Keith

I'm playing in Dark Echoes, a series of adventures written and published by Rempelstiltskin, so it's very cool to be playing a published adventure with the author running it! The lore is deep; there are just glimpses of a broader world and more stories beyond what we're immediately interacting with, and I really like that. He has excellent pacing and keeps us on the edge of our seats. Get into one of his games whenever you see an open seat; you'll be glad you did!

Kobold Press set out on a quest to make a game that would be independent of D&D's publishers, whoever they might someday be and whatever they might someday do. They also wanted to support the hundreds of books they've written for the fifth edition of D&D. This meant threading a fine needle, and writing D&D that isn't D&D. They succeeded. If you already play D&D5e you can sit down and play ToV right away. Bonus actions, initiative, spell slots, saving throws - the mechanics are virtually unchanged. Major rules improvements are in three places: character creation, monster design, and the Luck system. Your character chooses a lineage (what you were born with), a heritage (what you grew up with), a background (what you did before adventuring, and maybe still do), and a class (your adventuring career). The varied combinations of these make even first level characters a bit stronger and a lot more interesting than D&D characters. Kobold Press has been famous for their monsters for years; literally nothing in ToV is just a bag of hit points. When skeletons launch their fingerbones at you or the mimic blocks your blow with the adhered body of your ally you'll realize you can't take anything for granted! The Luck system that replaces Inspiration is *ahem* inspired. When you miss, you get a luck point. Use luck points to not miss. Simple, elegant, and players manage it themselves, so the GM doesn't need to get involved. ToV is still fairly new, and more player options and adventures written for it are coming soon, but in the meantime all the 5e content you have is compatible. You can run Curse of Strahd with characters built in ToV, and swap out the Monster Manual vampires for the scarier ToV Monster Vault version, and it's still Curse of Strahd. With minimal work you can even take a D&D subclass or race and turn it into a ToV subclass or lineage and heritage. If you know and like D&D, you'll love ToV. If you don't like D&D you probably won't like ToV either. If you're ready to learn D&D, you might have more fun learning ToV instead!

D&D is the second-best D&D game available today. It has been THE roleplaying game since before many players today were born. Reinvented every decade or so, its current (5th) edition is the best known and most popular RPG for good reasons. It's adaptable enough to tell stories in a wide range of styles, though pretty much in one medieval-fantasy genre. D&D does a good job of being accessible to new players and balancing rules "crunch" with roleplaying "fluff". Competing systems have mostly differentiated themselves by being either crunchier (Pathfinder) or fluffier (Cypher, Blades in the Dark). The game that's taken its place as my preferred ruleset, though, has done neither. Tales of the Valiant is a "branch" of D&D5e built by Kobold Press, and it's close enough that you can actually play characters built in either game side by side in the same adventure - but ToV has innovated in key areas, fixing things that were broken, most importantly in monster design. Too many D&D monsters are just bags of hit points; every ToV monster does something special to show us what kind of creature it is. Character creation has more interesting options to diversify your hero, with the interaction of Lineage, Heritage, Background, Talents and Class. Tools and skills see more use in ToV. The games I run today are mostly ToV or ToV/ D&D hybrids, taking good ideas and features from both.

I attended one of Bob's GM Seminars. His presentation was well thought out, his examples were clear, his manner funny and friendly, and he taught on a level accessible to newcomers while also providing tips and tricks that even a veteran GM like myself didn't know or hadn't considered. Although I haven't played an adventure or campaign with him, I can tell already that it would be a blast!

A funny and flavorful holiday one-shot game that also served as a great introduction to both Foundry and Savage Worlds.