My table has wholeheartedly embraced A5e, and after only a few sessions with it, it's hard to imagine going back.

In chapter 1, you'll read about different types of player archetypes, what they enjoy most in games, what problems they can have, and what conflicts might arise. I couldn't imagine a more helpful first chapter for DMs who are just getting started, and it's still very helpful at any DM skill level. As you tend to find out, even in groups of friends who all get along, the hardest part of DMing isn't always writing a campaign or running combats, but figuring out how to handle having a player who gets bored in combat and a player who gets bored with story, or what to do when one player starts taking charge and telling everyone else what to do, or how to deal with a super optimized min-maxer who is hogging the spotlight from other players. At the end of the day, no matter how well you run your game otherwise, ignoring problems like that for long enough can cause people to stop having fun, players to leave, or the whole group to fall apart. The rest of the book is also amazing, but I can't stress enough how helpful chapter 1 alone is.

The mechanics for travel and exploration are great, and full of hooks to start side quests and diversions. Recently, my group ran into some low level wannabe bandits who didn't attack, and instead talked to the party, bemoaning their situation. One of the characters gave them some tips and encouragement as a joke. Later, at the nearby town, they noticed an empty chest recently dug up from the ground behind the general store, and assumed it was the work of the same troubled youth. The next day, a fire broke out at that same store, which the party helped put out as an exploration challenge, and while looking for clues as to how it started, found a dagger left at the scene that one of the bandits was playing with the day before. They set off, fought the bandits, brought them back to town, and sent them off to the nearby major city to do some hard labor. All of this came from rolling encounters at the table- a story naturally came together from the pieces, and now the party is invested in the fate of these wannabe bandits, hoping they can be reformed. The usual encounter tables in games full of entries of "2d4 orcs" typically require some prep work on the DM's part to turn it into something interesting (why are they here? what are they doing? what do they want?), but these tables also have so many natural plot hooks and interesting encounters built in that I don't have a problem rolling on them during the game.

There are a lot of new, fun magic items, as well as other rewards, such as boons and discoveries, and rules for crafting magic items. The focus on having not only combat encounters but also social and exploration encounters, as well as some regular scenery, is wonderful. Having a large selection of encounter elements with their effect on CR to spice up fights is easy to overlook as a minor addition but adds so much- you no longer have to create your own rules for fighting in a swamp or what happens if a character falls into frigid water, nor guess how much more difficult it will make the fight. Calculating combat encounter difficulty from CR is also much simplified. There are so many good additions that I couldn't possibly highlight all of them. If you want a DM guide that doesn't gather dust except for opening it to the treasure chapter, one that's as useful for the DM to have on hand as the player book is, pick this up. Even if you don't want to convert entirely to A5e, this book is worth having- in fact, the journey system, regions, exploration challenges, and more could probably fit into other systems than just 5e with a little bit of tweaking, and your game would likely be better for it.

My group has been loving the A5e system, and this adventure has helped us get the hang of the changes. I absolutely love the way the adventure starts- it's pretty far from meeting in a tavern, and my players had a blast with it. It's a fun little adventure, and full of room for the players to mess around and not feel railroaded through an empty world, like shorter adventures can sometimes struggle with. It's also well written and very easy to run, with sidebars and information right where you need it, so I feel that newer DMs and maybe players wanting to try DMing for the first time would have a good experience with this. We were planning on running this to learn A5e and then go back to our old campaign and remake those characters for A5e and so on, but I am hearing a lot of long term plans for characters and their stories being thrown around by my players, so we may pick up the rest of this adventure path once we finish everything in this book.

My table has made a full switch from 5e to A5e, and I don't see us going back. As someone who started with 3.5 and Pathfinder, 5e had to grow on me before I could appreciate it. And while the trimmed down rules do offer a lot of freedom for the DM, it also creates a lot of work- when your players ask if they can make anything with the dragon hide they collected, you either tell them the RAW answer- not really, only the GP value matters for crafting- or either make crafting rules yourself or search for a third party supplement to tack on. If a player wants to grab onto a giant creature, or play a dragonborn raised by dwarves, or use their hard earned money to build a stronghold, a DM is left to say no, make their own modifications, or find a third party supplement by someone else who has made their own. I've run games with different crafting systems for each type of crafting tacked on, keeping detailed spreadsheets for alchemy ingredients and amounts of metals gathered for smithing, each with separate rules on how to actually craft with them. It's not fun. Coming up with rules and answers to things is the DM's job, but 5e leaves a lot of (often common) issues to be house ruled at each table.

Then A5e comes along. While still being very streamlined and easy to understand like 5e, A5e offers more mechanics for players and DMs both to enjoy. As a player, there are so many more options and ways to customize your character now. You can specialize in skills to reflect your own expertise, learn combat maneuvers to allow you to do all that cool stuff in combat your DM didn't know how to fairly handle before, craft items, customize spells, modify equipment, and so much more.

My group spent an entire session after A5e released simply flipping through the PDF and excitedly bringing up changes we found. Warlocks can now choose their ability score from Wis, Int, and Cha. They also have more casting versatility with spell points, giving them a different feel from other casters. The fatigue system helps with the problem of characters going to 0 HP and then getting picked up with a quick Healing Word multiple times in a fight. The Destiny system is excellent and really helps shape who your character is, what they want, and makes inspiration much more important and flavorful. The Marshal is a really cool class, offering tactical choices. Renaming existing classes gives them a lot more flexibility in their theme, such as the change from Monk to Adept, which can now go in many different directions, such as a brawler or athlete. Clerics have their own vows now, allowing their faith to show in how their character acts, and granting mechanical benefits. The separation of Heritage, Culture, and Background is what DnD should have done, instead of simply allowing you to choose your ability score increases from race. Ability checks have official critical successes and failures now, with separate tables for the type of check. Passive skills are expanded instead of an afterthought, so you could reasonably track passive Stealth for a light footed and naturally stealthy character, passive Insight for a character always paying attention to body language, or even passive Acrobatics for a character who does parkour. There are so many new spells that add interesting possibilities to the game, and rare spells. Equipment can be made from different materials, and can be modified. There are different types of shields, and weapons have more differences than which damage die they use. A lot of these are just small changes- there are so many big changes that other reviews are surely going to touch on more, that I want to highlight that there is so, so much more. The fact that Extra Attack now gives you two bonus action attacks when two weapon fighting isn't going to get its own bullet point anywhere, but it is still exciting. Having prices and rarity for pets isn't anything to write home about, but is a game changer for players (and their DMs) constantly looking for furry companions. A table letting players see how much gold they'll need to save up to hire someone to resurrect their companion and other common spells isn't a big selling point of A5e, but it is part of a wonderful whole package.

I can't stress enough how much more fun this system has been already. 5e has been a bit stale for me and some of my players for a while- in the last 5e campaign I ran, not a single player picked a race or subclass from the PHB. A5e feels new and fresh. It builds off of what 5e did, but adds some of the crunch and choice that a lot of people felt it needed. Some people it seems are upset about how compatible it is, claiming that it's somehow wildly different, but it's not. Adding any content to your game- sometimes even official 5e releases- isn't seamless, and requires some changes. Nothing is an exactly perfect fit to an existing table. You can play with a mixed party of 5e and A5e characters, and sure, there may be some problems with balance that come up. Half of the content in XGtE causes balance problems, too. The DM can make rulings on what tweaks need to happen. You could definitely take bits of A5e back to your regular 5e game, especially the things glaringly missing from 5e, such as crafting rules. But I think this is best enjoyed as a whole- there is some adjustment needed, but it only took a few sessions to feel like I had a good handle on it as a DM. It still works like 5e in a lot of ways, but fixes a lot of the problems, and adds so much more. I can't recommend this highly enough.

I've played with a lot of groups, some including people who have played since first edition, so I normally find myself spicing up monsters to give seasoned players surprises. And some monsters in 5e need it- at the end of the day, battling goblins, bandits, skeletons, and others are often the exact same fight, other than how the DM describes them. Maybe this one has a shield, to spice things up, or this one has an axe. While some common enemy groups have seen a bit more variety added in expansion books, the core 5e books put all the work on the DM to make a fighting goblins interesting or memorable, and running multiple groups of 3-5 regular goblins throughout a dungeon can be a chore. Now, even enemies like goblins that are traditionally cannon fodder are interesting, with many variants to choose from, notes on combat and behaviors, and more. I also never enjoyed running monsters with long spell lists- there's enough prep work for DMs already without researching and taking notes on spells for a monster you may only run once. Now, commonly used spells have descriptions right in the stat blocks. Do your players like to talk to their opponents and try to negotiate? Now there are names listed right in the monster's section. There is treasure, example encounters, what lore a character might gain if they make checks to recognize the creature, signs that a creature is in the area, and more. This book not only saves me a lot of time and energy as a DM, but also makes encounters much more interesting for both me and my players. My group and I love A5e as a whole package, but even if you're not sure if you want to convert your whole 5e game for whatever reason, this book alone is worth it.

This is a great supplement to have. The creatures inside are all interesting and fit their theme well. Some of these figures might fit into a given campaign, but I'm looking forward to using them as ways to fill out sessions where some people have to miss a session that would be too story heavy to run without them, or when I haven't had time to prepare a full session for the week. What party doesn't want to find out if they could defeat Ghengis Khan or the Easter Bunny?