Level Up A5E is that game where I can appreciate the design of 5E, thank the community that came together to fix it, and have nothing to do with the current owners of the trademark. I am sure Tales of the Valiant will be the same.
Bad owners can own things, and the community can move on with a new version. I am reminded of numerous open-source projects that were forked and split off from owners that few liked like the Open Office to Libre Office split a while back.
5E as a rules system? It's fine. It works. You can't get mad at it; it is just a variant of the d20 implementation. It uses a double hit-point scale and scales damage at higher levels on a curve. This is math and probability; you are weird if you get angry at that.
The Wizards' implementation must be fixed; multiclassing breaks the game and is too easy. That I can criticize. The previous books introduce the same problems the 2024 edition is trying to resolve. And the company sucks.
If the 5E framework is your thing, you have many options. The two best are Tales of the Valiant (coming soon) and Level Up A5E (here today). With these two games, you can de-colonize Wizards' from your 5E game; sell all your 2014 books and don't look back.
Also, ignore 5E YouTube; they will be a bunch of idiots for the next few months hyping the 2024 books, a purchase you will likely regret. Also, watch out for anti-hype, those YouTubers who are entirely negative until it comes out and then are pleasantly surprised and tell you to get on board!
That said, my shelf of 5E books is completely clean of Wizards' filler, and I am sorting through my 3rd party collection. I used to have Wizard's created books up there, and I felt terrible about my entire 5E collection. I needed to move on from the system entirely.
Then, I put all my Wizards' books in my "sell boxes" and kept the indie 5E books, with LU A5E as my core set of rules. The entire shelf brightened up, and I started to look forward to the adventures I could have. The baggage was gone. The rules and system seemed innocent and free of the last year's mental weight. The creativity of indie designers could compete on a level playing field of ideas, and there wasn't this guilt of 'is it official?' hanging over the system.
If it is all unofficial, it is all official.
I am adopting a few more core books for my de-colonized 5E game.
One direction D&D has been taking in recent years is the normalization of Tieflings as some 'cosplay human' race. You see this in Baldur's Gate 3, where they are pastel-skinned humans with horns that talk funny. It sucks, it takes the notion of evil out of the game, and it is lame. This is the blood of demons and Satan himself. Make it mean something!
The above book is one I have, and it is a more gamified version of corruption and evil than the others I have. The corruption of the soul happens in levels, and you gain power (and drawbacks) as you advance. I love this whole "Satan as a Sith-lord vibe" and that the spilling of demonic blood and infernal magic will create most monsters in the world. You can't adopt the monster because it is cute; it is an evil beast spawned from unstable Hell magic.
This is the more 5E-ish book that feels more suited to lighter-hearted play, where players could be evil, and the sacrifices are not as great. It does have a few excellent subsystems for Sins and Corruption that are gamified and fit in with the vibe I want.
The Book of Fiends is written by the author of Shadow of the Demon Lord; the corruption systems here are more "metal" and "absolute" in their implementation. This is a one-way ride, and you get no power from corruption. The demons here rock; they are pure fire and brimstone and make good heavies. Good enemies make excellent campaigns.
The enemy is ourselves, our weaknesses, and our sins and shortfalls. It is a cozy game where players are perfect, pandered to, and infallible can't explore those concepts.
And the direction Wizards is going in reminds me of AD&D 2nd edition, the so heavily censored version of D&D that I wondered if this was B/X and aimed at kids. The 2024 version is going in that direction, with cosplay tieflings that aren't demons, fully dressed church succubus (who aren't even in the demons section anymore, what are they?), and safe-for-kids content reviewed by people who get triggered by mere words.
I am old enough not to waste my time with a kid's game. And honestly, I don't know who they are writing D&D for anymore, and I doubt they do either.
I have the three excellent Tome of Beast books from Kobold Press, and they work with 5E and ToV, though I suspect more monster books for ToV will be coming out. These three books give me over 1,200 extra monsters.
The A5E monster books give me the basics, and I have the Kobold books, which will provide me with more than I will ever use. And I have zero monster books from Wizards on my shelf.
I am not hurting for monsters.
Nope, no shortage of monsters here.
Okay, that is now officially too many monsters. Over 3,000 in this collection? If I fought one a day that would take me ten years to get through them all.
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