In September 2024 we presented two offers featuring Level Up!, the Advanced 5th Edition FRPG from EN Publishing. To provide a good foundation for this well-grounded and distinctive take on Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, we brought back the core rulebooks in our revived November 2022 Level Up Bundle. And its all-new companion, Level Up Adventures, added recent sourcebooks and adventures plus the Starter Box.
Level Up is a complete, independent rules set backwards-compatible with D&D 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 dozens of new character archetypes. Martial maneuvers give non-spellcasters more options in combat. The stronghold system provides 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 existing 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 existing campaign. Play existing 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.
LEVEL UP BUNDLE [from Nov 2022]
This revived November 2022 Level Up Bundle had the core rulebooks and key supplements. If you’re new to Advanced 5th Edition, start here. with all three A5E core rulebooks – the Adventurer’s Guide, Trials & Treasures, and Monstrous Menagerie – along with the introductory adventure Memories of Holdenshire and the Narrator’s Screen.
LEVEL UP ADVENTURES [all-new]
Take your A5E campaign to new levels with the recent supplements and campaigns we presented this Level Up Adventures bundle. This offer’s Starter Collection included the complete digital Level Up Starter Box (with three new adventures, pregenerated player characters, maps, and play aids) along with two anthologies of new A5E material from EN Publishing’s house magazine: the Gate Pass Gazette Annual 2022 and Annual 2023.
Those who paid more than this offer’s threshold (average) price also got this offer’s entire Bonus Collection with three more titles worth an additional $70, including the Dungeon Delver’s Guide sourcebook, the spacefaring steampunk campaign setting Adventures in Zeitgeist, and the epic adventure trilogy To Save a Kingdom.
