My preference has always been to focus on the positives and refrain from criticising people or products. It’s in that spirit that I want to review the Tales of the Valiant Starter Set from SFG and Kobold Press. I want to like this product. I do like a lot of stuff in it… but it’s riddled with errors and for beginners this will make it suboptimal.

This is a chunky boxed set aimed at beginners and retailing at about £45. When I got it, I was impressed by production quality of the box and books. You get a set of A5 booklets including four adventures to take characters from Level 1 to Level 4. There are pre-gen character sheets, dice, maps, tokens, and four plastic miniatures of the pre-gens.

The problems became apparent when I started to read and use the set. To be clear: I have tried to play the solo adventure (more on the “tried” to come) and ran the first adventure for some friends this weekend. We had a good time playing the adventure and enjoyed Tales of the Valiant as a system… but oh boy, it was hard to use the starter set to learn.

“Welcome to Roleplaying Games” is the first booklet and it does an above-average job of introducing the concept of RPGs to the beginner. I was impressed with the first 11 pages of that booklet, in fact, because it didn’t overly confuse the roleplaying game with storytelling and seemed to be advocating a good approach to play. Kudos on that book!

Problems arise when you try to play the “Introductory Adventures”. You are on-boarded with a solo adventure and then encouraged to run the first adventure with your friends. The first problem is that the solo adventure isn’t. Next, you’ll find yourself dealing with writing errors that confused even a 45 year veteran GM. Finally, the first adventure is very average.

Problems in the text and with the maps riddle this product. They are all simple to fix and presumably result from rushed production and the lack of a good editor. Yet for a product aimed at beginners, this is a fatal flaw. How can a newbie (and I run games for 12-year old newbies) be expected to use a product with mistakes in it and not get confused?

In the “solo adventure”, on page 8, you learn about ability checks. Your character, Cabbage, needs to use Strength to open a stuck door. The text walks the beginner through how to make a check and says Cabbage’s ability modifier is +2. But on the character sheet his STR modifier is +3. Which is correct? (It’s the character sheet). This is but one such error.

The map in the book for the first proper adventure as a compass rose on it. The text describes the direction of the ritual room as being to “the east”. The map shows that as to the south. Examination of the text and the map suggests that the compass rose needs rotating 90 degrees. It’s exactly the sort of thing that throws a beginner for a loop.

But my favourite – and most irritating – mistake is the mismatch between the artwork in the books and the text. There’s a character called “the wizard Rantipole”. Check out the description in the book:

“Rantipole is a beastkin, who looks like a furry humanoid with the head of a rabbit.”

Really? Then why is the art work on every page he is mentioned – including his stat block – shown as a friendly older gentle human with a nice moustache?

The use of stock monster images from the TotV Monster Vault also causes some confusion, such as the Mimic that is shown as a barrel when it’s impersonating a different object. But you can forgive that because, you know, art is expensive. But Rantipole? That’s just laughable!

Let’s talk about the four pre-gens while we’re complaining: the sheets have conflicting totals of GP on them; the Kobold Warlock has a pseudodragon but there’s no rules for it in the Starter Set. There’s no token for it either, even though it can fight in battle and go up to 100 feet from the character. I could go on and list more (minor) errors. Let’s be kind.

Back to the solo adventure that isn’t. The intention is to provide a solo experience to acclimate the prospective GM to how to run a game. Instead of the expected “choose your own adventure” format, this is (really) a dialogue with the reader using a worked series of examples. If they hadn’t have described it as a “solo adventure” (page 4) then it’d be fine.

Adventure it is not: it’s a linear series of tasks that Cabbage (the hero) has to perform on his first day as a wizard’s apprentice. The first task is to get a broom out of a stuck cupboard. Next, he has to label some potion bottles. Third, feed the Quasit. You get the idea. It’s a vehicle for teaching you how to make ability checks.

And that’s my biggest problem: it’s boring because it reduces roleplaying down to “roll d20 and add a bonus”. Having laid out so beautifully the possibility of RPGs in the first booklet, the execution of the adventures makes it all about rolling d20. Choices are limited, in fact, and it feel like a scripted story in which you roll dice along the way.

Finally, the first proper adventure is basically average. It’s a linear march through some rooms with programmed fights. The goal is to escape the dungeon and it’s clearly designed to give opportunity to learn the rules. This is fine… but not very well done. Looking at it through the lens of the beginner, though, it’s confusing.

What happens if (like us) you only have two players but the dungeon is designed for four? The book doesn’t tell us. We ran it as written – deliberately to be faithful to the designer’s intent as much as we could – and we TPKed in Location 6. Why? Because the four monsters should have been one per adventurer in the party (based on the CR guidance in Monster Vault)

We retconned the scene at that point and I added a Potion of Healing to Rantipole as an NPC to allow for some healing. I mean, what beginner dungeon doesn’t have a Potion of Healing? Even the GM’s Guide tells you to give those out liberally to 1st level characters. Without rules for the Pseudodragon, the Warlock was a little weaker too, which sucked.

There are other design decisions I question, such as how the two little Kobolds with the cart in the sewer got down there when the only exit is the Mimic door? Why does the Mimic door try to talk to the PCs? I mean, what’s it’s motivation in asking permission to eat you? And let’s not get into the direction of the water flow being wrong.

Overall… we enjoyed the adventure! We made it work and fumbled our way through the scenario. This was in spite of all the challenges and problems we experienced. My big question is whether a true beginner would have a) the patience, and b) the information to fix the problems in the text and figure it out. I suspect they’ll conclude it’s a crap game.

The best thing in the box is the “Rules Reference” booklet because it is an A5 condensed set of the core TotV rules. I will carry to the table every session I run – for this alone it’s worth £45 to get the boxed set. Yes, really. You get dice too, and I like that you get two d20s. The miniatures are obviously lovely. The tokens are useful.

The main advice I’d give to a beginner (that’s not in the adventure) is to NOT put the beautifully printed copy of the dungeon map on the table. This spoils the whole “explore the dungeon” part of the RPG experience. At least tell them to cover up the map and reveal it in pieces as they explore!

Yes, it’s a lovely product. Flawed, certainly, but most of the problems could be fixed with simple textual editing. Just make Rantipole an old man because the art is cool and making him a rabbit so you can call the adventure, “Down the Rabbit Hole” is lame. The only thing the product would benefit from that’s missing is twenty tokens for Luck.

So there you have it. I hope the criticism is constructive.

Game on!