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Gems of A5E's Trials and Treasures

by Mike on 7 April 2025

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With 5e having expanded beyond just D&D, we find ourselves with several game master guides including:

The D&D 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide
The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide
Tales of the Valiant's Game Master's Guide
Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasures

This article digs down into Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasures and the gems contained within.

A5e's Trials and Treasures is fantastic. Like the three other game master guides, it includes advice for understanding types of players, building adventures, building worlds, session zero and safety tools, and other common advice to help game masters build their games.

The sections below I think are particularly noteworthy.

Tab Your Books

I'm a huge fan of tabbing your books – putting little reusable adhesive tabs to mark the parts of the book you're most likely to use at the table. Use the sections below as a guide for which sections to tab but also tab your own most-valued sections as needed. I like to start at the back of the book and work forward, putting tabs on the outside edge from the bottom to the top. This way, when you're done, your book is tabbed from top to bottom from the front to the back.

Encounter Building

A5e's Trials and Treasures pre-dates the Lazy Encounter Benchmark but the designers of Trials and Treasures use a similar and compatible system that works just as easily. You can find these encounter building guidelines on page 40. They include adjustments for building easy, medium, hard, deadly, and impossible challenges. The advice in this section is very good.

Encounter Elements

Page 48 begins a section on various effects you can drop into an encounter to make things interesting. Pools of acid, brown mold, crowds, extreme cold, and so on. The book includes five pages of such options and they're worth reviewing regularly so you know what you have.

Exploration

The exploration rules in Trials and Treasures, beginning on page 53, are my favorite from all four game master guides. They include advice for building travel encounters, a system for managing resources called "supply", and fourteen possible roles and activities the characters might take during a journey.

Random Encounters

Part of the exploration section includes 37 pages of random encounters for more than a dozen different regions with tables for each tier beginning on page 64. This section also includes "dungeon" tables often missing from books of random encounters. Each encounter section includes possible weather and changes to the various exploration activities. These tables include not just monster encounters but exploration encounters as well, tied to other sections in the book.

These random encounter tables also tie directly to the encounter tables in each monster in the Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie – a fantastic book of monsters for 5e that includes potential encounters at various tiers for most of the monsters in the book.

The book also includes d100 tables of social and travel encounters.

Exploration Challenges

Chapter 5 of A5e's Trials and Treasures, beginning on page 108, includes dozens of exploration challenges tied to the random tables in the exploration section. Each of them stand on their own should you want to improvise such challenges. These challenges include events like Bridge of Sorrow, Corrupted Druid Grove, Dark Allies, Endless Plummet, God Corpse, and many others. Each event runs as its own challenge with opportunities for the characters and ways to shake up other encounters. There are 50 pages of such challenges to dive into and choose from – way more than any other GMG.

Treasure

The Rewards chapter, beginning on page 171, includes fantastic tables for distributing treasure – the best I've seen for 5e. They're quick to roll on and provide useful context and value for the treasure parcels you give out.

Magic Items with Costs

Like other GMGs, Trials and Treasures includes piles of magic items – each with an associated cost. You can use these prices should the characters have the opportunity to purchase an item or a potential payout should they wish to sell it to NPCs. You'll have to decide which items work for your game and which are better left out.

Each item likewise includes components for crafting such an item. By tying specific components to the crafting of an item, GMs can control how easily a character can make such an item. This limitation is important to ensure players don't get every item they ever dreamed of – making any future rewards pointless.

A Fantastic Addition to your 5e GM Library

Whatever flavor of 5e you play, the Level Up Advanced Trials and Treasures includes tons of valuable resources you won't find in most other guides. It has tons of tools, tables, and concepts to fuel your game for decades to come.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Avoiding NPC Betrayal and Path to Blackspire – Dragon Empire Prep Session 18.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Keep basic monster stats on hand to improvise monsters during your game.
Simple 5e monster stats: AC / DC = 12 + 1/2 CR, HP = 15 to 20 per CR, Attack + Primary Save = 4 + 1/2 CR, Damage Per Round = 7 x CR.
During prep write down the Lazy Encounter Benchmark for a potentially deadly encounter and the max CR for any single monster.
Mix up easy combat encounters, roleplay scenes, exploration, and hard encounters.
When time is tight, cut from the boring middle instead of the exciting conclusion.
Bathe dungeons in multiple layers of history and purpose.
Know your wall decorations: murals, mosaics, frescoes, bas-reliefs, friezes, wax paintings, gilded engravings, and marouflage.

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