One of My 5E Shelves Got Converted Today

One of my 5E shelves got converted to my Palladium games today.

Most of that whole shelf went into a closet. WotC D&D. The other 5E-alikes. Event settings, version books, the spines I was supposed to keep current. Boxed. What is left on the open shelves from that family is Level Up A5E. That one earned the space. One game is enough, if it is the best one you actually have.

Hardcovers and special editions sit on bookstands, face out, like a hobby store display. Dice live in clear plastic hex containers that could also be used as candy jars. Between two free-standing bookends, the collection I display is Palladium Fantasy. Around that are my SDC games, Heroes Unlimited, Dead Reign, Beyond the Supernatural, and others.

Palladium Fantasy just says so much more to me than any version of 5E. The game comes with a world. Mapped, and still unexplored. A sandbox that has lasted intact and true to the original intent longer than any D&D setting I have watched go through edition rewrites. D&D settings get new covers, a new tone pass, a new set of what you are allowed to say about the place. Last edition’s setting is now something you farm for ideas and NPCs. The focus never sits still long enough for a place to remain a place, and it always changes what we are used to, making it a planar-hopping destination.

I am beginning to loathe D&D's multiverse model. It makes every campaign world a footnote and unimportant. After a while, only the planes matter. It has been this way since D&D 4E, where the campaign settings were glorified MMO starting zones to level 10, and then from 11-30, you were planar explorers and god-killers.

The Palladium Fantasy world did not get that treatment. The Western Empire is still the Western Empire. The Land of the Damned is still a hole in the map you do not walk into unless you mean it. The Old Kingdom is ruins, not a content drop. You can pick up a book from 1996 and a book from last year, and they are talking about the same continent. Nobody sent the setting back to committee. Nobody revised this and made the heroes look like Derek Zoolander at Ren Faire.

A world that does not fight you

This is the same argument I have been circling since January, just with the books standing up where I can see them.

WotC 5E trains you to look inward. Subclass, feat stack, spell list, multiclassing, and item slots. The world is a backdrop for the character build. If the build isn't singing, the session feels empty, so the designers keep feeding it. New subclasses. Nine more fire spells. Another pile of magic junk. The setting gets a new version because the book and new digital VTT files need selling.

The characters follow the same curve. Too weak at first level. Best around fifth, when the subclass has arrived, and the math still cares about a sword. Past tenth, they are overpowered and uninteresting. You are not playing a person anymore. You are managing a multi-page spreadsheet that keeps getting bigger. The early game lures you in with a false sense of simplicity, while the late game's character sheets feel like bags in an MMO that you can never empty. You keep hoarding junk powers, spells, abilities, and dozens of things that you feel obliged to write down, and that keep slowing down play as you search the sheet to figure out your actions this turn.

Palladium characters feel like mission-ready experts. They are capable when they hit the table. A knight can already be a knight, and a longbowman can already patrol a road. A witch is already a problem in a village pretending she isn't there. They have a comfort to them, like a favorite pair of shoes. Most of the power is already on the character, and you do not need a +2 whatever hanging off every slot for those people to matter, and you do not need five levels before the character is allowed to be itself.

Magic items in this game are rare, and they change the story when they show up. You are not hauling wagon trains of coin out of a hole just to buy the next piece of the character build. The world is not a dungeon with better lighting, nor a hex-grid to roll random tables for.

That is why the shelf conversion felt like a relief instead of a chore. I was not organizing books. I was putting a favorite friend, my Palladium books, back where I can reach them.

One book, still the same book

WotC puts out a setting book and Palladium Games puts out a setting book; what is the difference?

The WotC book is an event, and then the line goes quiet. When the next edition arrives, the event gets revised. You are expected to use the new hardcover and farm the old editions for the towns, the maps, and the adventures the new book did not bother to keep in print. Or you wait until those adventures come back in a compilation, a greatest-hits stack, like a video game with the old levels unlocked in a menu. The world is a version plus a reading list plus a season pass. That's why my 5E books went in the closet; they failed as a place you could come back to without doing archaeology.

The Palladium book lasts, and it is not rewritten to match a new brand version of the game. The second edition did not throw the continent away. A world book from thirty years ago is still legal at the table without a conversion appendix for the setting itself. An adventure from thirty years ago is still the same adventure. You are not keeping two Forgotten Realms in your head, one official and one archaeological, and you are not waiting for the dungeon to be remastered so it counts again. Nor did the continent size change, like it did during one of the world revisions in FR.

"Mapped yet unexplored" still matters because of that. The core book gives you a continent and enough names to start a fight. Later books add regions without declaring the last map obsolete. There are still blank spaces. Rumors still contradict each other. Some places still have the official answer: "go find out." Negative space only stays useful if nobody comes back in five years and paves it for a relaunch.

I do not want a cover version and a greatest hits adventure. I want a border kingdom and a road that did not stay open. I want that continent to still be itself when I come back in ten years. I want the Land of the Damned generator on pages 108–121 of that old book to still work on a Thursday night when I need a monster, and I do not want to invent one from a list of challenge ratings. The monsters are what they are, and that is fine.

The display is the argument

Face-out hardcovers look like a store display because that is how I want to think about these games. Not as a backlog. Not as "the system I used to play before I bought the new one." These displayed hardcovers are the games that are on my table. Every shelf of mine is a love letter to a game, and they are filled with dice, figures, art books, and all sorts of fun things. Keeping my shelves looking fun is part of the hobby for me.

The dice jars are a joke and also not a joke. Dice should look ready to be used, not buried in a bag behind a row of books you never pull. If the books are facing out, you pick one. If you pick one, you play that one. You do not need three near-identical 5E cores and a closet to justify that. You need a focus and a reason the adventure cannot wait another night. We need to see where the story goes!

Palladium Fantasy is first on that shelf because it is the cleanest version of fantasy gaming for me. World first and character second. The game does not expect to be some licensed IP romp with characters from the video game. It hands you a map and gets out of the way, and the story is mine to tell and share.

A5E stays. It is the best 5E-shaped game I have. The rest of that family can live in the closet, or be played through PDFs. One of those is enough. The rest of the shelf is for worlds that were allowed to stay themselves. If I pull ToV out again, it will be because the PDFs made this a compelling and "must-show" game for me. It is in the upstairs closet, not the garage, so there is hope.

Palladium and Rifts took over the two shelves. Welcome home.