Building the A5E Library, Part 1

So, now what?

The next logical step is figuring out which books to keep and which go. The easy first eliminations are the 2014 5E books and expansion books. Tasha's, the boxed collectors' sets, the three core books - goodbye. I hope someone who still plays the 2014 version gets good use out of them, and since they are going out of print, some collector picks them up and is happy.

I will never have PDFs for the Wizards' books, so what use are they? At least with Indie 5E, I can own PDFs and put them on my phone to read while away from my library. If I can't get a PDF, I don't want it, and a physical book alone is meaningless.

I am de-colonizing my 5E game from any Wizards content. Level Up A5E is superior as a core system in every way. I will not use Wizards content, adventures, expansions, settings, gods, or anything else they put out. There is so much great stuff in the third-party community, and all you need is a neutral base system.

And we come to a crossroads. I have a lot of Kobold Press 5E books, and they are very nice. I was saving them for Tales of the Valiant, but I am tired of waiting and may just use these for Level Up A5E. My feelings on ToV have soured a little now that I have seen some playtest materials. There is a lot of 5E in ToV without many improvements; it feels like a rewritten 5E emulator with a luck mechanic replacing inspiration. There are likely balance changes and tweaks to classes here and there, but I have not seen enough to get excited.

ToV is on par with LUA5E, but the latter goes much further and makes a lot of quality-of-life improvements appealing to old-school gamers. ToV feels like a tweaked 5E. LUA5E is an entirely new rebuild anchored on the three pillars of play: social, exploration, and combat. I enjoy the old-school style and characters balanced around the three pillars of play, so I will enjoy the LUA5E game more.

The only way ToV wins is if it delivers a far improved play experience over 5E and makes a serious effort to support the pillars of play. From what I see in the alphas, LUA5E has twice the special abilities as ToV when you get through character creation. ToV is simpler, whereas LUA5E is more in-depth. We will wait and see.

Will Midgard be my home campaign, even though this will be the ToV world?

I don't really know at this point. It is a fantastic setting with history and even appeared in our 4E game. Even with the adventures, the base 5E version is still version-agnostic enough to work well. However, I may do my own hex-crawl world since I am a little tired of huge setting books.

I am leaning towards keeping the Kobold Press books.

I have a few books that expand spells, monsters, and magic items like the above. These I will keep.

Books like Tome of Horrors 5E are keepers, too. While the base LUA5E monster book has many familiar 5E foes, the product identity ones that Wizards owns. I will not miss any of these. Goodbye! I never used them that much in 4E or any of our 3E games. The new 3rd party monsters are unfamiliar, new, and a better challenge than 50-year-old D&D retreads borrowed from better fantasy books.

I also have the big four mega-dungeons for 5E: Barrowmaze, Highfell, Archaia, and Darrowdeep. These are keepers and are decades of play. These four books could anchor an old-school campaign world.

The Amazing Adventures 5E book is one I saved from a sell box. While I have better pulp games than this, crossover characters from pulp worlds into my new 5E world may find this book handy. I know; check out Everyday Heroes. That game is supposed to be a better modern version of 5E, but this is what I have now. Troll Lord clearance-aisled these books post-OGL to clear their stocks of potentially infringing content. A fun 5E pulp game released at the worst time. 

That is another reason to never look back.

The 5E Tales of Arcana Race Guide? Keep, I love this book; even though the power level of these races is a step above anything in 5E, even the humans are pumped up. For memorable NPCs, this is a keeper.

So far, I have over two boxes to sell and the best-of-the-best remaining. I still have the 5E sci-fi books to sift through, though. More later.