Or is This the Future?

First Entry in a New Era in FRP Gaming.
Tales of the Valiant - Preview is not a complete game. It's a teaser and hopefully a promise of (good) things to come. One of the effects of poor management in an open market is an opportunity then exists for new producers to offer something better and the consumer ultimately benefits. (At least that is what I learned in college economics.) The summer heat has begun here in North America, and with it we have the first release in a crop of new FRP titles that have come about in response to, well, lets just move along to my thoughts on "Valiant".

Tales of the Valiant began life as a Kobold Press response to the OGL mess announcement of their "Project Blackflag". Kobold Press has previously partnered with other publishers and I have purchased several of their products written for various systems that all contain the iconic image of a reptilian caster, the "kobold" trademark. As far as independent publishers go, I rank Kobold Press among the top tier. The quality of their writing, their artwork and the originality of their creative ideas all impress me. And I generally enjoy the theme, tone and feeling of their setting materials. So Project Blackflag had my attention from the start.

At some point, Kobold Press dubbed their new core FRP system "Tales of the Valiant". What has been recently released as a free 63 page digital document contains the results of the "playtest" releases and is I believe beyond the rough draft stage, but it is not a finished or complete product. (The full release is being crowdfunded at the time of my writing this post.)

Tales of the Valiant is being built upon the back of a very popular SRD, so it is not entirely reinventing the proverbial wheel. But perhaps Kolbold Press will round off enough of the rough edges to make "Tales..." feel like an improvement and fun (mostly) new system.

What we get in the Preview document are the character creation materials to generate the four classic PC classes, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue and Wizard - all the classes are familiar to a large degree, but the "Valiant" Fighter looks to be a much needed improvement over the SRD version. For starters, our new Fighter has "Martial Action" at 1st level which allows for some round-by-round choice among decent combat abilities including the use of the bonus action to "Aim" your next missile shot, or raise your "Guard" while wielding a shield, and several other options. It's always nice to have tactical decisions to make as a player and I have found that the Fighter class has been a bit lackluster in recent years.

In addition to the four standard classes in the Preview we get a selection of lineages, dwarf, elf, human and the new "beastkin". If you fancy a PC with wings, horns or a tail, the beastkin covers all such features found in the animal kingdom under one PC lineage. Heritage is also included as a separate, but complementary, aspect of character creation along with lineage. For example, the cloud heritage goes nicely with the avian version of the beastkin lineage, but it can also be combined with the elf or human or dwarf lineage. You can choose.

Add Background, Talent and Luck and you round out your character in preparation for some tabletop heroics. Following recent trends in the hobby, Tales of the Valiant PCs begin play already feeling much like a "Valiant" hero. The Preview gives us enough information to generate the PC and also contains a handful of spell descriptions and a smattering of monsters, just enough in total to give us a taste for what the future shall bring when we have a full core rule book and monster book.

The Preview contains no combat mechanics and honestly they aren't essential if we just want to see how the new character classes work. Based on what Tales of the Valiant - Preview does contain, I feel it's a safe assumption the inclusion of the usual list of character statistics, proficiency bonus and the familiar list of spells are suggestive of the author(s) intent to stick fairly close to the source. If it remains consistent through to the final version, there may not even be much need for spelling out the system mechanics in the finished core product. We can always just use Tales of the Valiant as a variant of the familiar system and reference the Standard Reference Document for everything else.

So what do I think of Tales of the Valiant?

The intent is to craft a fresh take on the modern version of the game we all love, this is evident when I read the first few paragraphs wherein the author's "philosophy" of design, their expectations regarding the style of play and the role of the GM are all described. It looks like a natural evolution of a now familiar system that improves on some aspects (Fighter class), introduces some new concepts (spell circles) and yet remains familiar enough to not be off-putting to those who would like to keep playing the game they now love (without all the corporate messiness).