Sunday, June 29, 2025

Mail Room: Advanced FASERIP

I hold this game in such high regard, as we loved the original game it was inspired by in the 1980s. This game takes direct inspiration from the best superhero game ever made, and the second edition is even cleaner, better balanced, and play-tested than the original. The PDF is free, too, meaning anyone can play.

The art was redone with public domain comic art, which is terrific. The vibe is 1950s comics, and it fits the genre and game, giving it a very iconic comic look that is not modern but could be. I love that era—the cars, the gangsters, the post-war culture, and the entire feeling of the time. There is no reason why any modern team could not be reimagined there, and some of the best retro graphic novels for DC were amazingly set in that era.

A 1950s X-Men would be closer to the war that inspired them and to their origin in the 1960s. Something tells me this is where they belong. Even a 1950s Avengers would be fresh air, Cap would not be on ice, and Stark could be in the defense industry, making Cold War weapons. Many of the DC heroes were in their primes in this era.

You can play at any time, too; this is not limited to the 1950s. This system easily adapts to anything from cowboys to sci-fi, anywhere from the 1850s to the year 3000 and beyond. Lower the power level one step and have an Indiana Jones pulp adventure game.

The game is a simple beer-and-pretzels system. In five minutes, I had it figured out, with character creation. One book with a free PDF, and you are good to go. This is like the Star Frontiers of superhero games.

Highest recommendation.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Just Play...

I go on YouTube and see all this content farming, and a few say, "What happened to Tales of the Valiant?" They moan on and on, and farm clicks off of painting it one way or the other.

It is here.

Just play it.

I don't need any other reasons than that it is a better-designed 5E and does not come from Wizards.

There is another reason that hides under the surface. Stale product identity has saturated D&D, and this huge Planescape-era framework hangs over them and their creators like a wet towel. They want to do what every creative company does and "reimagine it all," and you have another side trying to shoehorn in Magic: The Gathering lore. It feels like a huge mess and a pile of decades of legacy products. Everything Wizards does will be compared to TSR and Gary. They will never live up to impossible expectations.

I loved Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms.

Decades ago.

Like a classic rock song I have heard over and over, those wear a little thin, and I want to create new worlds again. Yes, I love all that, the Tomb of Horrors and all the classic adventures. I even love the 4E setting. But D&D has this massive scaffolding of villains, planes, worlds, settings, personalities, special named wizards, NPCs, video games, and tons of other stuff they need to work with to deliver anything. As a DM, I need to be current on the lore and have that all in my mind.

Tales of the Valiant has no Wizards IP.

It is a clean, fresh start.

They go back to the DMG-era "here is a list of historical gods you can use," and the entire three-book game feels like a throwback to classic AD&D. This is a clean-room 5E with no nostalgia, reimagined things to make you angry, reverence to a cartoon, lore you need to keep in mind, NPCs you have to know, settings you have to take into account given the planar framework, lists of product-identity gods, lists of demons and devils longer than a book on Satanism, and all this other stuff that bloats and clutters what should be a game about your imagination and ideas.

That is precisely what I want. I don't want to be sold on the TSR-verse again or Wizard's 3E, 4E, 5E, and 5.5E reimagining of ground that better writers have already tread. The last D&D setting Wizards made that was original and not TSR was Eberron. That was a fantastic setting, a precursor to Paizo's OG 1e Golarion (pre-retcons and sanitizing), and I was sad to see it abandoned.

Eberron also broke with the past, a more generic world where the gods of Greyhawk and the Realms did not fit in. It used all the pieces, but the legacy product IP did not feel at home. I did not see the classic D&D bad guys fitting in all that well. I suspect the lack of nostalgia and dependence on copyrighted IP killed it. Dark Sun was the same way, though Dark Sun had a ton of TSR IP to farm and is a stronger setting for Wall Street to nostalgia mine.

ToV doesn't even try to cover the Midgard gods. The game isn't trying to sell you on anything but itself, and being a blank canvas for your imagination to create a world and story upon. The monsters are all wonderfully generic and setting-agnostic. The game gives you a huge box of toys, and dares you to build a world out of them. You do not have to worry about legacy settings, planes, places, people, games, or anything else. You are not being resold the beholder or mind flayer as the villain again, because it is better to use copyrighted stuff instead of a generic monster as a bad guy.

Your world is yours.

Your planar structure is yours.

You do not have to worry about decades of legacy content.

This is beautiful.

2024 D&D is full of fluff and bloat. The books are not cross-referenced, and there is too much fluff art. They are more collectors' items than gamebooks. ToV is a tighter game, with room for my ideas instead of someone else's or trying to live up to a past that the current writers will never live up to.

At that point, I gave up, kept what I loved about the past, and created my own place using those as inspiration. I used a game that gave me the room I needed to create my story instead of forcing me to tell someone else's.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Tales of the Valiant, Player's Guide 2: Final Day!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/players-guide-2-new-power-for-5e-and-tov-players/description

It is the last day to get the Player's Guide 2 for Tales of the Valiant. This does not ship until January 2026, so if you want early access, jump in now or find yourself waiting!

There has been a notable upswing in support over the past day, so I hope they can reach the $250,000 stretch goal. With over 3,000 backers, this is also a strong indicator of support for the system, particularly among those seeking Open 5E games as they try Daggerheart and transition to a longer-term support version of 5E.

The link is on the sidebar!

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Excitement, People Leaving, and Other Games

The actions of Wizards during the OGL and subsequent mistakes the company made drove many away from either the game or the hobby itself. Wizards "fired" a lot of customers during that time, and many of them are not interested in staying in the hobby, or even staying with any version of 5E that "looks and feels" like the game.

Shadowdark and Dragonbane took many players.

Other games absorbed the rest.

Those who remained in 5E stuck with D&D, and a fortress mentality emerged to prevent player loss. Many in that community won't consider Open 5E alternatives to the game since it reduced the mythical "people they have to play with" - even though D&D is a majority of the market still, and losing half of their players would not significantly impact people's "ability to find a game" online. Locally is another matter.

The MCDM RPG and Daggerheart's expansions have yet to drop, and they have built-in fan bases to sustain them from their creators' popularity. If you are in the D&D content creator space, you either take your fans and write a new game, or continue watching interest drop and stick with the largest market.

I like Tales of the Valiant. I have five shelves of third-party books for 5E that I won't use with D&D 5E or 2024, but they work just fine with ToV. There is a ceiling for ToV hype and excitement now, pushed down by YouTubers who dissed the game as 'nothing new' - but that is precisely the point. We need a system that will remain in place, just as it was in 2014, and be solid with an open and perpetual license going forward.

For me, D&D is not on my shelves anymore. I have better.

And it has to be more than "the Creative Commons" version of the game, which does not even include enough subclasses and character option support to even be considered a game. New players need books and adventures to buy, and a system to gather around. When D&D 6 rolls around, I doubt it will resemble 5E much at all, and 2014 compatibility will likely worsen. I have 10 years of 5E books from 2014-2024 that I still want to use, and ToV is the off-ramp I need.

Granted, I am currently simplifying my 5E library, and I will only keep the best.

But I get why people leave 5E, and I have even found happiness in other games. GURPS remains one of my go-to systems for fantasy and science fiction, still. GURPS is the easiest path to a "realistic, gritty fantasy" that I love experiencing, where 5E tends to be larger than life with overpowered characters. In GURPS, my characters must survive in a world that seeks to wear them down and kill them, fighting against the elements, nature, monsters, and a social world that is just as deadly as the wilds.

In 5E, I can't specialize and build into survival or social skills like I can in GURPS. You get one skill for each, and if you are proficient, that is as good as it gets. Skill rolls in D&D are terribly simplified, and the game is primarily for combat encounters. You can't specialize or buy deep into a skill. Your character is stuck on rails as they level. If I am good at the Survival and Nature skills, that is it, I am good at it all.

Typically, in 5E, one skill roll sets up a camp, gathers food, firewood, shelter, and everything else. It does not matter, and in terms of "playing an adventure," you will want to aggregate it all anyway.

In GURPS, I can specialize in fishing, hunting, trapping, shelter building, weather sense, scrounging, tracking, plant knowledge, and numerous other skills that turn survival into its own game. I could always create a Survival! (bang skill) which covers them all, but I prefer forming a team of experts and having this in-depth list of skills that transforms the parts of the game I love playing into a deep, meaningful, and enjoyable game of skills and subtasks.

I can also improve in areas where I am weak, such as shelter building, which becomes critical for survival, so I am investing points in that. If someone else wants to be the fishing expert while I'm over here building a shelter, then we can share the load and better utilize our time. You can't do that in D&D. You are either good or not, and there aren't many ways to remedy that without multiclassing and taking the whole thing (and potentially messing up your build).

GURPS is more of a simulation. While hunting for berries, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to make more skill rolls to stay out of trouble (or find something new), or encounter a goblin looking for the same thing you are. Yes, this can happen in 5E, and it should, but the game does not train you in that style of play or gamemastering.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Ashes Without Number: Shipping Soon

I just received an update that the Ashes Without Number books are printed and will be shipping soon. In a week or two, they will be here!

Kevin Crawford is one of the most generous creators in the business, making his SRDs available in the public domain. This isn't like the D&D Creative Commons license; this is a game the world is free to use and create from.

I am looking forward to this one!

Monday, June 23, 2025

Mail Room: ACKS II

ACKS II is the Final Boss of the OSR. 

It does in three books of a thousand total pages what 5E does in three shelves of books. I have never seen anything like this game. The tomes are weighty and substantial. The page stock is thick and luxurious. There are rules for everything, from scrounging coppers to buy torches, to staging a naval invasion after a fleet battle, and laying siege to the evil lands of the beast-men armies with your allies. After you knocked everything down, you rebuild, create new cities, and establish taxes and defenses. The game takes you from listening at a dungeon door all the way up to a full-blown game of Civilization in a fantasy setting.

The art is glorious.

The setting grips me like the epic myths of old.

The classes and systems are so well thought out that they put many games to shame.

There is no OGL or SRD content!

The setting is superior to any I have ever seen: a Bronze Age, falling empire, marked by strife and chaos, where land is taken and made your own. It is a world of lost ruins, savage battles, and ancient sorcery. It screams at you to be a hero or become a villain, as the game makes no moral judgment for you.

This is your path to walk.

This is not cosplay Renaissance, planar hopping, Hot Topic meets steampunk, dyed Supercuts hairstyles, anthropomorphic animal masks, funny voices, devil-in-appearance only, gunslingers and goblins, clockwork androids, or modern theater gaming, where nobody wears helmets. The game is more diverse than D&D because it invests in its setting and presents a rich tapestry of cultures and peoples. You don't lose anything by cutting out all the modern cartoon flash; you gain more by getting a game that asks you to put yourself in the world with your people.

I am glad they threw out the OGL and SRD content, as it takes this game from "oh, another OSR set of rules to play not-D&D with" to its own thing. And the game rises like a phoenix from the ashes. It is a game for mature minds, without slipping into the salacious or tawdry, like an epic drama meant to make us reflect and take seriously. This is the good stuff.

I have had a friend mistake the deluxe, leather-bound game books for a set of encyclopedias or a bible set.

No, that is a game.

What sort of game is it?

This is a sandbox game, where the story comes from what you do, not narrative tools, pools of meta-currencies, or random drama dice. The story is you living or dying, the struggles of watching a friend perish, the glory of finding a roomful of gold, and the parties you throw in remembrance of those who passed along on this hero's path you all walk along. This is growing into a mighty hero, kicking in the doors of a fort of beast-men slavers, and freeing the town they hold under chain and terror. And this town of grateful souls heals, rebuilds, and becomes the heart of your dominion.

That is your story.

You don't need toys or tokens to tell it.

You need bravery, determination, wits, timing, and luck.

Your heart needs to beat like the drums of destiny.

It is a game that is equal in weight to Adventures Dark and Deep, a game I consider to be a definitive classic Greyhawk experience, but it comes along and does more with more. Where Greyhawk is content to be first-edition plus more, ACKS II is the game we were promised by the first edition but never truly got.

You start off as a lowly, first-level hero, crawling in a dark hole in the ground, and can die in an instant.

You end up playing a 4X game, building cities, clearing the land with your armies, forging alliances and getting backstabbed, and conquering the world.

Then, you birth heirs, and start all over again.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Tales of the Valiant is a Reset

Many of my third-party 5E books exist to address issues with the original D&D 5E edition. We have "fix-it" ranger and monk subclasses everywhere; they are even in Tasha's. We apologize, but please either pay us to fix it or pay someone else to do so. We promise we won't do this again! Not until we remove humanoid monsters from the 2024 Monster Manual, and, oh, oops! Did we do it again? I am sure a third-party Kickstarter will be along shortly, and you can pay seventy dollars to fix our omissions.

I have shelves full of books that the cottage industry of third parties makes to fix Wizards' mistakes.

But I am finding a cleaner, more focused game is more fun. As a result, I am putting many of my third-party 5E books away and keeping only my Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant books as my supported system. ToV gets better the less junk you pile on it. I like additional subclasses, but not every one in every book is a great fit. Many of them are random junk.

I look forward to the Player's Guide 2 and the rest of the game's curated subclasses. We have the core selection in the base books, but these are the expanded roles that many feel the game is missing. With PG2, we will have the complete game we expected at release. That Kickstarter wraps in a few days, so if you are interested, this is a good time to jump in and support Open 5E. 

ToV is my reset game for 5E. There are plenty of other new systems coming out, and even Shadowdark, but only a few games directly replace 5E for me and feel like the clean reset the game needs after 10 years of expansions and patching. 

I have seen a character designer fully decked out with 2014 character options in 2014 D&D, and it is a mess few can navigate. There are so many options in there, the few players I put that character designer in front of quit rather than design a character. I thought I was giving them options! They took one look and bailed on playing D&D. We should have played Shadowdark instead.

The more I cut my 5E library down, the more compelling the game becomes. The more I focus on ToV, the stronger the game gets. My A5E and 2014 D&D books are in storage, and I don't even care about "losing the monsters" because they are 2014 versions and weaker, and I am tired of the Wizards product identity. I want to explore new lands and battle new monsters.

Books with extra monsters? Unless they are Kobold Press' "extra hot" versions of 5E foes, they will be weak, and those need to be put away. This really simplifies everything.

Even random campaign settings are finding a spot, or being put away, so I can focus on just the one I want to run. I don't need everything; I just need the best of one thing.

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Mail Room: Labyrinth Hardcovers

I got my two Labyrinth hardcovers today, the World Book and the Adventure Book, along with the early backer coin, which is very lovely. I like the Tales of the Valiant universe setup; it is one reality, one universe, one place, and it is connected by pathways "between space and time" called the Labyrinth.

There are no planes. There is no plane walking. There is no "Prime Material Plane" with infinite universes.

Where the gods live is a realm beyond anyone's ability to get there, and it keeps players from hunting and killing gods and elder demons. They can project a form into this world, which may take hundreds of years to reform, but you aren't killing them permanently.

Thank you for a sane universe setup, Kobold Press. Planar campaigns have ruined my campaigns for over 40 years, and it is way past time this was put to a stop. Planar campaigns killed D&D 4E for us, as every one of the iconic worlds, including the forever utterly destroyed Forgotten Realms that collapsed the entire Underdark and cratered the world, were turned into level 1-10 "MMO starting zones" before the planar adventures started.

Come to think of it, we loved D&D 4E, but what D&D 4E did to the established campaign worlds was to completely destroy them all. The changes were too significant, as the shoehorned-in races into the worlds that never belonged there, because the game did not want to mess with the "MMO character creation" of the core books. They advanced the plots through terrible retcons and world-spanning changes for the sake of the "rule of cool."

Every world was destroyed by Eberron's design sensibilities. I loved Eberron, but only there, not everywhere.

Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant get it right. You get one universe to play in, as many campaign settings as you can imagine, but only one universe with no planes. Where you are right now is important, and it means something. You can't just "colonize the planes" as if it were some place with infinite land and resources, building utopias "just because" and seemingly having infinite resources to support city-sized populations "because of magic."

I hate this notion that magic is free to use, without an ultimate cost or price. It is "running up the National Mana Debt" clock, getting infinite free resources, food, goods, and anything else you want, "just because I want it." I love a yin-and-yang to magic; what you get is what you must pay. Sustain a population on magic? Prepare to have them start to change and mutate after a few generations, as those chickens come home to roost.

Nothing is free. Farm the land and live a sustainable existence, just like how this world works, and you will be safe. Live off of magic, and that karma debt keeps piling up every time you get free stuff. Even in Tales of the Valiant, this will be a theme for me. On the small scale, you will be fine. Try to live off magic on a civilizational scale, and you are asking for trouble, like, on a Pompeii or City of Sodom level of trouble.

Just because one character can do it does not mean magic is the enabler of free everything in a society. If it scales to industrial levels, it isn't magic. Yes, part of this is Eberron's problem as well, and it sort of started the "free civilizational magic" thing. Looking back, Eberron had its flaws.

This is why Dungeon Crawl Classics is the best magic system in gaming. You will eventually pay a price for everything. Even divine magic comes with a cost.

The Labyrinth books are cool, and they are an excellent framework to stitch together campaign worlds and settings without needing to drag Heaven, Hell, the gods, all the demons, elemental planes, a Great Wheel, various neutral places nobody cares about, spoke-like structures that don't really have a concept in reality, an axial hub that stretches the metaphor, cities with billions of people living there like this is a usual place, and all this planar baggage we need to go through just to go visit another world.

We even get more character options here, which is always welcome and tides us over until the Player's Guide 2, which is in its final days as a Kickstarter, and please go support that to keep Open 5E alive and well.

Highly recommended.

Midgard's Orcs

Orcs are only mentioned in Midgard under the section of the White Goddess, the albino female Orc goddess, a mention under the Hunter god, and another mention of "deep orcs" in another chapter. How they are used here, where they are in the world, and how prominent they are is up to you.

Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault, page 270.
Copyright © 2024, Open Design, LLC

Tales of the Valiant introduces Orcs as a player race, and keeps the Orc entry in the Monster Vault. They retain their brutal, tribal, warlike look, making the game better than what we got in D&D 2024. What did we lose? We lost most of the description of the race being warlike, brutal, violent, and worshipping dark gods or demons. That description block is an OSR standard, and it feels like the designers at Kobold Press are "leaving it up to us."

Do we want the "noble savages" of World of Warcraft, or the Orcus-worshipping, evil brutes of the OSR? Are they allowed as player options in every game? ToV does not give you direction on allowing or disallowing lineages (races), so this is all up to the group. I appreciate being given the choice instead of having one forced on me.

The Orcs still have savage looks and are not "softened up" with CalArts' rounded features, doughy looks, and pudgy faces. They are not sloppily transplanted onto another culture like in D&D 2024, which is insulting. They look amazing, and the art reflects their sharp, brutal, and rough lives. This classic fantasy art communicates a lot about them; for some players, it will be why they play them.

I swear, people have lost their imagination somewhere along the line, and everything has to be a symbol or something in the real world. Orcs have their OWN culture. Just look at World of Warcraft if you want an example, but even that isn't the end-all since they got sloppy with silly and stupid pop-culture references.

Respect Orc culture like you would any other. This is not hard.

These orcs look cool. They have their own "thing" going on. If they look cool, I want to play them and use them.

This is a common theme in ToV, where D&D explicitly tells you what to do and actively eliminates options. D&D also uses its art to preach its designer's values to you. ToV will present you with everything and let you decide for yourself. The art stays mostly neutral. Kobold Press is a pretty progressive company, so this permissiveness is a pleasant surprise. Designers deserve praise for "staying out of the way" regarding group preferences instead of trying to socially engineer your gaming group.

I get it; sticking with D&D and "ignoring the designer's stupidity" are what everyone does.

But I stand up for the better game that respects my choices.

In Midgard, I am free to use orcs however I want. Although they are not mentioned much in the book, I can insert them wherever I want, create a land with them like something out of World of Warcraft, and do whatever I want, however I want, and make them as old-school as I want. I can make one faction the noble savages, and another the demon-worshippers, and have the two sides fight.

ToV is superior to D&D 2024 in this regard. Orcs are still in the game and are still listed as monsters.

Even better is the designers respecting the group's choices.


Thursday, June 19, 2025

Midgard's Dragons

"All dragons seek to rule their provinces and to carve out power, the better to amass treasures. As their willing servants, dragonborn, kobolds, and drakes are rewarded with lands and wealth of their own. The dragons of Midgard have no interest in sitting in a lonely cave, counting coins. Their greed makes them ambitious, and that ambition makes them extremely dangerous." - Midgard Worldbook 5E, pg. 9.

I like aggressive, territorial, faction-building dragons, making them active participants worldwide. They seek to bully and take over humanoid tribes and groups in their area, especially using their power on those of dragon blood. D&D lost the plot when it removed humanoid monsters from the game, and lost what makes the higher-order enemies fun. Dragons that can't threaten and dominate the local intelligent evil monster factions become weak-sauce, high-hit-dice-in-a-room, combat filler.

With no evil factions of monsters that unite in like-minded groups for survival, every humanoid monster joins civilization, and a "points of light" campaign becomes impossible. D&D 2024 wrecks the world model built since the original D&D game started, and replaces it with a maddening neutral perspective where good and evil do not exist, and no intelligent creature should be judged.

D&D 2024 makes crafting adventures by the beginning GM much harder by limiting options and forcing flavorless role-based templates onto any humanoid creature. This renders them into generic enemy types, devoid of any culture, mannerisms, identity, and special traits of their kin. By trying to be overly sensitive and projecting others onto these kin, they bleached them into blandness and removed them from the game.

Typically, the community will step in and fill the gap, likely involving an expensive "Humanoids of D&D 5.5E" Kickstarter campaign to patch D&D again with another hardcover. It is a good thing, but I am tired of it.

D&D 2014's dragons felt more isolationist to me, more of your typical "dragon in a cave on a pile of treasure: than a scheming, plotting, conquering force that takes allies and makes them do their bidding. Midgard's dragons are brutal leaders who seek to take land, crush opposition, corrupt those they can't destroy, and build a lair as big as they can fly across.

Even ToV's dragons in the Monster Vault feel more like conquerors than hoarders. They are closer to Midgard's dragons in spirit. They are also wonderfully diverse and different, with green dragons being serial alchemists and experimenters. I can see them working alongside evil forest folk in their toxic experiments and strange concoctions, almost creating large "chem labs" in the forest that pollute and poison the woods. These dragons destroy the land as much as they kill their enemies.

I can see a red dragon burning all around them, creating massive forest fires to drive out those competing for their land, clear burning forests and hills, and the land being scarred and blackened by their presence. All dragons are destructive forces of nature and change.

You would never write such things if you were a lesser writer too afraid to trigger readers, which is the case with many new games. These companies can't hire creatives who would dare write something so horrible, and the sensitivity readers would scrub it clean for those who may be triggered by such calamities. Poisoning a forest and causing massive wildfires? That hits some too close to home.

Nothing good comes out of a system built on fear.

To which I answer, this is why we need heroes. We need heroes to stop the wildfires, save the forests, and stop the tribes that serve these beasts. There is a larger metaphor there that can't be told with D&D anymore. Everything in the world and the game is a call to action. The monsters reflect some of the horrors of this world, and give us a chance to conquer them.

These dragons are different and unique. I am still "unlearning bad D&D habits" and beginning to see things anew.

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Mail Room: Labyrinth Worldbook Hardcover

 

I have a shipping notification for the hardcover of the Labyrinth Worldbook. This should be here shortly.

Kobold Press is launching its core book Kickstarter projects this year and has all the momentum. 

Life is good.

Daggerheart is the Beginning of the End of D&D

With all the top talent leaving Wizards and D&D, either a new team is being brought in for a radical redesign, or D&D is being prepared to be sold. I feel the former is far more likely than the latter, with some mobile-game-focused design team being given a shot to turn D&D into the next Monopoly Go.

There is a point where "what you are doing" is no longer resonating with customers, and the IP moves farther down the corporate pachinko machine, shifting from "this is our pride and joy" to "make it make money." The team gets a lot less freedom to "be creative" and "true to the legacy" the lower the ball gets in the machine.

We are entering a phase where niche games emerge, excelling in one or two areas better than D&D, which attempts to please everyone. As a result, we are seeing large sections of the player base peel off and play other games. Some of these niche games go on to be massive hits, and our first two are Shadowdark and Daggerheart.

The MCDM RPG (Draw Steel) is coming for the mechanics crowd here in a little bit, and I suspect that will be the third harbinger of the D&D apocalypse. The PDF release for this is scheduled for next month, June 17, and it will go to the printers in August.

Daggerheart, and to a lesser extent, Shadowdark, are giving people a reason to leave D&D for good, migrate campaigns to, and change everything about their hobby. Daggerheart is the "escape hatch" for the live-play and storyteller crowds. Those who are more fans of Critical Role than D&D will flock here. I am happy for them; this is an evolution of that playstyle and crowd, and it provides them with a place where they will feel comfortable. D&D was never an excellent fit for that style of dramatic play, and this frees D&D up to play to its strengths, rather than pretending to be a storyteller game.

Shadowdark is the escape hatch for the dungeon crawler and old-school fans. Both of them together give plenty of reasons to leave D&D. Shadowdark is fantastic, the game is very concise and tight, distilling the experience down into pearls of wisdom rather than page after page of filler text that ends up telling you to "make it all up yourself" or "just use a published adventure" like D&D does.

If you genuinely love 5E, the system, you should be with an Open 5E version by now. If you're still sticking with D&D, then you're more a fan of the IP than the game, or you just don't want to pay money again for something that you already have and works, and I don't blame you for that. Perhaps your characters are all locked up in some D&D-only VTT, and changing would be too hard. Maybe you don't care about your D&D games that much to even consider switching, and you are waiting for the next big thing to come along.

Many are sticking with D&D 2014, so 2024 will likely never recover or sell as well. 2024 had its chance on release, and it did not sell as well as hoped. There is not going to be a "second wind" like D&D 2014 had in the Pandemic, since Critical Role has moved on to its own game. Hoping for a live play show to save D&D 2024 now is like living in 2020. D&D 6E is far closer than we think, especially with all these team changes at Wizards.

My bet is it will be advertised as a "hybrid, always connected" D&D experience, where you can "bring D&D on the go, and always be playing." I can see it now, "You never have to leave the D&D world!" Don't laugh at me. I have been in corporate boardrooms. The above statements look really good on the whiteboard. These statements will drive teams and goals, and drive millions of dollars in investments.

 

Tales of the Valiant is my "Long Term Support" (LTS) version of 5E, and I put all my other variants in storage, including D&D 2014. I gave up Level Up A5E, something I liked for its design, for ToV, since ToV has far better support in their store and on regular Kickstarter projects. There is a point where you need to throw in with the strongest version and patch in the changes you liked from other variants.

My 2014 D&D and A5E books are in my closet. I am happier focusing solely on Kobold Press releases, as well as my "best of the best" third-party 5E books. My 5E library is shrinking, but I am much happier and I feel the need to play again.

There is still a crowd of us who like the 5E mechanics and have libraries of 2014 books to support. ToV will be the LTS game for those of us who choose to still play with 2014 and want to see that supported for the next 10-20 years. Then again, 5E as a game may trail off very soon (like D&D 3.5E did), with the release of these huge competitors, and the eventual release of 6E.

MCDM RPG (Draw Steel) is also on the cusp of release, and that crowdfunding was huge. We are about to see another major player drop.

The weakness of the 2024 D&D release means those who want the throne shall rise. We are witnessing the fracturing of the current D&D player base into four distinct factions: those focused on storytelling, dungeon crawling, mechanics, and long-term support. There will always be the D&D 2024 die-hards, those who are deeply invested in the settings and IP, but many who came in for other reasons are beginning to move to games that better fit their interests than a "do it all" game.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Daggerheart: Hope & Fear

Some say players accumulate hope much faster than the referee does fear, which could be a huge problem and destroy any challenge as players "pile on" with buckets of hope points. As a referee, going into a boss fight with a few fear points could mean the encounter would be a cakewalk for the players.

I feel part of this comes from not knowing the game, and referees feeling they need to "spend fear" to make a move, which the rules are clear on:

GMs also make moves. They should consider making a move when a player does one of the following things:

  • Rolls with Fear on an action roll.
  • Fails an action roll.
  • Does something that would have consequences.
  • Gives them a golden opportunity.
  • Looks to them for what happens next.

After the GM's turn is done, the spotlight goes back to the PCs. 

- Daggerheart SRD, page 37 

Rolls with fear or ANY failure (RWF/F)? The GM gets the spotlight. The rules say, "consider making a move," which is bad advice. Make a move! Do not slack on taking enemy action when ANY player RWF or fails. If you are not forcing enemy attacks each and every time a player RWF/F, you are gimping your fights. If that purple die is ever higher than the yellow, someone in the party is getting whacked.

While RWF gets the referee a fear point, a failure does not, but both give the GM a chance to make a move. Take them. Don't be soft on this, since this will be the majority of the opposition's action budget.

How do you spend fear?

Spend a Fear to:

  • Interrupt the players to steal the spotlight and make a move
  • Make an additional GM move
  • Use an adversary’s Fear Feature
  • Use an environment’s Fear Feature
  • Add an adversary’s Experience to a roll

- Daggerheart SRD, page 64

By spending fear, you can steal the spotlight, but you should be getting it on 50% of player rolls anyway, just due to chance. Also, remember, while resting, the referee accumulates fear. Spending fear to steal the spotlight should be a last resort, or saved for killing blows or other moments. The clever play is making a second move (or more) by spending a fear point, which means multiple enemies go on your spotlight turn.

Do not give the players any slack. Attack every chance you can get.

And don't burn your fear resource a few encounters ahead of the boss fight.

However, do not think that the only time the GM gets the spotlight is by spending fear. You are missing a massive part of the intended action economy. However, if people are correct and fear points are scarce, then using an adversary's special attacks and environmental features will not be feasible. The challenge will be negatively affected by a random factor.

I wonder if it was a great idea to narratively limit the referee's power using an artificial resource. The referee is busy enough running Daggerheart and keeping the puppet strings, making things work, and spending "referee points" to "make things happen," when in other games the referee can simply "just do it anyway," seems strange. It makes the game harder to run, and now the referee must balance encounters, run the narrative, communicate the environment, manage NPCs, reference rules, run combat, and manage a resource pool.

This is where the Cypher System excels. As a GM, I am not spending pool points to trip a boss's special attack; those are written into the monster. Monsters have their "boss attacks" used as GM Intrusions. I am not spending a limited resource to make a boss attack, as I can just call for a GM Intrusion for that monster, hand out XP to the players, and make it happen. Yes, I am handing out "free XP," but that XP can be handed back to refuse GM Intrusions, including boss monster attacks.

How many GM Intrusions do you have? They are infinite, but you are handing out XP with each one. With Player Intrusions, the players need to spend an XP to trigger them, and the referee has the final say (which protects the narrative and balance of the game).

Cypher's GM Intrusions are not "referee points." This is what being a referee is all about: rewarding players who take on extra adversity, while giving them more than enough XP to deal with it and push back.

Cypher System's narrative economy is easier, cleaner, and does not rely on tracking resources and generation by the players. It does not depend on random chance, and players do not make rolls to generate referee currency. Referees have no currency in Cypher; heck, they don't even have dice.

You call for a GM Intrusion when it is narratively correct, see if a player spends XP to refuse, and if they agree, you hand out the XP and tell them what happens next.

You keep playing.

The players are the only ones tracking pools, XP, health levels, and resources.

All a referee focuses on is the story.

Dragonbane is also great when it comes to boss monsters. They roll on a random chart every time they act. This can be solo-played very easily. You don't need narrative pools, just your imagination. This is a more traditional game than Cypher System or Daggerheart, but it also shows that you can use a random system to trigger boss attacks and have the game work correctly in the narrative.

I don't need a fear point to activate a dragon's breath weapon; all I need is the fear of not rolling it again.

Daggerheart remains a solid game, boasting numerous innovative mechanics. Other games excel in areas like narrative play. Others are more mechanical. One is not generally better than the other; each must be considered in light of a group's preferences, play style, and whether the game assembles enough interesting elements to make it compelling.

For mechanics, it is Dragonbane for me.

For narrative, it is Cypher System.

Daggerheart, I need to feel out whether this can be played solo at all, or if it's more of a group experience, like Pathfinder 2. Daggerheart is more of a collection of good things. If all these blend well and appeal to you, then great! This is your game. If other games do things better and would be a better fit for groups that like different styles, I will say so.

Be cautious about relying solely on limited reports of play and forming your opinion of the game based on them. Some groups could be playing the game wrong, report something wildly incorrect, and you will get a group of people online adopting false information as their opinion.

Play the game, and make up your own mind.

I return to the Daggerheart SRD, a free resource, and since it lacks art, it can serve as a more effective "quick resource" for rules. The page numbers in the index are significantly off in the current version, and I hope they will be corrected soon.

Yes, I can see how "going into a boss fight with limited fear" can be a problem, and the game tells GMs to spend "fast, often, and big." Also, don't let players make rolls for every little stupid thing. If the die roll has no meaning or impact, just "say they do it." Move the narrative along, and don't roll for every silly thing! This will freeze pool generation, but it will still reach the parts of the game where it matters when it is being generated.

If there is no consequence of failure, don't roll.

Also, think twice before setting a target number of 10 or lower. Do you really need to make this roll? Just give it to them! Most of your critical die rolls should be a target number of 15 or higher.

The action, "walk quickly across a narrow beam," is rated as a difficulty 10 agility roll. Most of the time, if the players were not under threat, had no arrows flying at them, and were not in a hurry, I would never roll for that. Yes, there is a "consequence" of "falling into the river," but I will ask you, "Is that really a consequence if nothing is going on around them?" 

What does it matter? Someone gets wet?

So what?

No real consequence, no die roll is needed, no hope and fear generation; move on, I do not care.

Do not get "die roll happy" with this game. Be stingy when you ask for dice rolls. Keep them essential and impactful.

Also, there is this rule in the SRD:

If there’s a rule you’d rather ignore or modify, feel free to implement any change with your table’s consent.

- Daggerheart SRD, page 3

If your bosses are getting rolled over, simply consider adding a rule where the referee receives a d4 of fear when a boss encounter starts. If the players agree, then the problem is solved. They don't want cakewalks any more than you.

Monday, June 16, 2025

The Air is Out of the 5E Market

I hear reports of DM's Guild creators' monthly revenue dropping to 1/10th of last year's monthly revenue. Part of this is due to the release of the revised 5.5E edition, which led people to buy that instead of add-ons for what they already had. Additionally, buyers are reading the new books. They are either not interested in add-on content or are concerned about compatibility, which is causing them to hold off on add-on purchases.

Reports of D&D 5.5E not flying off the shelves to the level of a Daggerheart are also concerning. Daggerheart is selling like hotcakes, with physical books and cards sold out, and it is being well-received across the hobby. Daggerheart is the narrative heir to the D&D throne, and the best place for D&D's current crowd of 'story gamers' to migrate to.

People are still waiting for a 5E Kickstarter to reach $1 million, which some say has not happened in a while.

Even the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 is a slow build towards the stretch goals. I love this game; this is my final version of 5E, and the level of support and compatibility is excellent. Going forward, ToV is my 5E, and I am done with Wizards. 

The air is out of the entire 5E market. The market is still huge, but it is slowly dying. 5.5E was the "mid-cycle console refresh" that never lived up to the first console's initial launch, since people already "have that" and won't move unless something new is brought to the table. Those who feel "left out" by the mid-cycle refresh walk away and try new things, opting to skip the investment in a marginally better experience and deciding to wait for an authentic "next gen" experience.

Daggerheart is the Nintendo handheld that comes along and takes the steam out of the mid-cycle launch.

This has likely sealed D&D 2024's fate as a minor release and pushed up the release date of D&D 6E. A company that is close to Wizards can't "print a fantasy game with cards" and perform better than D&D. The logical outcome of this is, "D&D needs a new version, with cards, today!" I give 2024 D&D three short years before it is replaced by the new, "card-based" D&D 6, which will be as well-received as D&D 4 was, since that was card-based too. I doubt their current team knows how to build a game like that, as there seems to be a severe skill shortage within D&D's design team.

And you see this "experience game" design all across the hobby these days, role-playing games being shipped as boxed sets with tons of components (thanks, tariffs), and a "toyification" of the entire hobby.

Shadowdark has the rules simplicity that D&D needs, and this game has also taken a good amount of air out of the 5E market. It also plays like a board game, almost like a D&D version of Monopoly, with tight, phased movement on the map, every turn. I can hand someone a character sheet, and they can learn the game in a few minutes. It doesn't require a high school education to understand Shadowdark, and that is a good thing since your target market gets much younger.

D&D 2024's 200-buck buy-in, with over a thousand pages of reading, puts the game in the collector's market. It is a luxury item, a book of art that also serves as a game. Both Shadowdark and Daggerheart stay in the sixty-dollar range for the complete game, and Daggerheart even comes with cards.

Shadowdark is like that console with the great JRPGs that hardcore players play on to get their fix, and ignore that mid-cycle refresh since it offers nothing new. In Shadowdark's case, the fix is almost a horror-game level of tension and tactical immersion.

With top designers of D&D jumping ship and heading to competitors, this feels like the Pathfinder 1e era all over again.

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Off the Shelf: Numenera

In Numenera, characters explore the ruins of the past and discover wonders to help build a better future. - Numenera Destiny, page 4.

As I'm pulling out my Cypher books, I will bring Numenera out of storage and onto a shelf for a while. This is an extraordinary, speculative, almost "lost Earth" sort of setting, a billion years in the future, where the world (and universe) has suffered multiple civilizational collapses.

This is one of the best science fantasy settings out there, not necessarily a Dying Earth dystopia (but it can be), but more of a strange, nanotech, super-science, living world, nightmare, bio-goo, AI-infused, mutational, psionic, oddly technological, energy-manipulated, genetically engineered, dimensionally travelling, broken networked, lost stellar, future world filled with who-knows-what and what-the-heck-is-that everything and strange we-have-no-clues.

The setting can be post-apocalyptic, quasi-medieval, weird horror, or a hopeful new world. Or all of them at once. It's similar to Gamma World, but not exactly. Gamma World is more D&D in technological dungeons with gotcha technology that can kill you for no reason, plus robots and mutants. Additionally, the setting assumes you are rebuilding society, rather than accumulating personal power.

There is an open question: we are in the Ninth World, the previous destroyed eight times over, so what is the point? Considering this world may never be destroyed again, that is the hopeful outcome you will be a part of. If not, you have a hundred million years to figure that out.

Numenera is more of a massive setting with any flavor you want. Start small, initially, with just a town and some ruins, and gauge your interests and those of your players. Figure out the ruins, the local bad guys, some locals, maybe some points of interest, a few places down the road or coast, and the stories you want to tell. Start with more minor, personal conflicts, and then gradually grow your scope.

Give the players a few memorable and worthy places and NPCs! You could create a town and place a holographic cabaret at its center, making it a popular spot for both travelers and locals. This place has been here since the city's inception, and no one knows how or why it works; it simply seems to function continuously. After you get player interest, draw them in with a few mysteries and unexplained messages that the holographs begin to give the players, sending them on quests around the area. Perhaps it will stop one day, and the characters will need to fix it or replace the power source. Let them make it their own. If they love the place, send them on quests to repair, upgrade, or improve it.

In these post-apocalyptic settings and games, there is often "no reason to care" about a harsh world with no hope. Numenera gives you plenty of tools and reasons "out of thin air" to get players to care and hook them in. Use them. Combine fantasy and unexplained technology. Give them a mental cry for help. Have monsters form out of goo. Let them discover an android trying to paint a painting with no brushes, paint, or canvas, and not realizing there is nothing there to work with. What happens when the characters give the android something to paint with? Can they talk to it? Will it respond if it finishes a real painting?

This is a better game than Gamma World, as it offers an extraordinary experience. It fills that "mutants and mayhem" itch, while presenting a system of rules where anything can be created by the referee, since the underlying Cypher System is capable of inventing almost any challenge or monster out of thin air. We don't need "product identity" since we can create it ourselves.

Gamma World tends to be either "primitive villagers in a high-tech nightmare dungeon" or "a medieval world with mutants and plant people visiting the ruins." There typically isn't a "bigger picture," and the game trends towards the D&D "increase my personal power over all else." Gamma World is also very loot-oriented. Once you get that 6d6 laser rifle and a stock of power cells, a set of good power armor, and a few energy grenades, you are set to start fighting warbots.

This is also the point at which many campaigns typically end. Back in the day, we were kids, and we did not have many more stories than "get loot, get power." Numenera is a longer-term campaign, more focused on narrative, worldbuilding, exploration, and story than treasure and personal power. These days, I am far more interested in story than mechanics.

That personal power thing is also D&D's Achilles' Heel, especially the newer versions of the game. If you are not interested in that "character build," then you are likely not interested in 5E at all.

If your imagination fails you, the game features three amazing bestiaries, plus a few dozen additional creatures in the core book. There is no lack of interesting, strange, "we have never seen that before" foes in this game. And you could reskin and mod all these, too, or pull monsters in from the Cypher System or the Strange games (and those two bestiaries). Five monster books? Go to town.

Numenera is a fantastic game, with one of the best science fantasy settings ever devised for creating your own stories, ruins, monsters, peoples, and places. It goes beyond your typical "mutants and mayhem" style of dungeon-first ruin crawls, and it world builds and gives you a vast space to create stories within. The game can be too imaginative for some, and I wish more people would play and appreciate this one.

What brought this game back to my mind was Daggerheart and the "you create your own world" starting point. Where that game falls short is that you are still in a fantasy system, and your concepts, magic, spells, and powers are all "sort of D&D-ish." You don't get to play with lasers, robots, technology, teleporters, bio-monsters, power first weapons, or any cool science fiction devices and technology. You don't have hover bikes, submersibles, high-tech wetsuits, jet-skis, hover-boots, concealment cloaks, space ships, hover platforms, mutants, cyborgs, androids, or AI computers with nano-bots.

You are still stuck in that D&D fantasy world.

Numenera gives you all that and more.

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Off the Shelf: Cypher System

https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/cypher-system-rules-primer/

This never got taken off the shelf, but it sat there for a while while I sorted through my games and started reducing the number I keep out. Monte Cook helped develop the modern version of the "d20 system," and this is his answer and ultimate version of the concept:

  • Everything boils down to a d20 test.
  • Players rely on pool resources.
  • Difficulty can be bid down based on resources, skills, and pool expenditures.
  • There is a meta-currency of XP exchanged between players and the referee to advance the narrative.
  • Resting is tightly controlled to prevent exploitation.
  • The referee (GM) is a narrative-focused participant only and does not roll the dice.

The entire system is as if people who have been playing these d20 games their whole lives decided to throw most everything out and boil down the interactions to the most basic and engaging parts. Everything was on the table, and most of it got thrown out, while keeping the best and most interesting parts of character design.

What is my character archetype?

What makes a character different and special?

What does my character do?

A Cypher System character is described in one sentence, "He is a tough soldier who works for a living," and all of the character's statistics and scores are created from that description. It is the most elegant and intuitive character creation system in roleplaying today, and it even beats out the card system of Daggerheart. You don't even need cards, just a few words, and then everything flows from there.

With fantasy kin, you do need to add another descriptive tag in there. "He is a tough elven soldier who works for a living." Or, replace "tough" with "elven;" the system works either way as long as you are consistent. Elven, dwarven, and so on will add a few special abilities and modifications. This is really the only system hack you need to do, if you want.

Daggerheart uses the typical D&D "rules framework" scaffolding, and it still has many crunchy combat and interaction rules. Daggerheart is a rules-medium game, and if you care more about narrative than system crunch, you will be happier with Cypher System than Daggerheart.

And Cypher System's narrative tools are a generation beyond the "shared story structure" of Daggerheart. Where Daggerheart relies on players becoming "temporary referees" in describing the narrative, such as when a player opens a chest and the referee asks, "What do you find in it?" The player can pull a magic sword out if they want, with no cost or price to pay; they just say so, and it happens.

In Cypher System, the referee is in charge of "what is in the chest," but the player is always free to pay 1 XP and trigger a "Player Intrusion" and find that magic sword, and the GM has the final say. The GM is free to give the players 2 XP (1 to the player, and the player decides who the other goes to) and trigger a "GM Intrusion" that complicates the narrative, such as the chest being a mimic or a trap being triggered. Or perhaps the magic sword has a curse that the players must go on a quest to break.

With the Cypher System, there is a currency linked to the narrative, based on an experience point (XP) economy. You pay XP to push things in your favor, or get XP for taking a setback. A critical failure (a d20 roll of 1) triggers an automatic GM Intrusion, with no XP awarded.

Daggerheart is considerably softer than Cypher System on narrative control. There is no narrative currency other than fate and hope points. There are no prices to pay to give yourself "free stuff." The game relies too heavily on goodwill, trust, and people not exploiting narrative powers. Once the referee begins amassing "fear tokens," then tension ramps up as the player's resources are reduced, but resting is far softer in this game.

In Daggerheart, resting generates fear, which seems strange. They limit resting like Cypher System, and you can only do a few things each rest, and must decide what you do. In the Cypher System, you rest, recover pool points, and time passes. The GM does not receive "fear points" or gain resources when players rest; they do not need it. Time is always the enemy; that is a given in both games, but Cypher System handles resting far more elegantly with far more narrative consequences.

Come to think of it, the referee has no tracked resources in the Cypher System. You don't need dice or special trackers. Those are for the players to play with. You focus on the story and the world. Daggerheart caps referee fear at 12, which feels like a lot, and I can see a situation where a GM piles up so much fear it becomes hard to use without piling on the players and having the monsters hog the spotlight.

In the Cypher System, I don't need a bag of "fear tokens" to beat my players over the head with to raise tension. Their characters are constantly spending resources, draining their pools, and burning rests. If you don't allow the players a chance to rest in the Cypher System, or they burn all their narrative resting options, and the ones they have left will consume too much time, then you begin to squeeze your players and raise tension. 

I had a situation where I had a character trapped in the badlands with only a 10-hour rest left, and there was no place to stop and rest without forcing an encounter. They were low on everything, barely hanging on, and had to spend an XP to trigger a Player Intrusion to find a relatively safe spot to stop in. I allowed it, and they recovered some, but not all of their pools, and limped back home the next day, even getting into another combat encounter.

Long rests aren't a "solve every problem" panacea like it is in Daggerheart or D&D.

Cypher System is much better defined in terms of the "cost" of changing the narrative, and the tension is ramped up considerably as your pool resources start depleting. Resting replenishes them, but once you start using those up, you begin to ramp up tension.

Cypher System also solo-plays exceptionally well. Your character exists as your playing piece, and you interact with a story, which you never have to context switch to a pretend referee and roll the dice as. If a GM Intrusion makes sense, it happens, or use an oracle die to see if one happens. You can always pay an XP to opt out.

Rolls of 17 through 20 trigger extra special positive effects for players. Also, only the players roll the dice, and monsters don't "make attacks." A player rolls to make an attack, and the player makes a roll to defend. Enemies never roll the dice.

  • 1: GM Intrusion
  • 17: +1 Damage Bonus
  • 18: +2 Damage Bonus
  • 19: +3 Damage Bonus or a Minor Effect
  • 20: +4 Damage Bonus or a Major Effect. If points were spent on the roll, they are not expended.

The dicing system and results of the Cypher System are an all-time genius system. Every roll is a surprise. Even a difficulty 1 task can be failed, and it is worth knocking that down to zero to avoid a roll at all. Avoiding rolling at all is a great strategy.

The GM never rolls the dice in the Cypher System and does not even need to do so. Only the players need dice. I played Cypher extensively, and I purposely never had dice on my side of the GM screen. If I needed a 1d100 roll, I asked a player to make one for me. I did not always tell them what it was for, just to give me one. The GM only focuses on storytelling and adjudicating the results of actions, NPCs, and the environment.

Also, the meta-currency of hope and fear in Daggerheart is constantly generated whenever the dice are rolled, and each player tracks a hope total, along with hit points, armor, and stress pools. The referee needs to track a "fear pool." In Cypher System, each character has three ability score pools, XP, recovery rolls, a damage track, and XP is the master meta currency. The meta-currencies are far easier to track in the Cypher System; there are fewer of them, and they are not always constantly changing with every roll.

Which game you prefer will depend on what you like and your expectations.

If you like the D&D rules crunch and trust each other well enough that sharing narrative control will not lead to exploiting the situation, then Daggerheart will be your game. For every D&D rule that Daggerheart throws out, it brings in a new one that is just as fiddly and crunchy to replace it. While it is more narrative-focused than D&D, it is still as filled with "d20 style rules" as the game it seeks to replace. Also, the narrative tools the game gives you are soft, with no "back and forth" between players and the referee.

Daggerheart is still a unique and fun game! Don't get me wrong, I love to see innovation in the hobby. The card-based characters are "Cypher System Lite" and do a good job of getting people playing quickly. The rules have enough crunch to please 5E players. It balances the "D&D style" with the "live play style" nicely. The game is crunchy, with plenty of character optimization, combinations, and fun.

We can't put this game on top of the narrative gaming mountain, though. We have the best narrative tabletop game of all time already, designed by one of the legendary designers in the industry.

If you want a multi-genre game where the crunch is thrown out the window, and every tool in the game serves the narrative, and there is a cost to creating an advantage, then Cypher System will be a better game for you. The game can play any genre, in any world, and has far better tools for building worlds and establishing the parameters of your creations. The Cypher System encompasses a wide range of genres, from science fiction to fantasy, including horror, comedy, romance, action, realism, and any flavor you can imagine.

The character building is far more expressive and in-depth than Daggerheart. Where Daggerheart relies on cards (and selling you more), Cypher System will just give you a new book filled with dozens of new archetype selections, and you will be shocked at what you can build out of them. Even the base book of Cypher System contains infinitely more combinations of character pieces than Daggerheart, with add-on books containing hundreds more that are tailored to each genre.

If narrative is king and you don't want crunch, Cypher System is the clear winner.