Tales

Gems of the Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide

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On April 28, 2025
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by Mike on 28 April 2025

While 5e started off ten years ago as just D&D 2014, now several companies publish several versions of 5e. Kobold Press, who long wrote material for 5e, now published their own 5e-based system – Tales of the Valiant including the Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide. Today we’ll dig into some of the most useful sections of this fantastic book.

First, a disclaimer. Kobold Press commissioned me to write some meaty pieces of the Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide including encounter building guidelines, running minions, the use of secrets and clues, running combat in the theater of the mind, and some other parts. So I’m clearly biased in my excitement for this book.

Tab Your GMG

Get some reusable adhesive tabs and tab your game master books. Labeled tabs help 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 up the page as I get closer to the front of the book. This way, when I’m done, I have nicely organized tabs from top to bottom and front to back.

Notable Sections of the Game Master’s Guide

The sections I tabbed above are all notable and chosen for their usefulness during the game but there are other notable sections worth referencing during prep or to fuel your ideas away from the gaming table.

Advanced Combat. This section contains a wealth of information on running combat on a 5-foot-square grid, in the theater of the mind, or with abstract maps. 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 they are! This section also includes 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. No other 5e game master guide includes such details for abstract and theater of the mind play.

Encounter Templates. This section offers several encounter templates such as “boss and bodyguards”, “triple bosses”, and “wolfpack”, breaking down the number of combatants and their rough challenge ratings based on the TOV encounter building guidelines (which I also wrote). These templates are handy when you want to throw a boss and minions or three smaller bosses against your players.

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

Dungeons. The Game Master’s Guide’s exploration section includes a great 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 quickly fill out a blank Dyson map.

Advanced Social. This chapter includes excellent tables for generating NPCs – from villainous plots to the traits and bonds of any given NPC.

Adventuring Options. This section includes tons of curses, diseases, and hazards to spice up your adventures. It also 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 D&D 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, 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 offering per-session parcels I can prepare for each game I run, it offers big parcels covering roughly three levels. That’s 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. It’s not my favorite.

Here’s a simpler per-session treasure parcel system loosely based on dividing the bigger parcels into smaller single-session parcels with an expectation of two parcels per level. 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

  • 250 gp in coins, gems, and art
  • One common magic item
  • Two uncommon consumables
  • One uncommon permanent magic item

5th to 10th Level

  • 2,500 gp in coins, gems, and art
  • One common magic item
  • Two uncommon or rare consumables
  • One uncommon or rare permanent magic item

11th to 16th Level

  • 11,000 gp in coins, gems, and art
  • Two uncommon, rare, or very rare consumables
  • One uncommon, rare, or very rare permanent magic item

17th to 20th Level

  • 45,000 gp in coins, gems, and art
  • Two rare, very rare, or legendary consumables
  • One rare, very rare, or legendary permanent magic item

Patreons of Sly Flourish get access to a special Tales of the Valiant treasure generator based on these per-session parcels linked on their main rewards page.

Homebrewer’s Toolbox. This noteworthy section peels back the system behind Tales of the Valiant to help GMs design lineages, heritages, backgrounds, talents, subclasses, magic items, and spells. It also includes an excellent section on creating monsters with stats by challenge rating, sample traits, and twelve templates to build unique variants of monsters. It also includes creature-type features with traits to build near limitless variants 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 table serves well enough. These random encounters include interesting context such as:

A pack of four winter wolves prowls the area, hunting for prey, and they regard the PCs as a delicious alternative to moose and deer. If one of the wolves is reduced half its hit point maximum, its keening howl draws another two winter wolves to the area in 1 minute.

*Random Campaign Dressing. Though nearly at the end of the book, this section includes lots of random tables for building out towns and villages, magical curios, trinkets, things found in a castle, and a set of environmental encounters. Don’t miss it.

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

A Truly Advanced Game Master’s Guide You Can Continually Reference

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide is a book designed to help GMs flesh out their 5e games. It’s a massive toolbox of re-usable material peeling 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.

Whatever flavor of 5e you’re running, the Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide sits well beside your other GM books. Don’t miss it.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week’s Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week’s topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week’s questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos: 2024 DMG Session Prep and the Lazy Dungeon Master and Let’s Build an Adventure with the City of Arches.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week’s tips:

  • Throw two or three different monster types at the characters for big battles.
  • Clarify how the characters can interact with objects in battle.
  • Let your players know when they’re about to jump into a big two hour fight.
  • Roll randomly to see which factions got the better of the others.
  • Prep three future quest paths. Have players choose before the end of a session so you know what to prep next.
  • Give the characters a chance to see old NPCs and what they’re up to now.
  • Keep an NPC list handy of the current and previous NPCs in your campaign.

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