared to what it was in 5e D&D.

Spellcasters, meanwhile, have access to new mechanics such as a Talent that lets them determine exact enemy Hit Points as a Bonus Action, making spells based on an enemy’s remaining HP, like the Power Word spells and Sleep, far more tactically viable. The power of individual spells has not been lowered, compared to 2014 5e D&D, but the martial classes all suffer greatly, compared to their D&D counterparts. Monks were never a viable damage dealing martial class, but the Stunning Strike feature gave them a unique utility. TOV has removed that, taking away the Monk’s sole viable combat option.

Stunning Strike, like a Paladin’s Smite, is now limited to once per turn, and carries additional drawbacks compared to the 2014 D&D PHB version of the ability, in that enemies can also reroll their save each time they take damage. The Paladin had an ability to exhaust much of its daily resources in a single “nova” round where they strike with multiple smite attacks, and that option is removed. Monks, while still a relatively poor class in the 5e 2014 D&D PHB, at least had a contribution in their ability to deliver multiple stun attempts, also now absent in TOV.

For those who were familiar with 5e D&D and its underlying game balance, combining Feats that granted Bonus Action attacks, like Crossbow Expert and Polearm Master, with those that granted -5 to hit for +10 to damage options, like Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master, provided excellent synergy with the classes that gained Martial Weapon Proficiency and the Extra Attack feature, particularly Fighters who scaled to multiple additional attacks. These Feat combinations allowed martial characters to offer a real asset in battle, on par with the reality warping power and versatility of full spellcasters.

TOV seemed to deliberately set out to create an impassible gulf between the usefulness of martial classes and caster classes. Very few people would describe that as a step in the right direction for any revision or alteration of the current 2014 5e D&D rules. There were other missed opportunities, such as the various spells that retain the same abusable loopholes and nebulous language as their original 2014 5e D&D versions. Failing to address those would mean TOV is not better than 5e D&D but might be an acceptable alternative for those want distance from Wizards of the Coast.

Unfortunately, TOV is not equal to the 2014 5e D&D, it is objectively worse. It is a game where roughly half the character classes are essentially trap builds, in a manner that is, in truth, more pronounced than the perceived martial/caster divide of 3.0 and 3.5 D&D. If the goal was to encourage entire parties made up of the full caster classes, simply eliminating martial classes and half-casters altogether would have, sincerely, produced a better game, by omitting character options that inexperienced players might errantly perceive as viable, balanced options, outright, instead of pretending otherwise.

Tales of the Valiant is still more coherent and well-polished than some of the current 5e D&D alternative systems, like the messy and poorly play-tested Level Up: A5E game line. Unlike Level Up, Tales of the Valiant does seem to have been made with some clear design goals in mind by designers who largely understand the system. Sadly, those design goals were seemingly to return to the 3e D&D era norm of useless, trap build martial classes, encouraging system savvy players to stick with spellcasters, exclusively. It is a consistent vision, but not one that legitimately improves 5e D&D.

If there was no 5e D&D, and Tales of the Valiant was a stand-alone gaming system that was not building off the success of another, it could be considered a 2.5-star product. That is not what the game is. It is a 5e D&D rules replacement, one that is fully compatible with existing 5e adventures, but inferior to the rules it seems to replace. TOV has no excuse for making the game balance worse than the system it aims to replace. The new additions, like the universal Luck Points mechanic, simply offer more to track that will slow down combat.

It is easy to speculate why this flawed system would be offered by Kobold Press. It is easier to market supplements towards players portraying spellcaster characters than martial characters, as evidenced by the publisher’s existing Deep Magic series. Offering systemic incentives to forego martial characters in favor of casters could entice more sales of supplements. Those who exclusively play casters may see TOV as a godsend. Those concerned about a balanced, playable game, will see it as a massive, missed opportunity to improve on 5e D&D’s flaws. I had high hopes for TOV, but it proved a massive letdown.

It is the monster manual done Kobold Press's way. Great artwork. I like the tales of the valiant stuff. A great option if you are fed up with the owners of the most famous RPG in the world and their recent antics

I think this is an excellent product. Lovely artwork as always. Nice to see someone rivaling WoC with the quality of the product. Really like the new barbarian and fighter classes. Our players seem to like it too. A great alternative to WoC.