Kobold Press Players Guide 2 Kickstarter

Today Kobold Press opened up the Kickstarter for thier Player’s Guide 2. While Kobold Press has already done a couple Kickstarters that are going to dramatically expand Tales of the Valiant when they come out later this year (Enter the Labyrinth - both a campaign book and a setting book; Monster Vault 2 - an expansion of their bestiary), Player’s Guide 2 is a huge expansion to the Tales of the Valiant ruleset. I, for one, am very excited about this update. Actually, I’m not the only one - at the time that I am writing this (end of the first day of the Kickstarter) there are 1461 backers that have pledged $114,000 against a $50k goal. This means after just about 8 hours they’ve almost reached 3/4 of their stretch goals.

As they do with every Kickstarter (or at least each one I’ve been a backer of), they released a preview PDF that reveals the table of contents and some of the proposed book content. I wanted to write up this post to talk aobut the things I got very excited about in the preview PDF and to hopefully get even more people excited aobut backing this Kickstarter.

• Witch Class! - I’m surprised they aren’t more common in base classes for TTRPGs. Perhaps it’s because they weren’t really represented in Tolkien or because people had a hard time seeing how the witch mythology ties in with being a hero, but it’s usually up to 3rd party supplents like this one. So it was fun to see Kobold Press add a witch class.
• The Elemental Voice Monk subclass can basically have an Avatar: the Last Airbender story in a in 5e game instead of the the officially licensed one
• The new Vanguard class sounds incredibly awesome and basically either super-charges your attackers or functions as a field medic. I like that we now have another healing class. I think it’s supposed to appeal to D&D 3e or D&D 4e players who haven’t seen the class in a Wizards of the Coast product in decades. Just reading it, I thought it was a class I might enjoy playing.

• Frogs! Back when I wrote this post comparing D&D 5e 2024 and Tales of the Valiant, I spoke about the convergent evolution with D&D 5e 2024 and Tales of the Valiant. For example, both of them decided that all classes would not get their subclasses at 3rd level. (Previously different classes got them at different times). Well, the convergent evolution of 2025 is frogs! Above you can see the Sapopova from Tales of the Valiant. (Now you can roleplay Frog from Chrono Trigger!) Below you can see the Ribbit from Daggerheart. Not sure what’s making frogs so “in” right now, but it’s funny to see these both appear at the same time. The only thing that doesn’t make sense to me is why the Sapopova are their own thing rather than a type of Beastkin. Maybe I’ll ask on the Kobold Press discord.

• More Warlock subclasses! All the original classes in Tales of the Valiant only had two subclasses each. I didn’t mind that too much for most of the classes, but with Warlocks needing a patron, it was somewhat limiting to only have demons and an eldritch entity that just desires death as the only built-in options.

• Seeing Magical Tattoos in the table of contents reminds me of the 5e supplement Sink!. I think at the very least it seems to go well with the new Kraken subclass for the Barbarian.

• I hope we get the Running A thieves Guild stretch goal (listed in the preview, but not on the Kickstarter page)

• Finally the part I got the most excited aobut when I saw the information in the preview PDF. In this blog post comparing the Kobold Press Game Master Guide with the WotC Dungeon Master Guide (which they later said was maybe a bit too mean of a tone) the writer for the blog said:

The third big, dedicated section we felt weird about is the entire chapter dedicated to bastions. This might be good. We’ll reserve judgement until we get a chance to play more with the system. But this is a lot of space to dedicate to a micro-management system that only appeals to a subset of your customers. These mechanics feel like they would have shined in a different kind of release.

Well, it looks like they did play with it and learned how to make it even better. There are many way in which I like Tales of the Valiant’s implementation better, but they mostly revolve around the fact that Kobold Press has focused on making things story-relevant with the players’ home bases. First of all, there is no level restriction (D&D Bastions only start at level 5). At any point in the game if the players have enough money or have done some work that a mayor or city official wants to reward with property, they can get it. The Player’s Guide 2 encourages the GM to have some backstory to the property, especially if the characters are getting an old, abandoned estate or lighthouse or something. Not only that, but there’s a whole section on mysteries the players might discover in the base. D&D Bastions feel so divorced from the story, but Tales of the Valiant encourages more story-based play.

Overall, I’m excited about this rules expansion that seems to be about 90% for players and 10% for GMs. The only sad thing is that it won’t come out until January (assuming no delays).

• 5e
• Tales of the Valiant
• DnD