Non-A5E Resources for Your A5E Game

Disclaimer: this article includes some affiliate links for DrivethruRPG. If you buy something through one of those links, I may receive a small kickback.

Level Up markets itself on being backwards-compatible with 5e, which is fortunate because it means that most 5e resources work great with it with little, if any, conversion. However, a thought should also be spared for system-agnostic tools as well. Here you’ll find a list of various resources, old and new, I’ve used in my own A5E game that I have found to be helpful.

The Compendium of Forgotten Secrets: Awakening by Genuine Fantasy Press is unlike any other 5e book I’ve ever seen. While it’s kind of billed as a player-facing resource and there is definitely ample content for players in there, it’s at least as good for GMs. The alrisen (the term the author uses for the various “too powerful for stat blocks, but not actually divine” beings in there) are fascinating creations and can be dropped into just about any setting. Most have specific agendas that aren’t simple good or evil, which can add a lot of richness and texture to a world.

If you’ve ever wanted to run an undead-heavy campaign but have been frustrated by the wide gaps in the CR range for undead, I cannot recommend Ultimate Bestiary: The Dreaded Accursed highly enough. Three different types of lich (based on wizard, cleric, and druid magic), each with stat blocks at CR 7, 11, 16, 20, and 23. The mummies section, in addition to standard mummies of various CRs, has stats for a mummified sphinx, babboon, crocodile, bull, swarm of snakes, and so on. The zombie section includes nasty high-cr plague zombies and a zombie troll that heals when it’s hit with poison damage. It also includes lycanthropes and animated objects in the same dizzying variety. A really fantastic resource for any campaign wanting to focus on those types of enemies. The company behind it, Nord Games, is currently working on a similar product for the fey, which I am about beside myself with anticipation for.

Speaking of monsters, while MCDM certainly doesn’t need any promotional help from me, Flee, Mortals! is an absolutely stellar monster book, that makes good use of the action-oriented design ethos that Matt Coville has been pushing for a while. The original video where he lays that design concept out is also very much worth watching, holds up fine, and is perfectly applicable to A5E. I do have two complaints with Flee, Mortals!, though; the first is that they locked the whole book down tight behind Product Identity. This is frustrating because the minion and retainer rules in particular would be a fantastic thing for the rest of the community to be able to iterate on. My second, smaller gripe is that it’s not as much of a direct replacement for the monster manual as advertised. Still, if you only get two monster books, it’ll pair well with your copy of the A5E Monstrous Menagerie. But you really shouldn’t limit yourself to just two monster books, and if you’re more of a do-it-yourself kind of person, then the one-two punch of Monstrous from Cloud Curio and The Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes from Sly Flourish should absolutely be on your radar. As this video from one of the illustrators of Monstrous demonstrates, they really do complement each other extraordinarily well; you can use Monstrous for lore and flavor and Forge of Foes for mechanics and whip a really cool monster up on the spot. Sly Flourish also released huge chunks of Forge of Foes into Creative Commons, which you can find here. Skerples’s The Monster Overhaul is also worth a look; it has a bunch of classic RPG fantasy monsters with different options for flavor and lore in it. While the mechanics (such as they are) would fit better with something like Shadowdark, the rest of the book is useful enough to be worth it anyway. And if you’re looking more at the subject of end-game threats, either the original or updated versions of Legendary Dragons (which have slightly different content and I personally own both versions of) do a lot to restore dragons to their role as powerful, awe-inspiring creatures that can define entire campaigns. Most of the dragons don’t even have a standard “type” such as metallic or chromatic; they’re unique, powerful beings that need to be engaged on their own terms. If even dragons don’t quite pack enough punch, then the Epic Legacy Tome of Titans, Volume 1 from 2CGaming includes some pre-made campaign villains that will give even 20th-level PCs a memorable challenge. For earlier in the campaign, their Total Party Kill Bestiaries, Volume 1 and Volume 2 will give you some rigorously-playtested monsters with extensive flavor and tactical notes to throw at your higher level PCs.

Moving from monsters to magic, I have to recommend the delightfully-creepy level-less spells from the aggravatingly-hard-to-track-down Book of Gaub. If you’re looking to depict forbidden magic as its own unique, scary thing that plays by its own set of rules, that is an absolutely fantastic place to start. Each of the seven fingers of the Hand of Gaub has seven spells, each with its own little vignette with it for inspiration and there are assorted other resources in the back of the book that tie into various spells as well. You can also fill out that level-less magic with Lost Pages’ other spellbooks Wonder & Wickedness, Marvels & Malisons, Cthonic Codex and the delightfully-named Hamsterish Hoard of Hexes. Along similar lines but from a different source, Feral Indie Studio’s As the Gods Demand is a slim little portfolio with some gods that remind me of the alrisen from COFSA, and weird, specific, system agnostic powers for their followers.

On the subject of Feral Indie Studio, their environment/setting books Into the Wyrd and Wild and Into the Cess and Citadel are mind-bendingly good. Into the Wyrd and Wild is a key source of inspiration for my current homebrew setting, and while it is available in PDF, if you can find a copy of the hardcover somewhere, you’ll probably want to go that route. The same goes for Into the Cess and Citadel. If you can only get one, get Wyrd and Wild, but they are both incredibly worth having, and work is proceeding on a third volume covering coastal areas.

To continue in the setting design vein, Spectacular Settlements from Nord Games (same people who made Ultimate Bestiary: The Dreaded Accursed) is also a really useful resource for setting design, but while it is available in PDF, I strongly recommend tracking down a hardcover at your FLGS or online retailer of choice (or just buy it straight from Nord Games here). The reason I recommend a hardcover for this one is that the sheer size of it at almost 500 pages makes the PDFs render painfully slowly. It’s much easier to just work from the physical book, especially if you want to use something from a later chapter. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Monte Cook Games’s excellent The Weird, which is one of the most fun and inspiring books of tables I’ve ever seen. It also contains content for multiple genres, meaning it will stay useful even if you switch to playing some entirely different system and/or genre.

Moving further out to things that will be useful in any system and many campaigns, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters from Encoded Designs is one of those things you’ll be able to reference for decades, and the recently-released Apocalypse: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Ending the World goes well with any high-stakes save-the-world campaign.

A general shout-out to GURPS books is also warranted: virtually any GURPS book that has subject material that interests you is just about guaranteed to be useful, even if you never play GURPS. Steve Jackson Games’s high standards for writing and research mean that the non-mechanical parts of them are loaded with the exact sorts of information you’d want while running a campaign with those elements. Of particularly high usefulness are GURPS Horror, 4th Edition, GURPS Undead, GURPS Faerie, GURPS Shapeshifters, GURPS Spirits, GURPS Blood Types, GURPS Dragons, GURPS Covert Ops, GURPS Ultra-Tech, GURPS Y2K, and GURPS All-Star Jam 2004, along with any an all of the historical settings that catch your fancy.

I could keep going (and probably will at some point) but this is some of the very best and most useful content from my own collection and experience, so it feels appropriate to end it there.

The Player’s Case for Level Up: Advanced 5e

During a recent podcast, Mike Shea mentioned that PJ Coffey had written an excellent case for GMs to upgrade from vanilla 5e to Level Up: Advanced 5e, but what about the player side? 

TL;DR:

First, let me warn that this is going to be long, and if you want the short version, this is it:

You likely will find that Level Up is better for you than 5e if you like having a high degree of customization, if you’ve gotten sick of being pigeonholed by “correct” 5e builds, and if you’ve wanted more things to do in the game, especially outside of combat, and/or if you’ve gotten sick of some of the “legacy tropes” in 5e. It will not be for you if what you really want is an OSR game: stripped-down, highly-lethal, and based more on dungeon survival than heroic fantasy. It also will likely not be for you if what you want is an indie RPG or story game.

Authorial Bias

Let me get this out of the way upfront: if you want an objective, journalistic take on this subject, or if you want someone to absolutely shred the system and claim it’s horrible, you’re likely going to be disappointed, because I’m not the person for either of those takes. I was part of the original design team for Level Up: Advanced 5e and I am currently the most prolific producer of third-party content for it. I also regularly contribute to the official books and the monthly Level Up periodical, The Gate Pass Gazette. I like the system quite a lot, and I am very, very familiar with it. That combination of positive feelings and deep familiarity means that I can make a pretty detailed case for the system, though, and if you’ve been interested in it, this is why I think you should take the leap.

Using This Article

One of the many things to recommend about Level Up is that EN Publishing is extremely committed to open gaming and the core rules (and a fair number of the supplemental ones) are available on the a5e.tools site. Where appropriate, I will link to entries on that site so you can check the various subjects out for yourself in more detail if you’re interested in doing so.

Note: toward the bottom of this post, some links to DriveThruRPG (only) are affiliate links; if you buy something using them, I may earn some credit based on your purchase.

Origins

Level Up uses the term “origin” as an umbrella term for the mechanical aspects of a character that define their life prior to their adventuring career. It is broken down into four subsections, each covering a different aspect of that personal foundation. Before we get into that detail, though, this entire portion of character creation is a major upgrade on its own; going through the origins portion of character creation leaves you with a character that feels way more like an actual person than the corresponding parts of 5e do. Let’s dig into how that works.

Heritage

The concept of “race” in D&D is broken down into two components in Level Up: Advanced 5e: heritage (nature) and culture (nurture). Level Up is not the first place where this distinction has been drawn, but it works well here.

Heritage covers the biological and physiological parts of a character such as their general physical size, senses, and so on. Each heritage has a set of traits common to all members of that heritage and a set of gifts that allow for diversity within that heritage. For example, with dragonborn, gifts can allow you to make a character that has tough, scaly skin and claws, or who instead has aquatic traits like being able to hold their breath for a long time and a swim speed, or who has wings (yes, dragonborn are actually playable now). Also at level 10, you receive a heritage paragon gift, which often builds on the original gift selected, but not always. Mixed-heritage characters can take a set of traits from one heritage and a gift from another. There’s no set mix of heritages that are biologically-compatible, leaving it to setting designers and Narrators/GMs to determine what heritages can have children together and/or have been mixed by magic or whatever other means exist in the world.

What you will not see in the heritage section is ability score increases; those have been moved to the background section.

Culture

The other half of what used to be “race” in D&D is culture, the environment that the character was raised in. Mechanically, these provide capabilities that are learned as part of the character’s upbringing or cultural formation such as languages, weapon and tool proficiencies, and so forth. Each heritage usually has a few associated cultures, such as high elves, wood elves, shadow elves, and eladrin for the elf heritage. However, there are some cultures not closely tied to any individual heritage, and the heritage and culture of a character can be mixed freely. This lines up better with fictional characters such as Carrot Ironfoundersson from Discworld who was a human raised by dwarves, or Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, who was a human with significant elven influence. 

In some ways, cultures allow for the kind of variation that used to be confined to “sub-races” but without needlessly pigeonholing a player. Even if some combination is strange or likely to be extremely improbable, player characters are often extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives. So if you really want to play that tiefling with a forest gnome culture, go for it!

Background

If heritage represents a character’s birth, and culture represents their formative experiences, then background covers things like their formal education and career training. It works pretty much like it does in vanilla 5e with a couple of key differences: first, you will get two ability score adjustments from your background: one that is fixed and one you get to pick (but they can’t be for the same ability score). This represents the idea that people are stronger, or more learned, or more perceptive because they have trained those parts of themselves via use rather than through birth, which makes a lot more sense. 

Additionally, backgrounds come with three additional traits now: a connection, a memento, and an adventures and advancement section. The connection is someone from the character’s background that still affects their life in some way; they can be a friend, an enemy, or anything in between, but they tie the character back to their past. Likewise, the memento can be a useful object, a sentimental trinket, or even just a piece of actual junk, but it also ties back to the character’s past and is added to their starting gear. Finally, the adventures and advancement section gives some brief guidance for how the character may “move up in the world” of their old background through adventuring if they desire to do so. These can be leaned into as much or as little as the player desires.

Destiny

A new mechanic in Level Up, Destiny replaces alignment and the bonds, flaws, and character traits section of a 5e character sheet as well as supplementing the inspiration mechanic. Destiny covers a character’s motivations and provides new ways to both gain and spend inspiration. Of the changes Level up has introduced, this might be my favorite, because it builds in characters with actual motivations and goals from the outset; think of the characters in a game like Octopath Traveler II: all eight of those people wanted to do something specific. Sometimes it was big and world-altering, sometimes it was small and personal, but they all had a personal goal. Destiny works like that, and there are a good number of them. They’re also not all things like “save the world,” either; revenge, wealth, excellence, and metamorphosis (turning yourself into a different type of creature!) are all on the default list of destinies in the Adventurer’s Guide.

As you can likely see, while this process does leave you with a bit more to keep track of than a character made with the 2014 Player’s Handbook, there’s also a lot more flexibility to define characters as people with actual histories and motivations in Level Up. Those distinctions carry real mechanical weight, too; you can make two characters with the exact same everything except one of their origin components and that alone will change both their capabilities and their flavor. There’s a ton of room to fully realize character concepts.

Classes

All twelve of the classes found in the 5e SRD have been reworked and the Adventurer’s Guide also includes a brand-new class called the marshal that fills the old “warlord” role that was popularized back in the 4e era. 

Three of the classes got new names; the monk is now the adept, the barbarian is now the berserker, and the paladin is now the herald. These changes were made with the primary goal of opening them up a bit, conceptually; adepts can still be wuxia style martial artists, but they can now be Greek-style “exalted athletes” and grimy street fighters, among other things. Berserkers are now less about being from a tribal or low-tech society and more about ferocity and toughness, and heralds are likewise intended to encompass a wider array of supernaturally-empowered idealists. 

New names weren’t the only changes, though; rangers are no longer spellcasters by default and every class now has much greater potential for customization. Where appropriate, new defensive choices were added (such as an armored option for adepts and an unarmored one for clerics) and every class has received a bunch of additional social and exploration features to help them be interesting and have things to do outside of combat. 

This notably does not mean that every class is a “party face” now. Some considerable effort was taken to make sure that the new features still fit the overall style of the character. For example, one of the fighter class’s social abilities is the second-level feature Steely Mien, which gives you three options to choose from when you get it: closed helm, which makes it harder to read you with Insight or to charm or frighten you; Heroic Flair, which helps you influence your allies; or Watchful Eye, which makes you good at keeping an eye out for threats or interesting details. None of these are primarily combat abilities, but they feed into the “fantasy warrior” flavor of the fighter class and let players actually be good at acting like that type of character outside of actual fights. You won’t find the dedicated social mechanics of a game like Burning Wheel or DramaSystem in here, though; it’s still 5e at its base.

It also doesn’t mean every class is a ranger, either. Every class gets an a la carte menu of class-specific exploration and investigative abilities to choose from. Pivoting from the fighter to the herald for this example, they get things like the ability to go longer than normal without food as the strength of their conviction sustains them (allowing the party to make do with fewer resources while exploring before it starts hurting them) or the ability to sense when a place they’ve entered is of special holy or unholy import. 

Pulling spellcasting out of the ranger class also gave their martial and exploration abilities real room to breathe; the class really feels like Aragorn or Davy Crockett or a fearsome tribal hunter now; it is stealthy and deadly and very much able to keep a whole party protected and supplied in the wilds. 

The classes have also been rebalanced to eliminate the worst of the “cheese builds” in 5e. While character optimizers might chafe at this a bit, the end result is that more character builds are viable now; rather than being confined to a limited number of “correct” builds, a Level Up player has greater flexibility to play what they want without feeling like they’re dragging the party down (though ability score placement does still matter). And in some cases, that rebalancing added new capabilities of its own; bards now have a neat new feature called Battle Hymns they can use to get additional effects out of their Bardic Inspiration, for example. Druids can now cast a limited number of spells and talk while wildshaped. The fighter’s Indomitable feature now can be used in additional ways. 

Taken as a whole, while an A5E character tends to be “wider” (with a greater variety of things they can do), the system has been smoothed out to keep them from being unreasonably “tall” and able to “nova” even deadly encounters in the first round of combat. Key features like Divine Smite and Eldritch Blast scale with levels of the class that grants them rather than other considerations now, meaning that if you just want to play a single-classed herald or sorcerer or warlock, you’re no longer leaving power “on the table” if you do so. Put another way, an A5E character will be a little less powerful, but much more versatile.

Multiclass and martial characters also got some interesting new capabilities all their own that we’ll discuss in just a moment.

Feats

One of the coolest new additions to Level Up (at least in my opinions) is the idea of synergy feats. These are short feat chains, typically 3 feats in total, that tend to fall into one of two broad categories: multiclass helpers or transformations.

The multiclass helpers let you make multiclass characters feel more like a unified whole, feeding the features of one class into those of the other or combining them in interesting ways. There are only a few of them in the core rules, but the third-party community has been very dedicated to expanding the number of them (I’ve made it a particular focus in my own releases). 

The transformation chains let you play things like a lycanthrope, revenant, or vampire without hideously unbalancing the game as you do, spreading the powers of the creature out in a logical and level-appropriate way. 

Combat Maneuvers

Another common complaint about vanilla 5e was that martial characters like fighters, rangers, barbarians, and even rogues often didn’t have much to do in combat other than basic attacks. On the flipside, cinematic, anime-style combat as seen in products like the 3rd-edition Book of Nine Swords and the 4e rules was derided as “weeaboo fightan magic” by large swaths of the community. Level Up threads this needle with a lot of more grounded combat maneuvers that roughly approximate things an actual trained weapon user can pull off, though there are some clear literary references here and there; for example, the Painful Pickpocket maneuver seems to be a reference to a specific scene that happens late in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. 

The maneuvers are divided up into a bunch of different combat traditions and martial classes get to select a number of these traditions (typically two) from a limited set to draw their maneuvers from. This subdivision means that each martial class (with the exception of the fighter, which gets to pick from the whole list of traditions) has a fighting style that, while unique to the character, also fits with the general flavor of the class. For example, a rogue might pull their maneuvers from the Biting Zephyr tradition which focuses on ranged attacks and the Mist and Shade tradition which emphasizes trickery. Similarly, a berserker might choose Adamant Mountain which emphasizes heavy weapons and Tooth & Claw, which is all about animalistic ferocity and mobility. Maneuvers are powered by a new resource called Exertion. 

Level Up also has a set of basic maneuvers that don’t use exertion and are available to all characters and don't need to be learned, further expanding what you can do in combat. 

Equipment

Speaking of options in combat, weapons and armor also have more properties available to them, which means that a longsword and a battle axe are no longer functionally the same weapon. Characters can now choose weapons and armor that fit with their preferred fighting style and actually see that matter. In addition, Level Up has added a bunch of new equipment and has a lot more magic items in its core rules than vanilla 5e. 

Those magic items also come with actual purchase prices and can be commissioned too, meaning that for groups that want to play in a setting where magic items are being produced and sold rather than being relics of a bygone age, that option is supported by the core rules.

Other New Elements

Speaking of spending gold, there’s lots more you can spend it on in Level Up. The game has a strongholds and followers system (that is much more grounded than the MCDM one), and also has options for buying pets, and doing charitable work in addition to the old favorites like spellcasting services. 

The stronghold system feeds into a new rating called Prestige that basically serves as an indicator of how well-known a character is and who they can realistically seek out an audience with. Level up has also added a number of new conditions, which helps streamline how various spells and features work and also separates exhaustion into fatigue and strife, which measure physical and mental strain, respectively.

The new supply system makes activities like hunting and foraging actually worthwhile, and combined with the journey rules and large number of pre-built non-combat encounters, exploration-heavy campaigns like hex crawls and “west marches” games take on additional life and vibrancy.

Spells now have non-classical schools like fire and obscurement in addition to the classical ones like evocation and illusion, making them easier to sort, and a bunch also have rare spell variants that are based on the “normal” version of the spell but are altered (usually improved) in some way.

Expertise as a mechanic, while not new per se, has been revamped and expanded upon. In vanilla 5e, the bard and rogue classes get a feature called Expertise that lets them double their proficiency bonus with a very limited number of skills. In A5E, instead of a static bonus, you get a +1d4 bonus instead. If you’d have more than one of these bonuses for the same roll, you instead increase the size of the bonus die one step, to a normal maximum of 1d8. This flexibility means that there’s more of an opportunity for characters to be especially good at specific things, and you’ll find expertise dice granted by origin, class, and archetype features, feats, spells, and more. They also can apply to just about anything that needs a d20 roll, including saves and attacks. A related mechanic is the concept of skill specialties, which are used to represent specific areas of knowledge. For example, a cleric might have proficiency with the Religion skill and a specialty in holy symbols. To recognize a prayer they overheard, they’d roll religion normally adding their relevant ability score (which can vary from roll to roll in A5E) and their proficiency bonus, but if they happened across a holy symbol that they wished to identify, they’d also get a +1d4 bonus on the roll to do so.

Compatibility

By this point, I have covered a lot of new stuff that’s in A5E, but it also bills itself as being backwards-compatible with 5e, so what does that look like? 

Probably the best analogy I can come up with is console (or operating system) generations. A Playstation 5 can run things made for a Playstation 4, but the reverse is not necessarily true. That’s how you can expect Level Up to work. Put more directly, you can generally use subclasses, feats, spells, magic items, and the like unmodified with their A5E counterparts. Trying to port an archetype written for the A5E fighter back to the 2014 D&D one is far less likely to work; like the PS 5 vs PS 4 analogy, there are features in the newer system that aren’t present in the older. That’s what backward compatibility means; the newer system (or console or OS) can use the resources of the older system. 

However, that’s not the entire story; you will likely find that third-party content such as that found in products from companies like Ghostfire Games, Kobold Press, and the like works with fewer issues than material drawn from 2014 D&D books. This is because of the common baseline of the 5.1 SRD. In essence, the closer something is to that shared baseline, the more compatible it will be with things that draw from it. The 5e family tree has forked pretty dramatically at this point; D&D has Xanathar’s Guide and Tasha’s Cauldron which both include elements that the open gaming community cannot reference or account for. That means that content from them will likely have more problems than content from the PHB or (as previously mentioned) material from other publishers using the SRD; that content isn’t down one of the design “branches” very far, it’s closer to the “root.” That also means that you might need to do some tweaking if you want to bring in something from Tales of the Valiant or C7D20. As always, talk to your GM.

On the GM side, it’s way less granular than this, by the way. Your GM/DM/Narrator can pull freely from basically any reputable 5e source or variant that exists for things like adventures and monsters and they’ll work fine; there’s literally no problem at all mixing and matching monsters from the 2014 Monster Manual, the A5E Monstrous Menagerie, and MCDM’s Flee, Mortals! In the same encounter, to say nothing of different encounters in the same campaign.

Also, because an A5E character still has the same basic building blocks as a vanilla 5e one, you can run characters from both systems in the same party. I personally think that’s likely to leave the player of the vanilla 5e classes feeling like there’s less for them to do, but it’s also likely to be very campaign-dependent. I’d personally recommend against multiclassing two versions of the same or corresponding class (fighter/fighter, adept/monk, etc.) together in the same PC, but otherwise, you should be fine. 

Who A5E is NOT For

If you’re a die-hard WotC fanatic where you consider official D&D branding to be the only valid choice, obviously anything from any other publisher is not for you. If the regular version of 5e is already more than you want to deal with and you prefer a simpler, more stripped-down system, A5E is probably going to give you a headache. If you’re a hardcore OSR type and want super-lethal combat, while you should know that A5E is actually a touch more lethal than standard 5e (check out the massive damage rules) it still has death saves, healing word, and so on.

Likewise, if you have strong indie RPG sensibilities and want a mechanized social interaction system like Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits, you’re also going to be disappointed; it’s still 5e.

Licensing and Support

Finally, in the light of January of 2023, it’s worth looking at the licensing picture with A5E. And to be blunt, it’s hard to imagine that being any better in a realistic way, at least from a company that’s still a for-profit business.

EN Publishing has adopted a Paizo-like stance, releasing basically the entirety of the three core rulebooks’ mechanical content as a massive SRD that independent creators can license using the OGL, ORC, or Creative Commons licenses as they see fit. This makes for an extremely creator-friendly environment for building content for the system, and there are a number of creators doing so (including myself). EN Publishing also lists third-party products using their compatibility logo on the tools site.

In addition, there’s the Gate Pass Gazette, which is a monthly periodical of new A5E content, and EN Publishing releases a couple of hardcover supplements each year. Last year’s supplements included the Dungeon Delver’s Guide, which Polygon included in their best new tabletop RPG books of 2023 list.

Conclusion

Much has been made of the benefits to GMs in Level Up’s books like the Monstrous Menagerie and Trials & Treasure, but the new system has at least as much to offer players. If 5e is feeling stale after a decade of play, A5E could be just the ticket to refreshing your gameplay experience without reinventing the wheel.

Hitting Pause

You may have noticed that Thematic Toolkit: Hazardous Knowledge has vanished from drivethrurpg.com/. You’re also going to notice a slowdown in new PMG releases for a while.

How long? I’m not sure. Why? Licensing limbo caused by sensible reactions to WotC’s behavior during January’s OGL crisis. Just to be clear: nobody has threatened or insinuated, much less actually performed any legal or other adversarial action against me personally or PMG as a company. This is borne out of a desire to do things correctly and fix them when I’ve gotten them wrong. Read on for the specifics.

When the OGL crisis happened back in January, EN Publishing was one of the numerous companies swept up in the consequences of it. Originally, the now-removed Publish tab of https://www.levelup5e.com/ contained the LUSRDs and pointed to the spell and combat maneuver sections of the tools site for those types of content. (For those unaware: Level Up has a collection of SRD documents called LUSRDs rather than a single one like D&D does, which it just calls the SRD.)

After the whole OGL crisis in January, EN Publishing decided to move their LUSRDs to https://a5esrd.com/ and as part of that, they no longer refer to the tools site. As I understand it, on the advice of their legal counsel, they’re in the process of improving the wording of their LUSRDs to make them iron-clad and increase the degree of separation from WotC’s IP. If you know me at all, you know I am 100% on board with that. In my opinion, it was a decision I support and am grateful for. I want nothing to do with WotC going forward, and I will be glad for the wall of separation from D&D those documents will provide. Some of the new ones are already up. In fact, as of this writing, 8 of the planned 12 LUSRDs drawing on the Adventurer’s Guide are available. This is a slow process, though; as Morrus has stated, they’re running everything past legal, and as I’m sure most folks reading this are acutely aware, A5E has a lot of words!

Unfortunately, the LUSRD documents that contained the classes didn’t make the transition to the new site, and the spells ones will be brand new when they’re released, so there’s currently nothing I can actually point to that’s available for the purposes of the OGL. In light of that, I have decided to pull down the latest Thematic Toolkit which includes a reference to an A5E-specific spell; the reason I’m not pulling anything else is that the prior releases were either published under the old rules and should therefore be okay or are original material that doesn’t need to specifically quote text from the LUSRDs (as in the case of Spells from the Forgotten Vault), though obviously that references the artificer class by name (only), so if someone from EN Publishing asks me to remove it, that will also come down. I doubt that will happen; there is a previous LUSRD file that references the artificer (I have a copy); the spells are the real issue here, as they’ve never had an SRD document that lists them.

Regrettably, there’s a chance this delays MoAR Complete; that will reference spells for the elementalist and wielder classes that don't currently appear in any LUSRD or the general O5E SRD. There’s also a hefty collection of archetypes (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 in total) that should be able to point back to a widely-available LUSRD. Those old SRDs still exist, but I’d really prefer to point to something easily-downloaded. Moreover, while I do trust EN Publishing, I don’t trust WotC, so if I’m going to have something providing artificer archetypes, I want an SRD I can point to that says “no, really, this isn’t for your artificer class, WotC.”

However, I want to stress something: as of right now MoAR Complete isn’t delayed by anything in this post because it isn’t done yet. I would estimate that I’m somewhere in the general neighborhood of 60% done with the first pass of the layout file and I am going to want to review the heck out of it before I make it available for purchase anyway. This is going to have a print option, so I want to catch everything possible before release; I can fix PDFs, but I obviously can’t digitally update an already-printed book! Any errors that slip through will be stuck there. Some extra time to fine-tune and review will not go amiss.

If we’re fortunate, the LUSRDs we need to reference will drop before everything is finished. If we’re not that lucky, MoAR Complete will still release once the necessary LUSRD documents have appeared, but we might be waiting a while. 

I realize this is frustrating and disappointing news to receive (it is to write) but if you feel compelled to be annoyed with someone, pick either WotC (for putting us all in this jam in the first place) or me (for not more carefully checking the new SRDs before we even got started on MoAR Complete) but please don’t get mad at EN Publishing. They are doing the best they can for the good of the industry with very limited resources. They do not deserve your ire, but your gratitude.

The PMG Stack

This is something I’ve long wanted to actually put in one place and publish, and now that I have this site up and running, I have no excuse to put it off any longer, so here’s what I use, where I find visual assets, etc. This will just cover my actual production, because honestly if you want to know about marketing, social media, and so forth, I am not the person to ask, much less listen to. But I have learned a fair bit about what tools one can use to make a nice-looking RPG PDF.

Writing and Design Collaboration

• Google Drive and Google Docs. The industry, or at least the parts of it that I’ve touched, seems pretty well standardized on Google’s drive and doc services. I wouldn’t recommend using the free products of a tech giant for anything you want kept truly private, but for designing your TTRPG content and more importantly, sharing it with your collaborators, you really can’t go wrong here. In particular, Google’s commenting and version history features are an absolute godsend when you’re editing and revising. It also has the advantage of living entirely in the cloud, which means it’s accessible anywhere you have an internet connection, and, even more importantly automatically and constantly backed up in real time.

Layout and Graphic Design

• Affinity Publisher. As a general rule (though one of the exceptions is above!) commercial software will come with features that free software doesn’t have. That said, I don’t really like being on the subscription chain for the software I use. Affinity Publisher costs $50 assuming you don’t get it on sale and has so many features that I’ll probably never use them all. I will go over some of those in a later post, most likely, but if you want some professional layout software, just go here and pick it up. If you are just getting started and want to do your own layout, this is the first thing you should get. A word of warning: pasting from Google docs into Affinity strips the formatting off the text.

• Affinity Photo. One of the really neat features of Affinity Publisher is that if you have either or both of the other products in the suite, you can switch “personas” while in publisher, getting access to the functions of the other program without ever leaving Publisher. This is incredibly useful for things like making page backgrounds and doing those nice effects around the edges of your images. It’s available here.

• Affinity Designer. I’ll freely admit that while I own this one, I have gotten next-to-no use out of it. One of these days, I need to really sit down and go through some tutorials, because it’s extremely useful for things like designing logos and the like. However, I would definitely pick Publisher and Photo up first if you’re just getting started. Still, if you’re interested, it’s here.

Visual Assets and Art

I don’t use AI art for a number of reasons, but the one that you should consider before using it yourself is that there is a certain segment of the TTRPG customer base that will not buy anything that has even one piece of AI art in it and may even never buy anything from you again if you use it. You’re welcome to your own opinions about how fair that thinking is, but just know that it’s out there. You also really can find suitable art for reasonable prices if you’re willing to put in the work looking for it, and you won’t alienate potential customers in the process. The options are not “use AI art” or “commission something.” Spend some time looking through what’s available and think creatively. You really can get by with reasonably-priced commercial stock art.

Stock Art

This is not an exhaustive list. However, I have found the following sources to be useful and/or especially good in terms of “bang for your buck.” There are other useful sources (such as Shutterstock) out there that I can acknowledge as useful but don’t currently have any firsthand experience using.

• DriveThruRPG. Good old drivethrurpg.com has a surprising amount of good stock art for fairly reasonable prices and is a good place to start. A few things to keep in mind as you’re shopping, though: some artists allow an unlimited number of uses of the image with your purchase, others allow one use, meaning that if you want to use it again, the license requires you to buy it again. For obvious reasons, I personally stick with the former as much as possible, but I have actually repurchased a few assets so I could use them again. Because the stock art section is a bit daunting, here’s a list of creators I’ve personally found helpful:

  • Fat Goblin Games. My personal favorite source of art on the site. The license is unlimited use, the image quality is good, the prices are reasonable at the baseline, and they occasionally run a really good sale where they mark a ton of stuff down to a dollar (make sure you get their emails! The sales are usually short). I have built up an enormous library of their images that you will recognize from my products if you start sifting through their pages. The other nice thing about Fat Goblin is they have multiple artists’ work, which means different styles and types of art. Felipe Gaona’s paintings are pretty much uniformly good enough to use as cover art, for example.

  • Purple Duck Games. Another company with multiple artists and multi-use licenses. I use lots of their material too, and they have a bunch of more obscure or quirky content. When I went looking for an islander when I was working on Fiery Justice, they were the only place that had one. They’re also the only place I’ve ever seen a depiction of vegetable-mounted cavalry (I will find a use for that image some day)! Well worth checking out.

  • Vagelio. Vagelio doesn’t have quite the sheer volume of content as the creators above, but the quality is unbelievably high. The art has a really nice soft/wholesome vibe to it without being overly cartoony and often has backgrounds as well, which is always nice. Especially good selection of non-human adventurers, too. If you want catfolk or dragonborn, check Vagelio first.

  • The Forge Studios. Mostly black-and-white, but really good black-and-white, especially if you’re looking for something a little bit more “new school.” They also have a multi-use license. I have used a bunch of their art in my Thematic Toolkit products; their “clash” series has been good for B&W cover art.

  • John Latta. Unlike the creators above, John Latta’s art is a bit pricier and it’s also single-use. However, it’s also of extremely high quality. He’s another one, like Vagelio, who has a lot of good non-human characters.

  • Daniel Comerci. Another single-use licensor, and also worth it. Daniel Comerci has a good mix of color and B&W art, and I’ve used his material in Thematic Toolkit releases, notably as the cover for Cultist.

  • Dean Spencer. The guy everyone mentions when talking about stock art. Dead Spencer has a very “classic fantasy” style that would look right at home on the cover of an 80s fantasy novel or a 2nd edition D&D rulebook. He’s also a single-use licensor, but it tends to be reasonably-priced too. Always worth a look.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the good art you can find on DTRPG, but it should be enough to get you started, and should also illustrate the point that there’s quality stock art available there if you go looking.

• Freepik. I have to credit Rachel “Steampunkette” Williamson for pointing me to freepik.com. The name of the site is a bit of a misnomer; the really good material is gated behind their premium membership. There’s also an irritating amount of AI art on there, and some isn’t even obvious until you check the rest of the poster’s portfolio. The “exclude AI art” feature is basically useless as well. Despite these criticisms, I still think it’s worth the subscription cost, though. Why? Tithi Luadthong and Liu Zishan. Between just the two of them, there are literal hundreds of amazing pieces of fantasy and sci-fi artwork. There are slightly better selections for both of them available elsewhere, but nowhere with license terms as favorable as Freepik. They also have a nice selection of fonts, page decorations, and so on. You also get access to Flaticon as part of the same subscription. It’s not nearly as useful as freepik, but you’ll see a few icons from it in upcoming PMG releases.

• Itch.io. It’s not as easy to navigate as some of the sites above, but itch.io has some fantastic bargains to be had. In particular, if you like pixel art, you could probably do a really cool supplement with just pixel art. Two notable specific things to be aware of:

  • This bonkers asset pack. Yeah, a bunch of it isn’t super useful for TTRPGs, but there’s a huge number of icons and inventory item packs that could be used for small spot illustrations, magic items, etc. You’ll see some content from this pack in a future PMG release.

  • Feral indie Studios. They have some fantastic art packs from Charles Ferguson-Avery. It’s a very specific style, but high-quality and a good value. I have other (very positive) things to say about their supplements too, but that’ll be another post someday.

• Pixabay. Pixabay has one huge advantage: everything on there is free. That also means that there is a lot of junk (and a growing amount of AI art) but I found the cover image for Mortalist and the art for the Atonement destiny on there. You will spend a lot of time searching, but there are some quality images on there. There’s also a decent amount of corner and page decorations, which can be nice to have.

Fonts

• Myfonts. I have only purchased one commercial font so far, but it was from here. A solid selection of commercial fonts good for logos and headers.

• Fontspace. Another good place for fonts that has a feature I absolutely love: the ability to filter by license type. I found the font I use for most of my covers now here.

• Google Fonts. Not a place to find more “novel” fonts, but if you want a nice, clean body font, look no further. I got the fonts I used on this site (and in my most recent products) from there.

Brushes for Affinity

You don’t have to be making your own illustrations for brush packs to be handy! In particular, they are good for making custom backgrounds (often a dust, smoke or fog brush can give you amazingly attractive results there) or texturing the edges of the images you use.

• The Official Affinity Site. Lots of interesting brush packs to be found here; I particularly like this one, this one, this one, and this one. That last one has an eraser brush that’s worth it alone, IMHO. It’s really useful for making the kind of borders you often see in game products. Be sure to grab the free brush pack from Dreamphotography down at the bottom of the add-ons page, too. It has some dust brushes in it that I’ve found very useful.

• Creative Market. If you want more brushes than you’ll ever know what to do with, look no further than this massive collection. I’ve barely scratched the surface of these, but I have plans for some of them in an upcoming release.

Final Thoughts

This is probably a daunting amount of content for a new creator, so I want to stress again here at the end that you needn’t dig into all of it right away! However, as you continue to make more and more content, you will find the use for more and more assets, and I’d have loved to have a curated list like this as I was finding things out. If you’ve got a strong idea of what you want to do for your first TTRPG product, I would suggest buying an affinity license ($50), getting Google Docs going (if you don’t already have it) and buy a little stock art as needed.

Welcome to the PMG Blog!

New site!

This is one of the things I’ve been wanting a website for, so I am glad to finally have this all set up. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll weigh in on various topics about TTRPGs and PMG. Hopefully I can keep it interesting and worth the time to read. I have a number of topics picked out already, so watch this space. It won’t be long until you see something more substantive than a welcome message here!

-Peter