A while back I did an article looking at the core competencies of Wizards of the Coast and Kobold Press. I wanted to do this more as a ranking, to avoid outright saying that any aspect of the company’s output is bad. If the company is compelling enough for me to spend time writing about it, I have respect for their work, and have enjoyed engaging with their material.

Who Is In This Time?

While I’m interested in what Cubicle 7 is doing, the work they have done with new classes and monsters are specific to the Broken Weave setting. While they have done some work with the rules around ancestry, a lot of it is tied to the lifepath system in A Life Well Lived. They don’t have much in the way of adventure material. Most of their work has been in that Miscellaneous Rules section, even if they’ve been knocking it out of the park on that front.

The other company that does have enough material to add to this comparison of competencies is EN Publishing, however, I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time with their options to filter them into a similar summary. I’ve spent more time with the character origins and monsters than with the classes, subclasses, and spells. At some point, it’s coming, but there is so much 5e for me to sort through right now.

I wanted to add Ghostfire Gaming to this, because I’ve seen a cross-section of their work. I’ve seen adventures, setting material, monsters, etc. There may be a few places where I don’t have much to go on, but they do have a spread of material that covers almost all of my original criteria, as well as the new categories I wanted to look at.

I’m leaving Wizards of the Coast out of this analysis because we’re kind of in a transitional period with the 2024 rules about to appear. On the other hand, with the publication of Tales of the Valiant, it’s reasonable to return to Kobold Press.

Revisiting a Theme

Compared to my last analysis, I added a few additional categories to the competencies list. Remember, a company can have a lower competency for a subject and still put out good material, according to this analysis. It’s just that something else they work on consistently ranks higher.

To clarify, if a content area appears higher in one company’s list than another, that doesn’t mean that company is necessarily better at that content area. Everything is contextual to that company’s product line.

Content Area

Kobold Press

Ghostfire Gaming

1st

Monsters

Setting Material

2nd

Miscellaneous Rules

Adventures

3rd

Adventures

Ancestries

4th

Magic Items

Classes

5th

Ancestries

Subclasses

6th

Setting Material

Miscellaneous Rules

7th

Subclasses

Monsters

8th

Classes

Magic Items

9th

Spells

Spells

Adventures

It’s interesting looking at how many adventures get published now, and how many have come from WotC, when third edition D&D eventually ceded the field to licensees and third-party publishers.

Ghostfire Gaming

Ghostfire Gaming has many adventure products under their belt, with three campaigns published via their retired Fables line, and the Saga of the Seasons adventure. They also have the Lairs of Etheris collection of lairs for their proprietary Grim Hollow monsters. They’ve developed several products that originated outside of the company, with campaign-length adventures like Dungeons of Drakkenheim and Sunken Isles, and the Quest-O-Nomicon adventure anthology. When they engage with setting content, they do so in a meaningful manner, which isn’t something WotC can always claim.

Kobold Press

If you want a campaign-length adventure, WotC dominates that category. Kobold Press has one campaign-length adventure in Empire of the Ghouls, and potentially a themed set of adventures in Tales of the Old Margreve, which don’t all have natural transitions. Kobold Press is great with lairs and short adventure PDFs, but they haven’t provided much in the way of connected narratives recently.

Ancestries

A few years ago, we saw a major change in the 5e SRD space. To move away from stereotypes and biological essentialism, designs started to change.

Ghostfire Gaming

Ghostfire Gaming has probably taken the most interesting road with its Ancestry design.  They broke down traits into the smallest bits possible. Then, the individual traits were organized under Combat, Exploration and Environment, and Roleplaying traits. Existing ancestries are shown to illustrate what the “average” dwarf or elf might be, but players aren’t constrained to only picking those traits. Depending on the setting, adventurers could be reassembled from the magic of creation, be raised in another ancestry’s culture, or have diverse families. GMs can modify the number of traits PCs start with, and they can specify how many traits can come from each category.

This facilitates setting details. In the Raider’s Guide to Valika, for example, there are traits from traditional ancestries, but there are also Clan traits, to show the diversity of people in Valika, and the primacy of Clans over cultures traditionally associated with different ancestries. I don’t know that this is the single implementation that I would like to see in every 5e SRD game, and I need to see it in play more to see how much the system can be abused by those players prone to do so, but between showing the baseline ancestry and adding new traits in subsequent products, it feels robust, and I appreciate that Ghostfire created this approach, and has kept it across the Arora, Aethereal Expanse, and Grim Hollow product lines.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press has also come up with a solution that I like in structure. What was race is now split into Heritage (physically inherited traits) and Lineage (the culture in which the character is raised). This is a strong baseline for design, and mechanically, I like a lot of what I’ve seen. Thematically, I wish things were a little different. Tales of the Valiant creates the broadest archetypes they can, and in some cases, it feels less satisfying to me than a more specific implementation.

For example, the Tome of Heroes introduced a fire-resistant species of dwarf who don’t have darkvision due to working around forges and brighter lights. They also know minor magics related to repairing items. When this was translated to Tales of the Valiant, the Fireforge Lineage had skills and proficiencies in crafting, and the cantrip provided in the previous version, but the lineage is the standard dwarf, which, among other things, means that a Fireforge Dwarf has darkvision.

I appreciate the utility of the design, but decisions like this define all differences between dwarves, elves, or halflings as a function of Lineage. The design is so utilitarian that halflings and gnomes are different categories of Smallfolk, Aasimar and Tieflings are differentiated by a decision point in the Syderean Heritage, and Beastkin cover catfolk, minotaurs, avians, or lizardfolk. It makes for very flexible rules, but also makes a lot of distinct species less “visible” in the rules. I also wish that some of the lineages had more texture to them. They work well as broad archetypes, but I’m not sure I feel a deep roleplaying connection to the differences between a Fireforged Dwarf and a Stone Dwarf.

What I hope to see is something like a hybrid of WotC’s solution, where, to use Kobold Press examples, a Shadow Fey heritage is different from an Elf heritage, because there are physical differences and inherited traits distinct between them, but if the Player’s Guide pattern continues, I’m expecting a “Shadow” heritage to be applied to elves. Functional, efficient, and less flavorful.

I hope that when we see more setting-specific material, we will see a more individualized implementation. My ideal example is still Lazy Wolf’s 3rd party Black Flag product Banner of the Bull, which presents lineages that are firmly rooted in the Thrones and Bones setting. It’s very easy to picture a dwarf in this setting raised among Norronians, or a Huldrafolk changeling raised by Norronian parents. It’s a great proof of concept that I don’t feel that Kobold Press themselves have fully realized in their products. We haven’t seen much in the way of setting specific material from them since Tales of the Valiant launched, and this could change.

Classes

What constitutes class design varies a bit between these companies, from complete redesigns of core classes to additional class features, to brand-new classes.

Ghostfire Gaming

There isn’t as much to measure in Ghostfire’s design of core classes, but the one core class we’ve seen them build from the ground up has been both mechanically solid and thematically exciting. The Monster Hunter hasn’t reached its final form, but it’s already managing to do new things, like relying on opportunity attacks for their extra damage output, while still drawing from a well of D&D options that feel adjacent to how other classes function in the game.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press is in a strange position. Because a lot of the design adopted conventions like concepts introduced in the earlier 2024 D&D playtest material, a game that was created to carry on the tradition of the 2014 game may end up resembling the 2014 rules less than the 2024 version of D&D. Because of the standardization of subclass levels, the game requires more compatibility work to implement standard D&D subclasses, and even the previously published Kobold Press subclasses.

That means the game design needs to be compelling enough to play a game like, but not 100% compatible with, the current version of D&D. One of the strengths of Kobold Press as a 3rd party publisher was the ability to mix and match with D&D, which didn’t require their customer base to be dedicated to only their products in order to get the most utility for their games.

One issue that tends to be invisible from only looking at the classes is that the change to broad instead of class-specific spell lists alters some classes more than it appears. The bard, as an arcane caster, turns into a musical wizard rather than being able to be the class that can “almost” fill in for a cleric as the primary healer. Class spell lists tell stories and reinforce themes, and bards no longer lean heavily on spells that deal with sound, light, and creation. It can feel a little like “why is this wizard able to inspire people?” Paladins and Rangers both get more spells that are direct damage and area attacks, which may look appealing, but confuses what the class should be doing, i.e. hitting or shooting things. The broad spell lists also create issues whenever options open. For example, if a wizard takes the 10th level feature “Rite of the Source Master,” they can pick another source of spells, meaning that from that point on, they can start adding in spells that heal or raise dead, but by 10th level, that can be a dramatic shift in the character’s role.

Making ritual spells into something separate from standard spells, rather than a subset of regular spells, is an interesting idea, but functionally, most classes still get the same number of non-ritual spells. This can make the variety of spells you can take too narrow, since you’re not spending your spells known feature, for example, on ritual spells, but you’re still getting ritual spells from your number of rituals known.

While there is a clear theme/story to each of the spell sources, functionally, putting spells into these broad lists makes it evident that the game’s themes start to suffer the further you move away from Arcane/Divine. Looking at the individual sources, Primordial, for example, feels like half-Arcane, half-Divine, even if a lot of it is plant, animal, and elemental focused. What that means is, story wise, you may want your wizard to seem like a Merlin-style magician/druid, but if you want the most versatility, it makes a lot more sense to pick up the Divine source.

In the playtest material from WotC, some of this was addressed via limiting spell schools within a source for different classes, but that gets to be a heavier cognitive load. By adopting the broad sources without those limitations, however, the spells a class can access have an even harder time presenting a theme, at least outside of the wizard, cleric, or druid classes.

I like the idea of fighting styles being something that uses a bonus action, framing them as something a character actively does, rather than passively has. That said, there’s a few that let you double your proficiency bonus on attacks. I’m already a little concerned that the proliferation of Expertise skews the assumed difficulty of ability checks, but creating a similar effect for attack rolls seems like it could start to cause problems with assumptions brought over from D&D 5e. The class design also brings over a prescriptive issue from the 2014 rules. Classes can have wide open access to broad spell lists, but rangers can only be two-weapon fighters or archers, and paladins can’t be a duelist using two weapons.

There is another potentially invisible problem. Looking at discussions with KP staff, the rogue’s sneak attack and the paladin’s smite were meant to only be usable once per round on that character’s turn, but the wording is the same as the 2014 rules, i.e. once per turn, with no other qualifier. The main area you can find that hints at this is the 15th level ability of the Enforcer subclass that does let you sneak attack on an opportunity attack. This is supposed to be addressed in upcoming errata, but it feels like this could be a shock to the system to someone that knows how things work in the 2014 rules and sees the same wording here. That could mean that people that get used to a playstyle for a few months may need to unlearn what they have learned.

Aside from the spell list and the constrained fighting styles, I really like the design they put into the ranger. The class abilities describe a class that is good at scouting and hunting. Even though they are spellcasters, I want the ranger’s survival abilities to feel like a learned skill, not a supernatural affectation, and this class accomplishes that. It also shifts a Hunter’s Mark-like ability into a class feature, rather than gating a core aspect of the class behind spell slots.

I like the general idea of the Mechanist, although given how they address the idea of a class gifted with imbuing magical traits to items, Mechanist sounds more technological than some of the class features imply. I like the feel of a melee combatant that can represent a master elven bladesmith that is so talented they can make weapons of supernatural power, or dwarven weapon masters that have learned the secrets of dwarven crafting passed down from their ancestors. What I’m saying is, this feels less techno-magical, the way the Artificer does (even though I do like the Artificer) and may be easier to slot into settings where techno-magic trappings feel out of place.

In addition to the classes, we saw in the Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide, we also have two other classes to look at from Kobold Press. The revamped Deep Magic volumes each presented a new class. Those classes were the Theurge and the Witch. One broad observation is that while the Theurge and the Witch were stated as being compatible with Tales of the Valiant, neither class has the standardized subclass levels presented in ToV. They also don’t have the 10th-level boon choice worked into the new version of the ToV classes. The Theurge gains subclass features on 3rd, 6th, 10th, and 14th level. The Witch gains subclass features at 1st, 6th, 10th, and 15th level.

The Theurge represents a scholarly spellcaster who can learn cleric and wizard spells. They must split spells they can put in their book between the two class lists, and they only get new spells when they level up, i.e. no scribing spells into spellbooks when they find them. They do gain the same number of new spells to add to their libram as wizards get when they level up. That’s one of the tricky things about the Theurge, it’s generally better than the wizard, with the only balancing factor being that they can’t add extra spells that they find.

The Witch is interesting in that it’s almost a “reverse bard,” able to assign a hex die to an opponent, and getting similar hit dice, weapon, and armor proficiencies. They can infuse a spirit into a signature item that modifies their spellcasting or adds additional abilities to them. Their spell list is like the bard’s, in that it’s a mix of thematic wizard spells and another class, although they lean more druidic for their spell list, versus the Bard’s clerical flavoring. Something that fits into a similar spot, but does it in a different manner is a good starting place for a class, and I think the witch worked out well in this case . . . but a lot of that is predicated on the class spell list being thematically appropriate, which may not translate if the class is ever converted to ToV.

Magic Items

Kobold Press has more examples of magic items, from their various supplements and an entire sourcebook dedicated to the subject, but Ghostfire has added a lot of items into their adventures.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press put out the Vault of Magic, which introduced a ton of new magic items. These are fun, and many of them have usable story elements, and that book also introduced something that makes its way into the core Tales of the Valiant rules, Fabled magic items. This introduces something that really needs to be a standard in 5e SRD games, magic items that level up with the character that owns the item. There is also a new system for pricing magic items. We’re told this doesn’t mean you should be able to find magic items for sale all the time, but sometimes, it would be nice to have pricing, and pricing that is based on the utility of the item, not just the rarity. Magic items also represent an aspect of Tales of the Valiant that can still be easily ported between the 2014 rules and ToV, and the pricing also works across games.

Ghostfire Gaming

Ghostfire Gaming hasn’t had any dedicated magic item products, and I can’t say that I’ve looked through everything they published, but I am familiar with the Fables line, and the magic items introduced in those products. The real strength of those items is that those items were tied into the setting and themes where the items appear, such as the magi-tech spy gear in Agents of the Empire. In some cases, this makes them less portable, but does a good job of using the magic items to contribute to storytelling.

Miscellaneous Rules

This is a huge catch-all, but I wanted to address the kind of design that fills in a gap or provides more structure to something lightly touched upon by the 2014 rules. Miscellaneous rules can be tricky, because it’s very easy for them to push into implementations that drift from anything that resembles the 5e SRD. Innovation is good, but if you drift too far, the more your game plays in the “drift,” the less it feels like the game you play outside of that miscellaneous rule.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press has been knocking it out of the park in this area. The downtime rules introduced in the Tome of Heroes created a new paradigm, based on those downtime activities that required a roll, which then rewarded a player with varying numbers of resources. The additional boost to this concept is that you may be working towards a larger goal (writing a piece of music, for example), but you can spend the points you are accumulating on things (gain advantage when interacting with people that could be a patron of the arts) that may give you a short term benefit before you pay for the more expensive payouts for the downtime.

The Tales of the Valiant downtime activities, which more closely resemble the 2014 rules, still have a more active roll involved. For example, you aren’t just spending time training for a tool or a language until you hit a threshold. You can learn more quickly with a good roll during your downtime.

Each of the tools and kits have a standardized presentation that suggests what ability scores work with the tool kit, what’s in the kit, the function of the tools, and any rules associated with the kit, or introduced by the kit. This was a huge improvement over the 2014 rules, which felt like they were just shifting some things from being called skills, to being called a tool proficiency, with the actual kit not providing much in the way of utility.

Tales of the Valiant introduces Weapon Options, which are like the Weapon Masteries that the 2024 WotC rules are introducing. I can’t really comment on those, other than to say I’m a little worried that it’s going to complicate combat. What I appreciate about the Tales of the Valiant rule is that, in most cases, you are choosing to perform the special action instead of damaging a target. That means they won’t come up every turn, and they may be used more as a support move for another character that requires a risk/reward assessment.

Luck is another new rule that I think has turned out very well. Replacing Inspiration with a more free-flowing currency, something that can accumulate, and be used in ways that are more likely to be beneficial, is a great module to swap into the game. Being awarded on a failed roll helps alleviate frustration, and awarding more than one point of Luck makes it more useful than Inspiration as a narrative/roleplaying-based reward.

Ghostfire Gaming

Ghostfire Gaming has introduced a lot of new miscellaneous rules, some of which landed for me, though not all. Transformations are a big win, although I would love to see some of these consolidated, with some tweaks and clarifications. It might also be worth it to see if you could introduce a “non-Transformation Transformation” for the people in the party who aren’t slowly turning into a creature of the night. Transformations are another example where Ghostfire has been producing rules that are also good at reinforcing setting information.

I also appreciate the Exploration and Discovery rules introduced in Arora. I like that it can facilitate hexcrawling, but also funnel things towards a few interesting options, and creating a currency to use for exploration makes the process feel a little more structured. It makes individual exploration rolls feel more meaningful because they are providing you with something for which you must plan your spending.

I’m still considering the Raiding rules from The Raider’s Guide to Valika. I appreciate the procedure of it, and the way it reinforces that raiding is something that requires preparation and planning. I’m not sure how much I want raiding to be a regular part of one of my games, and while I think the resolution rules are interesting when not using assault raids (where you run standard 5e SRD fights to represent key moments of the raid), I need more time to process them.

Advanced backgrounds feel like they are trying to provide too much character development off-screen. Advanced weapons don’t work for me. A better sword that you aren’t proficient with until 3rd level and costs ridiculous amounts of gold to give you something in 5e to spend your money on feels clunky. It’s just inflating numbers, especially when the only gateway to being proficient is gaining 3rd level. I’d be a bigger fan of having special training that costs X amount and lets you bump up your damage die by one step, for example.

Looking at Fables, some of the rules around Arcanotech were fun, and played with the idea of dangerous cutting-edge technology, but I wasn’t a fan of the seafaring rules that were introduced (and reintroduced) in the Aethereal Expanse adventures and campaign setting. Rather than layering additional options onto the DMG’s thin vehicle rules, naval combat uses targeting dice and a different hit point scale, and different movement rules. The mettle rules are interesting, but also feel like when used, they replace existing rules, like making basic Charisma checks with or without certain skills.

Monsters

Everyone publishes monsters, although Kobold Press definitely has a head start on Ghostfire Gaming in this regard. Still, they have a full monster grimoire in addition to the monsters that appear in their adventures and setting books.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press has managed to put out a wide range of monsters, from serious to humorous, and across all kinds of monster types, as well as a range of challenge ratings. Kobold Press monsters tend to hit harder than WotC monsters, which is a virtue in high-level play, but can be a bit difficult to account for with monsters on the very low end.

Kobold Press is one of the few companies to delve into a new area of unique individual monsters, adding Fey Lords to similar beings like Demon Lords and Archdevils. Archfey are already referenced in D&D, but there are few examples in D&D proper. These characters are a welcome addition.

Kobold Press’ newest monster offering, the Monster Vault, redesigns many of the core creatures from the 5e SRD. These redesigns are less radical than MCDM’s Flee Mortals! Most are very similar to their D&D 2014 versions, but with tweaked hit points, damage, and often additional options like bonus actions and reactions. I’m not a fan of some of the structural changes to the stat blocks, particularly the realignment of resistances and immunities, and the lack of hit dice to facilitate dialing hit points up or down, but those aren’t major impediments to using the monsters in a 5e SRD game, and these monsters are portable to games even without adopting Tales of the Valiant on a wider scale.

Ghostfire Gaming

The biggest downside to Ghostfire’s monster output isn’t the monsters, it’s actually an aspect of one of the company’s strengths. Monsters tend to be highly thematic. That means that if you want to pull a few monsters from the Grim Hollow Monster Grimoire for a dark fantasy game, you have some good options, but they lean heavily toward the horror side of things. That’s not bad, it’s just not as versatile as a broader bestiary

Similarly, the monsters that appear in the Aethereal Expanse are great, if you’re dealing with a campaign that introduces sailing the Astral plane. Arora is good at introducing draconic monstrosities and post-apocalyptic nightmares. In other words, good, solid content, tailored to the setting for which the monsters were created.

Setting Material

I completely understand the concern over creating a metaplot for a setting, providing a lot of superfluous details which are hard to weigh against other details, and creating long, detailed timelines. That said, trusting that people “get” the D&D vibe without providing actionable content tied to setting details isn’t my favorite way to go.

Ghostfire Gaming

While I’m not equally excited to engage with all of the settings they have published so far, the way Ghostfire presents settings is unafraid to make that setting feel distinct, to have a personality. Grim Hollow has distinct nations, organizations, ominous creatures, and a unique divine set up. Arora is very clearly a post-apocalyptic setting where individual regions are ruled by specific draconic rulers, with warped magical regions with their own quirks. The Aethereal Expanse synthesizes Astral sailing with a more typical paradigm of the high seas. Valika, while a subset of the Grim Hollow setting, is very much a Norse-inspired location that has distinct clans and threats that blend dark fantasy horror with Norse epics. Their settings are, indeed, settings, and not just proper names to use as a home base during an adventure.

Kobold Press

Midgard is a setting that made itself distinct by being a world that allows for the full range of D&D styled adventures and campaigns, while also introducing some darker eastern European influences, a little bit of a clockpunk aesthetic, as well as the detailed Southlands, which does feel like it’s being careful enough to introduce cultural elements into a fantastical setting without leaning too hard into stereotypes, although it’s not perfect in that regard.

At times Kobold Press introduces interesting new creatures but they aren’t integrated into Midgard. Recent sourcebooks that could be aligned with Midgard have become more generic toolboxes for genre elements, like Wates of Chaos, which could have detailed the Wasted West of Midgard’s setting, but instead creates a toolbox for building your own version of the Wasted West or another apocalyptic fantasy setting. At the very least, I would have loved a treatment for the Northlands like the Southlands Worldbook.

Does that mean Kobold Press has demonstrable evidence that generic toolkits are better for business than their own setting material? I can’t speak to that. If that’s the case, I can’t argue with their direction.

The Labyrinth Worldbook, the next product destined for crowdfunding in the fall, is detailing a wider planar setting. There are factions, and different groupings of worlds, but it’s also painted in broad strokes. Given that WotC is leaning into “the multiverse is the setting,” this feels like another instance where Kobold Press is entering “we’re doing what they’re doing, but slightly different” territory. The peek we’ve seen of the setting leans into factions, concepts and themes, and away from what was a grittier, slightly more grounded approach to setting details we received in Midgard.

Spells

This one is going to be quick.

Ghostfire Gaming

There are spells in various products, but there haven’t been as many books that have a significant portion dedicated to lots of new spells (keep in mind, I’ve not seen some of the developed settings like Drakkenheim). That’s really the only reason this one isn’t higher on their competencies list. Plus, everything has to rank somewhere, and being last in this case doesn’t mean being bad.

Kobold Press

Kobold Press has published big books of spells, notably Deep Magic, which was then adapted to Deep Magic Volume 1 & 2. There is some great, imaginative, evocative material in those books. There were also spells that weren’t balance well against baseline 5e SRD spells, from cantrips on up. The updated volumes cleaned up some language, and made some of the spells more easily understood, and sometimes answered questions introduced when the original spell came out. Unfortunately, many of these changes don’t address the power level of the spell.

There is also such a flood of new spells that the differences between spell lists starts to get lost. There are so many offensive spells that it becomes harder to read a spell and tell that it is a wizard, cleric, or druid spell. It’s too much of a good thing, all at once. There is also something lost from the previous Deep Magic. There were suggestions in that volume that only people with certain feats or subclasses may have access to spells associated with different themes, which helped reinforce that the material should be introduced in bite-sized chunks.

One of the best things introduced in the Deep Magic volumes are the variant spells. Different versions of commonly used spells to refresh the concept, looking at spells like raise dead or fireball. There are also tables to modify the existing spells, beyond the variants. I would have loved to have seen more content like that.

Subclasses

Subclasses have been one of the areas that I feel have evolved a lot since the 2014 rules. In more recent sources, like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, subclasses feel like there was a strong alignment between the story of the subclass and the abilities the subclass granted. This is compared to some of the early 2014 subclasses, which may have had a theme, but often interspersed thematic elements with the utilitarian. Those features were nice to have but didn’t feel as connected to the theme of the subclass.

Ghostfire Gaming

Ghostfire subclasses have the same combination of general utility and setting focused options. There are a few that get a little wild for me, but wild has personality, and I would rather reject something interesting that doesn’t work for me than to not have much of a feeling about a subclass at all. There are also a lot of subclasses that have dialed-in story and options, in a manner that doesn’t feel too wild, and also remains true to the concept of the subclass. There are several that interest me across various sourcebooks, like the Path of the Wronged Barbarian, College of the Blade Dancer Bard, Veiled Guardian Rogue, and The Reaper Warlock Patron from the Aethereal Expanse book, and the Circle of Nightmares Druid, Way of the Silent Scribe Monk, and The Psychopomp Warlock Patron from Arora. I also appreciate that The Reaper and the Psychopomp tread similar ground but tell the same story with different mechanics.

The Raider’s Guide to Valika introduced martial maneuvers, combat abilities that can be learned and triggered by spending a set number of points from a pool. My personal preference is to keep to the more standard X per short or long rest, with a potential means of recharging by using a different resource, but preference doesn’t preclude interest. I know all of the subclasses got martial maneuvers because the Valikan clans are a martial society where even wizards are going to learn to gut someone in a fight, but having maneuvers for every subclass was a little overwhelming, and I was more comfortable with more weapon focused classes using these maneuvers. I know, I can be stodgy sometimes. The Carrion Raven, North Wind, and Dark Envoy are subclasses I wouldn’t mind taking for a spin, personally.

I’m not a fan of the Oath of Incarceration Paladin, mainly because it’s a theme that is very close to the political surface in the modern zeitgeist.

Kobold Press

Remember when I mentioned utilitarian class features that fit a theme, but don’t engage with it? Without being too dismissive, a lot of Kobold Press subclasses have fit this paradigm. They are safe, and they are useful, but they don’t provide me with as much roleplaying grist, based on the specific class abilities, as I would like.

The Player’s Guide has a limited number of subclasses that it can present for Tales of the Valiant, and one of the Wizard options, in the core book, is focused on using cantrips better than other wizards. It’s a mechanical option that you may want to pursue, but it feels less evocative than I would like.

While I may have had reservations with some of the spells in Deep Magic, some of my favorite subclasses produced by Kobold Press have been the subclasses based on the magical traditions presented in those books. A lot of those have a personality to them that really defines your spellcaster in terms of that tradition, and I wish some of the weirder, more bombastic subclasses had made it into the Tales of the Valiant book instead of what feels like the “obligatory” mechanically sound options.

Moving Forward

I’m really interested to see what the 2024 rules look like, and how all of these options compare after we see the big picture. 5e SRD fans have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to material we can draw from, and while some sources are easier to mix and match than others, so much of it works together that players and DMs have an exceedingly full toolbox. It just doesn’t hurt to know which tools you want to pull from what section.

If you are planning on taking a look at some of these products for yourself, and you don’t mind helping me generate enough to buy more games to do more reviews, you could consider visiting DriveThruRPG via these links:

Ghostfire Gaming

• Grim Hollow: The Campaign Guide
• Grim Hollow: The Player’s Guide
• Grim Hollow: The Monster Grimoire
• Arora: Age of Desolation
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim
• Sunken Isles
• Quest-O-Nomicon

Kobold Press

• Tome of Beasts I
• Tome of Beasts II
• Tome of Beasts III
• Creature Codex
• Tome of Heroes
• Deep Magic Volume 1
• Deep Magic Volume 2
• Guide to the Labyrinth
• Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide
• Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault

Lazy Wolf

• Thrones & Bones: Banner of the Bull

https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/07/03/revisiting-5e-srd-competencies/

#5eSRD #AetherealExpanse #Arora #DD #DD5e #dnd #DnD5e #DungeonsDragons #GhostfireGaming #GrimHollow #RaiderSGuideToValikan