I had a chance to read Kobold Quarterly, a D&D magazine believed by many to be the spiritual successor to Dragon Magazine (in its print version pre-4th Ed.) and I can see why that is. It is a nicely put together mag with tons of D&D content, whether you’re playing 3.x, Pathfinder or my system of choice, 4th Ed.
The current issue out now is issue 11, the Fall 2009 issue, with this nice color cover:
There's some nice artwork right there...
Just from the cover, the two things that stood out the most for me were the articles on 4th Ed. wishes, and the designer round table. Wishes because I’d like to see how they created that without breaking the game, and the designer round table because of some of the names attached to it. I had an issue with this article, and I’ll get into that later on in the review.
I won’t spoil all the articles so you have an element of surprise when you pick up the magazine. You should pick it up if you are running a game and would like to sample other stuff outside of the WOTC published material. Here now are a few words on some of the articles:
A Broken Mind: Sanity and Mental Disorders by Scott Gable
Right off the bat we get an article filled with alternate rules for a sanity system in 4e. The article assigns a new ability score to your character, “Mind”, and based on this score you have a “Sanity” pool of points. Different factors affect how and when you lose points from you sanity pool, reading forbidden tomes or running into aberrant creatures are two examples that would force you to roll a sanity check to see if you are affected. There are then effects that take place depending on how many points you’ve lost, etc… The article is well presented and it’s obvious that some thought went behind the design of the system. If you are a DM that would find this sort of thing interesting, then by all means go for it. It doesn’t seem to be too complicated, and the author does a good job of laying it out there in a simple enough manner.
Running Across the Screen, a GM Roundtable
The cover of the magazine calls it a designer roundtable, yet the article refers to it as a GM roundtable. A minor point, sure, but it stood out for me. Either way, this is a very nice article that includes 16 DM’s, with such names as Monte Cook, Chris Pramas, Robin Laws, Mike Mearls, Chris Perkins, and James Wyatt. The article includes the DM’s input on what it means to them to be a DM and other stuff like encounter design and player free will. It’s good to read what other DM’s think, specially those so close to the game that their names are on the books, so it is an interesting article. My only gripe, and it’s a minor one, is that for me a roundtable would have everyone in the same room playing off each others’ answers, while this clearly reads as an article combining emailed answers. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, I love the article, but it’s not a real roundtable in how I see the meaning of one. Either way, as a DM you can get some good insight out of this.
Wishing Well by Garrett Baumgartner
Wishes have been a controversial part of D&D, and I believe their exclusion in 4th Ed. was a deliberate attempt to get away from the more game breaking aspects of the game. In this article, the author attempts to bring back the Wish as a system revolving around the three tiers of play, and based on the tier the impact and effect of the wish becomes greater. The wishes are given out as if they were treasure based on the 4th. Ed. treasure parcel system, and they immediately reminded me of the alternate rewards mechanic in the DMG2. In fact, the Heroic Tier wish is called a boon, which if you’ve read the DMG2, you’ll immediately recognize it as a reward handed out as if it were treasure as well. Wishes can be used for things as renewing an encounter power, granting instant success on ability checks, and even changing your race at Epic tier. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’d use the Wish mechanic as written in this article. Wishes are out of the game for a reason, and this article does nothing for me to justify their existence.
Farragum, the Howling City by Dan Voyce
This is a neat article detailing an underground city populated by the Derro, and even includes a new disease to throw at your player, “Madness of the Wailing Wind”. The Derro, which I didn’t know and had to look up, are an evil race that’s a combination of man and dwarf, something the article omits but I would have found useful to know. Sometimes authors should not assume every reader is a knowledgeable about every D&D thing out there, just a thought. The article highlights important locales and includes a nicely rendered color map of the city. It seems easy enough to place this in any generic campaign world, although I’m not sure of there are Derro’s in 4e., making their inclusion in this article a little puzzling. Perhaps a city of Duergars? In all fairness it was both a 3.5 and 4e article, which leads me to my one negative thing on the magazine…
Maybe I’m getting blinder as I age, but I had a real hard time finding the reference on the article headers that described if it was a 3.x, Pathfinder or 4th Ed. article. Once I found it I had an embarrassing moment of “how stupid of me“, but I still feel it could be a little bit more prevalent, or perhaps written into the introduction of the article itself. Also, the table of contents doesn’t detail what edition the article is for, and I think that would be a good thing to include on there for faster flipping to the sections that may interest me.
My other very minor gripe was the inconsistency with the GM/Designer roundtable article, which seems like an editing mistake more than anything else. I think it could lead someone who’s looking for designer advice to find something else when they read the article.
The magazine is very nice, very well put together, and for its price it is a good value. At $5.99 for the PDF, or $7.99 for the print version, you really can’t go wrong. I think the points I touched on regarding the edition references would go a long way towards making it a little more user friendly, at least for me. Would I recommend it to someone who has never read it? Sure. Extra content for your game is never a bad thing, and sometimes it’s good to go beyond the books and writings of the same designers you keep buying and reading from over and over again. So yes, I recommend it, even with those minor flaws (to me) that I singled out.
www. Newbie DM .com 
Spenser
October 24, 2009
I agree about the edition markers; they’re pretty small, and there’s really no reason for them not to be in the TOC. Kind of a nitpick, but still…
Aaron
October 24, 2009
I think the idea of reintroducing the Wish into 4e as a balanced mechanic is a completely ridiculous idea. The point of Wish (I say, all-knowingly, despite having never played D&D prior to 4e) is that it was an unbalancing piece of magic that the players could do pretty much anything with. Whether or not you want that in your 4e game is up to you, but I don’t think it makes sense as a balanced mechanic.
Pobman
October 26, 2009
I’ve been a bit wary of buying Kobold Quarterly as I only play 4E and would feel like some of the money I’m spending on it would be wasted on the other content.
Have you looked at Level Up magazine by Goodman Games? I have bought the first two issues of this and as it is all 4E stuff I think I will get a lot more out of it.
Wyatt
October 26, 2009
Pobman:
There actually is a good balance in the magazine because the Edition-Neutral content, added unto to Edition-Hybrid and Edition-Specific content, brings the material for every game system to more or less the same amount.
Pobman
November 3, 2009
Cheers Wyatt. I’ve actually picked this issue up now. Will read it next week.
Neal Hebert
November 15, 2009
I won’t speak for the other other editors, but I can say that I’m adamantly opposed to putting edition-specific icons in the ToC. I’m not a terribly big fan of having graphics at all, because it strikes me as an unnecessary acquiescence to demands for edition purity.
I play 4e exclusively. I got sick of the 3.5 rules well before it was fashionable to do so online, and new iterations of the rules don’t address any of my concerns with them or make me want to play a game using them again.
But the demand for the labels usually comes from people who are mono-system guys, or people who spend an unhealthy amount of time complaining about the edition split online (or defending their favorite iteration of the edition split, or discussing the edition split on Twitter, &c).
Though I admit to being biased since I help produce the magazine, I like our content a lot. Even though I’ll never use the mechanics in, well, any of the non-4e articles, I find a lot to enjoy in pretty much all the articles that is completely unrelated to mechanical content.
I love reading reviews of the magazine I spend so much time producing (and I don’t work nearly as hard as the other editors), but I’m not terribly sympathetic to the desire to further ghettoize material so that it’s easier for some readers to write off content because it’s “useless to them.” I routinely go back and read my 2e Dragon Magazines when I need inspiration for my 4e game – and like to think that KQ encourages gamers to find something useful in everything, no matter what system the material was written for.
newbiedm
November 15, 2009
Neal, thanks for dropping by. I’m not sure if I agree with your thinking that people calling for clearer labels for the articles are coming from people looking to stir the flames of edtion wars. I for one am not. I was just looking for an easier way to find the 4e material I was looking for. Granted, the labels were there, and I should have looked harder, but I found it a tad too hidden for my personal taste.
As far as the useless content for me, well, it is. A 3e trap unless it comes with a coversion for 4e, is useless for me. Not because it may be a bad article or trap, but because if I’m looking through a magazine I’d want to just have to lift the article and paste it on my game directly, without having to convert it myself. So yeah, 3e content that I’m paying for is ultimately useless to me, because I’m not going to bother converting it myself.
I do think the magazine is a well put together one though, and said as much in my review.
Neal Hebert
November 15, 2009
SPEAKING FOR ME ONLY. THERE ARE TWO OTHER EDITORS AT KQ, BOTH OF WHOM CAN SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES ON THIS MATTER.
“I’m not sure if I agree with your thinking that people calling for clearer labels for the articles are coming from people looking to stir the flames of edtion wars.”
Not to pull a Joseph Goodman on you, but you don’t have the information to meaningfully disagree with me on this point. You haven’t seen the message board comments, KQ-specific blog comments, e-mails, letters to the editor, and so on. I believe that you believe you just want things to be easier to read – but your later comment about useless content suggests it’s not quite as a simple as that even for you.
“As far as the useless content for me, well, it is.”
Bullshit. Do you find movies useless? They don’t come with ready-made stats to port directly into your game. How about novels and short stories? Songs? Video Games? Anime?
Given that I’ve seen you post in some form or fashion about most (all?) of these things inspiring you (not once complaining about the lack of mechanical information inherent in them or their degree of portability), I think it’s irrational to call 3e content useless. You’re paying a lot more for these things (barring songs, possibly) than you are for KQ – and, if we can be honest, most of these non-gaming bits of inspiration are substantially less portable than other-edition RPG content. Intellectually speaking, it’s hyperbole and insulting to call some types of content good for inspiration and ghettoize others simply because of mechanical edition.
And this isn’t an attack on you in particular, newbie – it’s just that the only reason anyone ever cites for wanting graphics in the Table of Contents is so that they can more easily ignore content from the edition they don’t like. It’s like they’re afraid accidentally reading wrongly-themed magazine material is like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc.
It’s never, ever couched in positive terms (“I just want to know how much content is for my game” is eschewed in favor of “I want to know how much of the magazine is useless to me”). Those two statements mean radically-different things.
So yeah, I may well get outvoted by everyone else at the magazine, but I don’t think we should actively assist casual readers in ignoring vast swathes of a magazine we’re quite proud of. I don’t believe something has to be 100 percent portable from the page to the game to be “useful” (even edition appropriate articles need major tweaking to work at MY table).
Readers can spend money however they want, of course. But readers being free to spend their money however they want doesn’t presuppose that they are rational agents in the market – and the edition purity arguments bring that into stark relief.
newbiedm
November 15, 2009
I’ll add one more thing and then I’ll leave it alone. The difference between movies, video games and anime as opposed to a magazine like Kobold Quarterly is that I’m not paying for those things looking for content for an RPG I play. A magazine like the one you work on, has only one purpose for me, RPG material. RPG material that I am paying good money for to fulfill my needs as an RPG consumer. If I’m currently an RPG consumer that is only consuming 4e stuff, then yes, anything non-4e in the magazine is automatically useless to me, unless I feel it isn’t upon reading it and give it a chance. But that’s my choice to make.
So it’s unfair to compare non-rpg related media in this discussion, because I don’t actively consume that entertainment as a means of getting rpg content, unlike a gaming magazine, whose sole reason for existing is for such content. And if I’m going to pay for it, then all I want out of it is the stuff that is written for me and the game I’m playing.
But Neal, it’s not about ignoring content. It’s about first getting to the content that the magazine is providing for the edition I play, and then getting to the other stuff if it calls my attention. Look at the weapons article. Kick ass stuff, unfortunately the mechanical natures of 3.5 vs. 4 make it useless to me. It’s the reality of publishing (and purchasing) a multi-edition magazine. I don’t have time to sit and fiddle and convert, I just don’t.
I doubt that the average person playing Pathfinder is going to pay Wizard’s for a subscription to the new Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Why? It’s all 4e content. Just like I wouldn’t buy a strictly 3.x magazine, I’d rather spend my money on 4e stuff that I know I can use immediately at my game.
I felt that I was very fair in my review of Kobold Quarterly. In fact, my overall impressions were quite positive I think. My complaints were few. The GM article was mislabeled in the cover. There’s no denying that. And believe me, my issue with the table of contents, and asking for a clearer labeling of the edition an article was meant for, came from what I said it was. A desire to find and use the magazine’s 4e stuff without me needing to convert it. There was no intent of fanning any flame of edition wars, because I tend to not participate in any of that bullshit, both in and out of my blog.
Neal Hebert
November 15, 2009
newbie,
I liked your review. You were very fair in your review.
But just as people on Twitter calling D&D 4e a “tactical miniatures game with no roleplaying” gets your goat (and I’ve seen you go at this, just as I’ve gone at that same stuff), people ghettoizing roleplaying content that isn’t edition specific by calling it “useless” gets my goat.
Something “useless” means it could have no bearing on your game in any possible world (I do philosophy, remember) – if the monster article gives you an idea for monster weaponry as flavor, then I think it’s definitively useful for a 4e player. After all, monster damage is based on level and a whacky formula, so porting these weapons essentially involves you changing flavor. You don’t need stats for that, just a cool picture and a pencil on a pre-printed monster stat block.
It’s something that’s less useful than loads of new 4e monsters, admittedly, but it’s decidedly not useless (for any reasonable definition of the term, at least). If we’re being honest, I rarely use mechanical content from 3rd party sources (KQ included) because this content isn’t integrated into the DDI Suite – So I’m looking exclusively for flavor or cool ideas that I can use as a GM. I know the 4e rules well enough to improv or fake the mechanics I need at the table for virtually all GM-oriented stuff.
Now, whether this affects your buying patterns as a consumer is a different matter. If it’s one of only two or so things that you dislike about the magazine, then we’re doing well. I’d encourage you to pick up the next issue (there’s a 4e feature written by me that I’m curious to see if you like), as well as some of the 4e specific sourcebooks coming out (which I edited).