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.
