Title: Notable Sections of the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide
Author: Mike Shea
Date:

While 5e started off as just D&D 2014, we now have several publishers publishing several revisions to the ten-year-old RPG platform. Kobold Press, who has long published material for 5e, now has their own 5e-based system – Tales of the Valiant. One of their three core books is the *[Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/tales-of-the-valiant-game-masters-guide-2/)*. While many pay attention to the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, I think it's useful to see what other 5e GM-focused books have to offer.

First, a disclaimer. I was commissioned to write some meaty pieces of the *Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide* including their encounter building guidelines, running minions, the use of secrets and clues, and running combat in the theater of the mind, and some others. So I'm clearly biased in my excitement for this book. Setting that aside, I think it's a good book with a lot of great material you won't find in every other game master's guide out there for 5e.

## Tab Your GMG

Here's a pro tip. Get some re-usable adhesive tabs and tab your game master books. Labeled tabs make it far easier to use these books during prep and play – helping you quickly get to the sections you need to help you improvise during your game. Here's a quick list of the sections I tabbed in my own copy of the *Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide*:

- Taverns and Landmarks – pg 36
- Dungeons – pg 84
- Weather – pg 108
- NPC Names – pg 116
- Hazards – pg 137
- Traps – pg 146
- Dread effects - pg 156
- Poisons and Rewards – pg 171
- Random magic items – pg 175
- Monster traits – pg 212
- Monster stats by CR – pg 235
- Random encounter tables – pg 246

I like to start my tabs from the back of the book to the front, starting tabs at the outside bottom of the page and moving my way up the page as I get closer to the front of the book. This lines the tabs up nicely when I'm done.

## Notable Sections of the Game Master's Guide

The sections above are all notable and chosen for their value during the game but there are other notable sections as well. Let's have a look.

**Advanced Combat**. This section contains a wealth of information on running combat on a battle grid, in the theater of the mind, or using abstract maps. Again, I'm biased because I wrote the theater of the mind and abstract map guidelines and I always felt they had a place in a solid game master's guide. Here it is. The section include templates and tables to help you identify how many targets might fall into various areas of effect and diagrams to show you how zones can work.

**Encounter Templates**. This section breaks down various types of encounters against groups of monsters with a rough challenge rating breakdown based on the TOV encounter building guidelines (which I also wrote). Handy when you want to throw a boss and minions or three smaller bosses against your players.

Other notable sections here includes large-scale battles, vehicle combat, fighting colossal enemies, running minions and hordes, multi-phase battles, called shots, and expanding the doom rules from the Monster Vault.

**Dungeons**. The Game Master's Guide's exploration section includes a full dungeon builder with piles of random tables to build out dungeons or help you fill in a pre-drawn dungeon map. Some of the tables are too granular for me like a 1d20 table on door details, but the tables describing the chambers of various types of dungeons is a fantastic aid to help you quickly fill out a blank Dyson map.

**Advanced Social**. This chapter includes lots of tables for building out NPCs from large scale villainous plots to the individual personality bonds of any given NPC.

**Adventuring Options**. This section includes tons of curses, diseases, and hazards to spice up your adventures. It includes a new set of dread tables, a replacement for the old 2014 "madness" tables.

**Treasure Tables**. I'm a sucker for great random treasure tables and the TOV GMG has them. Unlike the 2024 DMG, it splits up tables for consumables and permanent magic items, which I prefer. Unfortunately, the way the GMG handles treasure parcels doesn't work for me. Instead of giving me per-session parcels I can roll each time I prep, it gives me big parcels that cover threeish levels of play. That's just too much for me and gives me the extra homework of splitting up parcels per session. I suppose you can use it like a checklist but you'd still have to split up the money. That's not great.

Here's a simpler per-session treasure parcel system that can work with any 5e game. This is a group reward given out each session and assumes four characters but don't sweat it if you have more. It doesn't perfectly line up with TOV's rewards but I don't think it'll break your game either.

**1st to 4th Level**

- 200 GP
- One uncommon consumable
- One common magic item
- One uncommon magic item

**5th to 10th Level**

- 3,000 GP
- One common magic item
- Two uncommon consumables
- One rare consumable
- One uncommon or rare magic item

**11th to 16th Level**

- 12,000 GP
- One common magic item
- Two uncommon or rare consumables
- One very rare consumable
- One uncommon magic item
- One rare or very rare magic item

**17th to 20th Level**

- 50,000 GP
- One common magic item
- Two rare or very rare consumables
- One uncommon or rare magic item
- One very rare or legendary magic item

**Homebrewer's Toolbox**. This is a fantastic section that peels back the system behind Tales of the Valiant to help you design lineages, heritages, backgrounds, talents, subclasses, magic items, and spells. It also has an excellent section on creating monsters with sample traits and twelve templates around which you can build unique variants of monsters. It has an excellent creature statistics by challenge rating table to help you build a TOV monster in under a minute. It also includes a whole separate set of creature type features with traits to build a near limitless range of new baddies.

**Random Encounters**. The GMG includes tier-based random encounters for fourteen different environments. I wish it had a "dungeon" environment but the Underground serves well enough.

**Random Campaign Dressing*. Though nearly at the end of the book, this section has piles of random tables for building out towns and villages, magical curios, trinkets, things found in a castle, and a set of environmental encounters.

**Fantasy Inspiration**. The GMG includes seven pages of books, films, television shows, games, and non-fiction to inspire your games.

## An Advanced Game Master's Guide You Can Continually Return To

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide is a book designed to help GMs flesh out their game. It's a massive toolbox of re-usable material that peels back the underlying design of the game and shows you how to construct your own flavor of 5e, whatever actual ruleset you use at the table.

Even if you're playing D&D 2014 or D&D 2024, the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide sits well beside your other GM books. Give it a look.