Kobold Quarterly: the Magazine for Fantasy RPG Gamers

July 16, 2009 | David

The GOLD blog is officially back in business with a brief review of Kobold Quarterly Issue 10.

I got my hands on a pre-release copy of the upcoming issue of Kobold Quarterly (issue #10) this morning. (How? I run a respectable RPG webseries up in here - don’t think I’m without connections. And, no, I didn’t steal it. ;-) I wanna start off by saying that this well-crafted magazine just keeps getting better with every issue I read (this is my third issue).

For the uninitiated, Kobold Quarterly is a magazine filled with tips, extensions, insights, opinion and interviews all related to fantasy role playing games (it’s geared toward Dungeons and Dragons and other d20 system games, but it pretty system agnostic overall), and is the heir to the Dragon and Dungeon magazine thrones. (If you’re really uninitiated and don’t know Dragon or Dungeon, picture a young David Nett, aged 11 or 12, scrawny, with thick glasses, messy hair and a vaguely hideous early puberty baby mustache, sitting on the floor of the Waldenbooks in the Dakota Square mall, pouring over the latest issue of Dragon to get the skinny on the newest D&D spells and updated classes. Dungeon, which was a compilation of short D&D adventures published every month, was the only magazine besides Omni I ever had a subscription to until I was in my late 20’s.) When Wizards of the Coast killed Dragon and Dungeon in 2007, Kobold Quarterly (at that time about a year or so old) stepped in to take their place.

This issue is the largest one yet, according to the publisher, clocking in at 90 pages. And it is chock full of great stuff. At high level, it’s all the stuff readers of those venerable D&D magazines could desire: a letters section, an “ask the Kobold” game rules clarification column, game theory, new magic, feats, and races, detailed examinations of a monster race (hill giants) and adventuring gear (the halberd), some great balanced and playtested cookie-cutter encounters to help DMs spice up their games, a fully fleshed-out and mapped location, and an interview with legendary game designer Jeff Grubb (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and Spelljammer, among other more recent forays). As with previous issues, the writing is clear and straightforward, conversational enough to make for a good read and detailed enough to serve as a game reference. The design is as attractive and professional as the writing; Kobold Quarterly is not amateur fanzine, it’s a fully edited and professionally produced magazine (with ads), and that shows in the careful construction and reliable quality of every article and illustration.

While I enjoyed all of issue 10, and will keep it on file as a useful reference (as I have with all previous issues), I particularly enjoyed three articles:

“Back and Better Than Ever” by Michael Kortes is a fantastic piece about the consequences of resurrection. The ability of PCs to bring characters back from the dead, either by paying a powerful temple or cleric, or under their own divine power at very high levels, has long been controversial in the game. A lot of dungeon masters, especially Old School Movement gamerunners, remove magical resurrection from their games entirely, arguing that if nothing in the game is truly fatal, the danger (along with a lot of the fun) is drained from the game. This article addresses the resurrection conundrum not by removing it from the game, but by creating a group of consequences for resurrected characters: changes caused by their journey through the lands of the dead. This can add a lot of flavor to the game, and I’ll absolutely be referring to it in my current campaign, should my players choose to cheat death.

“No School Like an Old School” by Monte Cook is a short, cool article about the burgeoning Old School gaming movement, which has exploded online in the last few years, and has created some interesting ripples in the gaming community. This explains a little bit about the movement, it’s origins, and what Old School Gaming means. I’m not an Old Schooler (despite the fact that my favorite D&D edition is still 2nd), so I found this fascinating and informative.

But my favorite piece in this issue is actually an editorial at the beginning of the issue: “Ethical and UnEthical Gaming” by editor and KQ founder Wolfgang Baur. It’s a brief discussion of the ethical motivations of characters within a game, and how those ethics, deeply role-played, might cause characters to behave in unexpected ways when faced with traditional monster-fighting, treasure-gathering scenarios. It’s a fascinating discussion I’ve been having with my original gaming group since we were in junior high, and I was delighted to see it here. Our discussion dates back to the classic TSR module “Against the Giants,” which was part of the super-module “Queen of the Spiders,” the last chapter in the “Temple of Elemental Evil” series. We were maturing as gamers at that point, and a fight broke out in the group about whether it was right or wrong to cone-of-cold a room full of young Fire Giants who were not warriors or actively involved in combat against the party. On one side, since Fire Giants (in game terms) are evil, the killing of evil creatures, even young ones, seems okay for a party of good characters. On the other hand, since Fire Giants are intelligent creatures, ostensibly with free will, mercy shown to those young ones and non-combatants is the ethically correct thing for a good party, and might even result in a change of alignment/ideas in those to whom mercy is shown. In the old war-gaming model, bad guys are bad guys and you kill them. But in a deeper role-playing, ethical model, additional considerations must be made, and there are consequences for these actions. It’s a fascinating concept in game terms, and in my opinion adds another layer of enjoyment to the game. And the editorial is a good read.

Kobold Quarterly, Issue #10, is another great issue from an excellent magazine. If you love fantasy RPGs, especially D&D or any game based on the D20 system, you should be reading Kobold Quarterly. It’s available in print and PDF forms at http://www.koboldquarterly.com.