Over the last year I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog because I have been utterly and totally consumed by one project: Level Up.

It just launched on Kickstarter today and funded over $40,000 in 18 minutes!

What’s Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition? A backwards compatible standalone RPG that greatly expands the breadth and scope of the game, designed by a diverse team of people from across the world, guided by the feedback of thousands of playtesters.

What does that mean, exactly?

• Three books: the Adventurer’s Guide, Trials & Treasure, and Monstrous Menagerie.
• The original D&D 5E race and backgrounds have been replaced with an in depth four stage origins system: your heritage (what your parents were), your culture (how you were raised), your background (what you did before adventuring), and your destiny (putting more weight on inspiration and rooting your adventurer’s development in the campaign they are in).
• Every class in the Adventurer’s Guide has been thoroughly revised and there’s a new marshal class.
• Every pillar of play—combat, exploration, and social—is addressed with new class features that matter for more than just when initiative has been rolled.
• Speaking of combat: that’s more satisfying too! The Adventurer’s Guide has a chapter of over 100 combat maneuvers for martial classes!
• Trials & Treasure has scores of exploration challenges with a journey system that makes every part of a quest memorable. How about rewards to hand out after battle is over? This book has more than 500 magic items—all the originals you know and love plus a whole bunch of new ones. That includes a few sentient magic items and a whole slew of unique artifacts!
• Think your bestiary could use a boost? Monstrous Menagerie has over 600 revamped creatures in it and each entry is filled with useful tools like treasure tables, what other monsters they might be encountered with, signs of a creature’s presence, and legends and lore for adventurers that want to make an ability check to know more about a creature.
• New weapons, new armor, new materials, new equipment and crafting systems (magical, mundane, and machined!), new skills (Culture and Engineering), new feats (plus many you’ll recognize and synergy feats to become a Shadowdancer and the like), world actions, strongholds, followers, ability check criticals and failures, new spells (and rare spells), new diseases, new poisons, mental stress effects, a dual system for exhaustion (fatigue represents physical suffering whereas strife represents mental suffering) as well as other new conditions (confused, rattled, slowed), and so much more.
• Mythological Figures & Maleficent Monsters has been updated for Level Up, and there’s an Adventures in ZEITGEIST campaign setting book coming in 2022!
• SO MUCH MORE! The Level Up website does a much better job of laying it all out! –> https://www.levelup5e.com/about

Check out the Kickstarter page and get your pledge in (especially if you want the special covers—only available from the Kickstarter project and initial print run).
If you’ve been playing 5E for a long time and are ready to make your game more interesting, this is a surefire way to do it! ^_^