Level Up (A5E) 13 weeks to go…

Man, that looks like an impressive and gorgeous array of books. Looks like EN is pulling a Paizo and doing D&D 5.5, eh?

I just might dish out dough for this...

Morrus said:

The current plan is to release three books on launch, with the ZEITGEIST setting book a bit later.

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Morrus, do you have any idea yet what a Retailer Tier might look like for the Kickstarter? (I can wait the weeks if not).

I'm toying with the idea of backing it (I sometimes, but rarely use kickstarter - mostly I'll just order games from my distributors).

My store won't go through a lot of them (we're not a big store, just an old-school comic store that is 1/3 a game store) but I'd like to give a try at hand-selling it to D&D players. I teach and Demo a lot of D&D (pre-pandemic) but I've never really tried to push 3rd party stuff before. I don't know how well it'll go over, but I practically live on ENWorld in my spare time, so I'd like to try to support your efforts.

I'll also be trying to get my personal IRL group to give it a try, but that's another story.

So actually got around to looking up MF&MM and it is NOT what I thought it was, that is so cool It does make me a bit concerned though. A lot of Level Up's strength in the early game, much like Pathfinder's was, is going to be backwards compatibility. Which is FANTASTIC for acting as a bridge to get people out of the pit that is o5e. But it does concern me as far as, with not being able to actually officially use any of that content in published books, MF&MM is gonna be limited to the Level Up Core Rulebook. Which when compared to the o5e Core Rulebook is going to be far more robust for sure, but when factoring in like, UA and XGE, that's gonna be asking the Core to do some HEAVY Subclass lifting. Of course, LU Subclasses are something we've seen nothing from, would love to see what those are looking like, both in quantity and quality. Interested to see if LU Subclasses offer choices like the base Classes or are static like o5e's.

HeroicVanguard said:

So actually got around to looking up MF&MM and it is NOT what I thought it was, that is so cool It does make me a bit concerned though. A lot of Level Up's strength in the early game, much like Pathfinder's was, is going to be backwards compatibility. Which is FANTASTIC for acting as a bridge to get people out of the pit that is o5e. But it does concern me as far as, with not being able to actually officially use any of that content in published books, MF&MM is gonna be limited to the Level Up Core Rulebook. Which when compared to the o5e Core Rulebook is going to be far more robust for sure, but when factoring in like, UA and XGE, that's gonna be asking the Core to do some HEAVY Subclass lifting. Of course, LU Subclasses are something we've seen nothing from, would love to see what those are looking like, both in quantity and quality. Interested to see if LU Subclasses offer choices like the base Classes or are static like o5e's.

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I'm not entirely sure what that means, but you can use any MF&MM monster in an O5E game.

Morrus said:

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but you can use any MF&MM monster in an O5E game.

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Mostly just curious to see how Subclasses in Level Up look at launch since, I'm assuming, for a Level Up Product you don't have the ability to use, say, the Swashbuckler Rogue from o5e, since it's not part of the SRD?

HeroicVanguard said:

Mostly just curious to see how Subclasses in Level Up look at launch since, I'm assuming, for a Level Up Product you don't have the ability to use, say, the Swashbuckler Rogue from o5e, since it's not part of the SRD?

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Not the exact words, but we can write our own equivalent.

Any chance we can see an updated list of archetypes? I know you were having some issues with names for a few of them; I'd love to see what's been decided upon.

thom_likes_gaming said:

Man, that looks like an impressive and gorgeous array of books. Looks like EN is pulling a Paizo and doing D&D 5.5, eh?

I just might dish out dough for this...

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As someone who has had a (minor) role on the design team: more like 5.75 or even 5.95.

The amount of amazing new stuff is in-cred-i-ble.

I put it this way in the private discussion with some of the other folks who have worked on it. I've been collecting third-party supplemental products to do various things that O5e doesn't do for years. MCDM's Strongholds and Followers for ... strongholds and followers. Nord Games and Astrolago Press's crafting systems. Arcanist Press's Ancestry and Culture. A PDF product from Kobold Press that more meaningfully differentiates the weapons in the game from the O5e baseline.

I won't need any of it any more once Level Up comes out. And I'll also have more spells, more magic items, more monsters, the Destiny system, a hugely more supported exploration pillar, and various other improvements.

I'll give you another fun example since Morrus has kindly released us from our NDAs.

One of the most impactful changes to Level Up on a lore level has been the rethinking of what role alignment plays. Most things don't have them any more, which means that a lot of monsters had to be re-thought. A lot of designers picked various monsters to do new lore for (I'm interested to see what the others did!) fairly early on, but I came in late and picked up the "leftovers." One of those was grimlocks, a monster I have never actually used as a GM.

In O5e, grimlocks are basically CHUDS; they're stupid, vicious, cannibalistic, and sycophantic toward mind flayers. That meant that several things had to go. First, obviously, we couldn't use mind flayers or connect anything to them because of intellectual property restrictions with the OGL. We also have been trying to get away from portraying humanoids as stupid and evil from birth both for sensitivity reasons and, frankly, for utilitarian ones. If the vast majority of the entities in your monster books can be allies or enemies, it gives GMs more flexibility in storytelling, and to paraphrase Paul, the lead guy on the monster book, it effectively increases the size of the book because of that versatility. Almost anything can be friend or foe, regardless of the party's moral or ethical leanings. To use one quick example: it allows for things like bridge trolls. O5e trolls are CE balls of hungry murder. They're not going to maintain a bridge and collect tolls, they're just going to rip you to shreds and eat you.

So with those considerations in mind, we redesigned the grimlocks. We took a page from the morlocks of H.G. Welles's The Time Machine and gave them a bunch of underground machinery to tend to, but the morlocks have their own baggage, so that's about as much as we took. What we wound up with was a society descended from a group of human engineers trapped by a mining accident who managed to survive and ultimately thrive underground. Their machinery can stabilize the geology of entire regions, effectively "shutting off" volcanoes and earthquakes, preventing the ocean from flooding the underlands, etc. But as you'd expect, they're pretty protective of that machinery. So it's still dangerous to wander into grimlock territory unannounced, because you're very likely to provoke a violent security response.

At the same time, if you make contact with them on their terms, they're not unreasonable, they have a vast underground society, and they're technologically-advanced. So they could be a critical ally against some large-scale threat, and it would make sense for them to be. I'm actually pondering writing a supplement for Level Up where they're another playable option. Much like the redesigned orcs that you may have seen in the Origins playtest document, they're now much more than a monster.

I assume that means that those of us who read through the monster playtest doc are also released from the NDA.

I really liked the redesigned grimlocks! I loved that they were weird tech-based, and I'm having great fun imagining what their cities are like, considering they'd be designed for and by blind people (even if they have blindsight, they still can't see in the way most others can, and their architecture and design would reflect that).

The only complaint I had is that they were still using things like clubs when they should totally be using vibro-axes or stuff like that.