Tales of the Valiant: Kobold Press's Answer to 5e
On January 5, 2023, a leaked document from Wizards of the Coast threatened to detonate the Open Gaming License — the legal framework that had allowed third-party publishers to create D&D-compatible content for over two decades. Within a week, the tabletop RPG industry was in open revolt. Within that same week, Kobold Press — one of the largest and most respected third-party D&D publishers in the world — announced Project Black Flag: a plan to build an entirely new, open, subscription-free fantasy RPG ruleset. The company's sales quadrupled in January alone. By May of that year, the project had a name: Tales of the Valiant.
This is the story of how a crisis became a catalyst, and how a publisher best known for monster books and adventure modules decided to build a complete alternative to 5th Edition D&D — one that walks a razor-thin line between compatibility and independence.
Kobold Press: The Long Road to Black Flag
To understand Tales of the Valiant, you need to understand Kobold Press. Wolfgang Baur, the company's founder and CEO, launched Open Design in 2006 as an experiment in crowdfunded tabletop RPG publishing — years before Kickstarter existed. The first product, Steam & Brass, was set in the city of Zobeck, which would eventually become the foundation for Kobold Press's signature campaign setting, Midgard.
Baur had spent years working on Dragon magazine and at TSR and Wizards of the Coast before striking out on his own. In 2007, he launched Kobold Quarterly, a print magazine that filled the gap left when Paizo stopped publishing Dragon and Dungeon. Over the next decade, the company grew from patron-funded PDF adventures into a major publisher of hardcover supplements. The Tome of Beasts (2016) became one of the best-selling third-party 5e products of all time, offering DMs hundreds of new creatures that filled gaps the official Monster Manual left wide open. Creature Codex, the Book of Ebon Tides, and the sprawling Midgard Worldbook followed.
By 2023, Kobold Press was not just a third-party publisher. It was an institution. Which is why its response to the OGL crisis carried so much weight.
The OGL Crisis and the Birth of Project Black Flag
The OGL 1.0a, released by Wizards of the Coast in 2000, was a foundational document for the modern RPG industry. It allowed anyone to publish content using the core D&D rules, and it powered the d20 boom of the early 2000s, the Pathfinder revolution of 2009, and the explosion of 5e third-party content from 2014 onward.
When leaked documents in January 2023 revealed that Wizards planned to revoke or restrict the OGL, the fallout was immediate and severe. Publishers whose businesses depended on the license faced an existential threat. Kobold Press, whose entire product line was built on 5e compatibility, was among the most exposed.
On January 10, 2023, Kobold Press announced Project Black Flag — an open, available, subscription-free core fantasy RPG system. It was a declaration of independence, and the community responded. The Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter launched on May 23, 2023, with a $100,000 goal. It closed on June 23 having raised $1,151,914 from 10,057 backers — Kobold Press's first million-dollar campaign.
What Is Tales of the Valiant?
Tales of the Valiant (ToV) is a standalone fantasy RPG built on the Black Flag Roleplaying engine. It is published under the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) and Creative Commons 4.0, ensuring that the rules will remain open and available regardless of any single company's business decisions.
At a mechanical level, ToV is recognizably 5e. If you have played D&D 5th Edition, you can sit down at a ToV table and start playing within minutes. The core resolution mechanic — roll a d20, add modifiers, compare to a target number — is identical. The six ability scores, the proficiency bonus, the advantage/disadvantage system, hit dice, spell slots — all present and accounted for. This is by design. Kobold Press was not trying to reinvent the wheel. They were trying to build a better wheel and make sure nobody could take it away.
The system ships as two core books: the Player's Guide and the Monster Vault. A Game Master's Guide followed via a separate Kickstarter campaign.
How ToV Differs from 5e
The differences between ToV and D&D 5e are deliberate and focused. They address specific pain points that the 5e community has discussed for years, without departing so far from the source material that existing content becomes incompatible.
Lineage and Heritage replace the old "race" and "subrace" system. Lineage represents your biology — elf, dwarf, human, beastkin — while Heritage represents the culture you grew up in. This separation means a dwarf raised among elves plays differently from a dwarf raised in a mountain hold, and it removes racial ability score bonuses entirely. It is an elegant solution to a design problem that D&D 5e itself eventually addressed, but ToV arrived at its answer first.
The Luck system replaces Inspiration with something far more interesting. When you fail a roll, you earn a Luck point — a consolation mechanic that means bad luck at the table eventually becomes a resource. Players can accumulate up to 5 Luck points and spend them to boost rolls or, for 3 points, reroll a d20 entirely. It is a small change with large downstream effects on table feel.
The Mechanist class is ToV's headline addition — a non-spellcasting, Intelligence-based martial class built around crafting, invention, and a feature called Shard of Creation, a transformable piece of magical matter that can become a weapon, shield, or tool. It fills the Artificer-shaped hole in the 5e class lineup without being a spellcaster, which is a meaningful design distinction.
ToV also includes 13 base classes total (the 12 core D&D classes plus the Mechanist), each with streamlined subclass structures and rebalanced features. For DMs tracking the growing roster of character options across their campaigns — whether official 5e, ToV, or third-party — a tool like Lorekeeper's character management system helps keep everything organized.
The Open RPG Creative License
Perhaps the most significant thing about Tales of the Valiant is not any single mechanical change but its legal foundation. The ORC License, developed in partnership with Paizo and other publishers, is designed to be irrevocable. No single company owns it. No corporate board can decide to change its terms. The Black Flag Reference Document (BFRD) is available for free at bfrd.net, and anyone can publish compatible content under the same terms.
This matters because it changes the calculus for every publisher, homebrew creator, and DM in the ecosystem. Content created for Tales of the Valiant is, by definition, content that can never be pulled out from under you. In a post-OGL-crisis world, that is not just a feature. It is the feature.
Where It Stands Now
As of early 2026, Kobold Press has celebrated 20 years of publishing. Tales of the Valiant has established itself as the most prominent 5e-compatible alternative RPG on the market, with a growing library of adventures, supplements, and third-party support. The Monster Vault pairs naturally with existing 5e bestiaries, and the cross-compatibility means that products like Kobold Press's own Tome of Beasts creatures work seamlessly across both systems.
Whether you view Tales of the Valiant as a competitor to D&D or as a safety net for the broader 5e ecosystem depends on your perspective. What is undeniable is that the OGL crisis forced the industry to ask hard questions about ownership, openness, and the future of shared game systems — and Kobold Press answered with a million-dollar bet that openness would win.