In November 2022 we presented the all-new Level Up Bundle featuring Level Up!, the standalone Advanced 5E FRPG from EN Publishing.
Level Up is a complete, independent rules set backwards-compatible with Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. For those who like 5E but want extra crunch, Level Up enhances the game with deeper, more flexible options. The character creation system encourages diverse heritages, and you make meaningful and important choices about your character at every advancement level. There’s a reworked ranger class, a new warlord class, and three dozen new character archetypes. Martial maneuvers give non-spellcasters more options in combat. The stronghold system gives high-level characters more ways to spend their hard-earned (or ill-gotten) gold. Level Up adds a complete exploration system, thematic journey rules, new combat conditions, distinctive weapons and armor, crafting of magic items, monster templates, and improved Challenge Ratings for adversaries.
All the A5E titles also work as supplements to current Fifth Edition books. If you just want the monsters, or the class overhauls, or the exploration rules, you can drop the A5E creations smoothly into your ongoing campaign. You can also play all published 5E adventures in Level Up without conversion. EN Publishing offers lots of free A5E downloads and many free online aids at a5E.tools.
“We’re all massive, massive, massive fans of D&D,” publisher Russ “Morrus” Morrissey told Polygon‘s Samantha Nelson in a July 2022 interview. “It just got to a stage where we’d like if there was a little more depth to it, if there was just a little more to look forward to as you level up your fighter. We were finding that was happening across all aspects of play. We thought if we felt like that, there must be other people out there who felt the same way.”
For the Level Up project, Russ leveraged the large and enthusiastic community at the leading D&D fan site, EN World. The EN World A5E forum, started in August 2020 and still vigorous, covers hundreds of topics. Particularly note the 16 A5E Survey topics where designers collected playtest feedback from thousands of EN Worlders. The “Broad Outlines” summary exemplifies how these surveys conditioned the final game. Users didn’t want a new initiative system or social-combat mechanics; they were lukewarm toward psionics and dual cinematic-gritty combat modes; and they were strongly polarized about prestige classes, removing alignment, and Immortal-level play.
The large team of A5E designers spent more than a year navigating these sometimes choppy waters. The October 2021 Level Up Kickstarter campaign showed off their work handsomely. – And to great success: 6,135 backers contributed £700,000.
This Level Up Bundle included all three corebooks, adventures, and play aids for an unbeatable bargain price. There were six complete titles in our Level Up Collection (retail value $105) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including all three A5E core rulebooks – the Adventurer’s Guide, Trials & Treasures, and Monstrous Menagerie; the Narrator’s Screen; the introductory adventure Memories of Holdenshire; and Issue #0 of EN Publishing’s A5E house magazine, the Gate Pass Gazette.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this Level Up offer’s pandemic-related charity, Direct Relief. Direct Relief sends protective gear and critical care medications to health workers, with emergency deliveries to medical facilities across the US and to regional response agencies across the world.
