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.