This is the weakest of the three "core" A5E books by a long shot; if it didn't include the necessary Journey rules that govern many player characters' Journey abilities, it would be almost a complete wash. It's in this book that you can see most clearly that A5E does not live up to its stated goals of building out all three "pillars" of Fifth Edition (social, exploration, combat).

Like the base 5e DMG, this book contains sections expounding on the designers' philosophy of how a DM might create their campaign, things like player engagement, worldbuilding, cosmology, etc. To its credit, it spends a lot more time and energy on player safety tools than the DMG does and emphasizes player comfort and community -- a welcome addition in the hobby and something that Pathfinder 2e also did in its DM guidebook. It also contains the nuts-and-bolts information you'd expect in a DM-facing guide, such as a treasure and magic item compendium, information on dungeon hazards, traps, illnesses, etc. All of that stuff is competently presented and more or less equivalent to what you'd find in the 5e DMG in terms of utility.

It also includes some welcome content that is NOT in the 5e DMG, such as a full 50 pages of "exploration challenges," small vignettes like the "Killing Cloud" that can be popped into your exploration segments as useful, or at the very least inspire your own creativity in designing exploration challenges that go beyond "monster destroyed our food." There's an appreciable variety of quality in the challenges, and some of them reduce to "if your party succeeds at this specific check, they win. If not, they don't," but even if you don't use them verbatim (I typically don't in my group) they still provide useful seeds for you to design your own exploration encounters.

However, like the Adventurer's Guide, this book shows its relative immaturity in design by the types and utility of DM tools it includes, and in comparison to the 5e DMG there are quite a lot of useful DM tools simply absent. One example is the book's approach to campaign, adventure, and encounter design. The "Worldbuilding" chapter, 13 pages long, contains: 5 pages expounding on "guiding principles" of campaign creation: the premise of the campaign, its scope, the difference between self-contained sessions and serialized sessions, etc.; 3 pages expounding on "approaches" to worldbuilding, for example articulating different extents to which a DM might design facets of the campaign that the players won't necessarily engage with, as well as providing simple prompts such as "how was the world created?" or "is there an afterlife?" that might spur DM thinking at the top level; and 5 pages just presenting the system's default cosmology. The next chapter, "Encounter Design," is 15 pages long and fully 12 of those pages are taken up (a) talking about monster CR for combat encounters and (b) presenting encounter hazards such as acid or high gravity. The remaining three pages list a few examples of exploration and social encounters.

These two chapters, taken as a whole, seem to demonstrate an affinity for providing the reader with information and hoping that they are inspired, rather than providing tools for them to capitalize on their inspiration and actually create. The book shifts from pontificating on campaign cosmology and a "functionalist vs simulationist" discussion to providing detailed mechanical analysis of its own CR system -- without ever providing a reader the means of walking through the process of creating an adventure or a series of encounters, much less a full campaign. The section in the "Encounter Design" chapter discussing "Social Encounters," despite mentioning that the majority of encounters in a given adventure are likely to be social, presents almost no actionable guidance on creating compelling social encounters, instead relying on expository truths such as "a social encounter can be used to provide information to the players" and going no further. The book also doesn't deliver on expanding all three of the "pillars" of 5e, constraining exploration encounters by their CR like combat encounters and providing no guidance whatsoever on how to build, run, or award XP for social encounters beyond simply saying that it might be a good idea to do so.

The 5e DMG has its faults, but one thing that I have come back to over and over in my tenure as a 5e DM is that, throughout the entire book, there are actual design tools for DMs to use to build satisfying encounters, tools that help DMs learn what makes a compelling adventure, what makes a satisfying encounter, what makes the game worth playing, beyond simply what makes a combat or exploration challenge mechanically balanced. The DMG contains tools for building narrative arcs, designing compelling NPCs, sketching communities and dungeon environments, and even gigantic tables for building random dungeons that have seeded truly memorable experiences for my players. By comparison, this product presents a thousand interesting trees for DMs but never weaves them into anything even partially resembling a forest, and certainly doesn't teach a reader how to plant them. For DMs who are already skilled arborists, it might be useful in an encyclopedic sense, but for new DMs my fear is that the focus on presenting information rather than teaching concepts and skills will either be confusing, overwhelming, or simply a turn off.

EDIT: As you can see, the publisher has weighed in, arguing that the book is not intended to serve in a DMG-like capacity, and is instead intended to simply present the Journey rules and the magic items compendium. This is fair! And I do want to acknowledge that the back-of-the-book description of this product agrees with the comment. I think that, in that case, what I'd ask is: why include this material at all, much less as the "introduction" to the book? The first sentence of the book is "What does it mean to be the Narrator?" The first chapter of the book is "Gamemastery Troubleshooting." These might be ancilary to the intended purpose of the book, but front-loading them like that really gives a different idea of the book's goals and intentions, and it preps readers for certain types of content, setting up a sort of "genre contract" that isn't followed through on throughout the book. It would have been nice if the introduction had been more clear about what this book was intended to be, so that the publisher didn't have to weigh in on third-party review sites.

Unlike the 5e DMG, i actually use this book. A lot.

When runnng 5e i'd have four to five supplements and blog posts open to deal with everything outside a dungeon. What is the weather? What happened on the trip? Can we go down that alley? What is on the corpse? Can we sell body parts on the open market? How much? What can we do with all the money we made from selling bulette eggs?

Pretty much all of this is in T&T.

The base 5th edition manual is one of the most utterly useless tree products I've ever held. I've DM'd for years (since 3.5), transitioned to 5th edition, and decided I hated the DMG—it had the magic items I wanted in it, but nothing else I found of value. So I used maybe 10% of that book, ever. With the practical editions in Trials and Treasures, not to mention the glorious expansion of crafting and travel rules (and exploration-based encounters), I could easily see myself regularly using at least 70% of Trials and Treasures. That's a 60% improvement! Even more of an improvement if you compare direct page counts.

This product is really, really good. The journey rules alone are worth it, but there is so much more.

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.

Magic item costs. Encounter tables that include terrain hazards and challenges. A journey system that isnt made trivial by a player's level 1 background choice. All of these are good stuff and there's much more in here.

The only criticism I have about this product is that the journeys seem to be designed with the idea that the players know their destination, so I have to do a hair bit of work to come up with what happens if the characters are trying to find a location in an unknown wilderness. But this isn't enough to diminish my enoyment of the product in any way shape or form.

This is a must have for a Narrator(GameMaster, DungeonMaster etc)!

Information for Troubleshooting as a GameMaster for things like...

• Player Archetypes
• Potential Conflicts
• Problem behaviors
• Safety Tools!

Information about worldbuilding!

• Creating a campaign
• Worldbuilding
• The Planes

Encounter Design!

• How to design encounters that are exploration, social and combat!
• Different elements in encounters like acid, darkness, cold, heat, low gravity etc

EXPLORATION!!!

• A wonderful Chapter on Exploration
• The Journey required
• Navigation and travel pace
• Regions and Weather (different regions with information about what you might find there)
• Encounters you may find
• How to create a region
• Dungeons
• Social Encouters and Travel Scenery
• An entire chapter on exploration challenges of stuff like acid field, to falling net to floor, tsnuami and wild magic zome.

Information on Dieases and Poisons!

Adventuring Rewards

• Lots of good information about treasures and what they entail like coins, gems, valuables, magic items etc.
• Boons and Discoveries
• Lovely amount of magical items like how to create them, cost to buy them, how to identify them.

Lots of cool stuff in this book and is just what a Narrator or GameMaster needs to DM in A5E, or to simply expand your o5e game!

I adore the journeys and exploration section! It definitely made my last session come alive.

Journey rules, a completed crafting ststem that doesn't require "ask your gm [to finish it]" as the cornerstone, exploration challenges your players will get to creatively leverage their abilities into solutions, interesrting diseases & maladies useful to me as a GM & so much more. Others have talked about those in detail so I want to cover a different area important to me as a GM for the rest of this review.

The biggest step up for both GM & players though is that the whole system is designed as a ciohesive whole rather than a bunch of isolated bolt on additions. Anyone who has run d&d5e(o5e) for a while has long since grown familiar with the laundry list of abilities that might as well read "yell skip at the gm when they start talking about this thing you autosucceed at" & similar. When you use this in combination with the A5e players guide all of those kinds of things are tuned to have their own costs to use & to be useful at helping with a problem rather than effectively skipping it.

Journeying and Explorational rules, combined with regions, make the Explorational pillar one to behold, finally restoring the third pillar of D&D. Journey activities give players something to do while traveling, Exploration challenges set up unique activites that dont have to purely be combat. I love the fact that not everything is combat, and they still handle combat very well!

This book has plenty of tables to roll on to make each exploration very uniuque and fun, including Social Encounter tables, travel scenery, weather, region tiers, its really incredible. Combined with long term effects like Fatigue and Strife, it works to make your A5E D&D experience extremely memorable, and is equal parts preparation and improvisation.

Great book.

I give this 5 stars for the Encounter Design, Exploration, and Exploration Challenges sections alone. That's about 120 pages of content that any GM could use - and a lot of it could be used in games that aren't strictly fantasy; the Regions and Explorations Challenges could be put to use even in sci-fi games. there's also 13 pages on worldbuilding, and sections on Maladies, Adventuring Rewards, and Enchanted Gear.