Kickstarter: Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/tales-of-the-valiant-game-masters-guide-5e/

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide Kickstarter launched today, and it is worth checking out. They are past $150,000 on the first day, which is a great start.

Here is a quote from the FAQ on what is in the book, and the highlights are mine:

What is the difference between the 5E DMG and Tales of the Valiant GMG?

The big-picture goals for Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide are:

1) Provide extensive guidance on organizing and running games, including:

• How to find players

• Dealing with scheduling

• Running games for different personality types

• Creating effective session notes

2) Present expanded rulesets to enrich the elements of the game that your table cares about most:

• The Advanced Combat chapter includes rules for running colossal monsters, creating minion-versions of monsters, staging mass combat scenarios, and using a brutal injury system to track damage.

• The Advanced Exploration chapter includes rules for running exploration as a hex crawl, constructing chase encounters, and playable resource scarcity options for survival-style gameplay.

• The Advanced Social chapter contains rules for an attitude system to combine roleplay with rolling and reputation mechanics to track PC influence with factions.

• Other highlights include rules for sentient magic items, magic-item crafting, firearms, siege weapons, skill challenges, monster harvesting, and MORE!

3) New options for mechanics introduced in the Players Guide and Monster Vault. These plug-and-play options include :

• A huge selection of curses, diseases, hazards, and traps to raise the stakes of your encounters.

• More vehicle stat blocks of every type—including suites of burrowing, submersible, and flying vehicles!

• Expanded lists of poisons and poison-types

• Random treasure tables and random magic item tables to generate killer rewards quickly—all using treasures from the Player’s Guide.

• Random encounter tables for every environment and tier of play—all using creatures from the Monster Vault.

4) An extensive suite of homebrewing tools. These tools provide specific and actionable guidance whether you want to modify existing options quickly or build brand new options from scratch. Best of all, we show you every step of the math we use to build our obsessively engineered monsters!

And quite a lot more. See the sample PDF for a complete table of contents.

Wow, a few thoughts:

• Minions? 4E mechanic, love this.
• Brutal injuries? Advanced wounding and grim & gritty games are possible. Nice.
• Hex crawls plus survival gameplay? Be still my OSR heart.
• Monster harvesting? Very interesting.
• In the GMG preview, they have monster templates to change things up, like undead owlbears.

Looks good! Loving everything I am seeing here, and this is an A5E replacement contender now.