Kobold Quarterly #12 just released and reviewers are already posting their comments. Find out what the buzz is about.
Telkari, Inevitable of Death… A corrupted marut inevitable and biomechanical plagues redolent of Hellraiser and Tetsuo: Bodyhammer. Awesome article…
The Holy Remix… Pathfinder Cleric Hacking! Like clerics of different deities being distinct from each other? You’ll love this. Holy monks, cloistered sages, missionaries, covert cultists, wow…
Impossible Caravans & Unseelie Ambassadors… Concept-laden, sinister (“It warms us.”) and otherworldly with dark humour… Gaimanesque in all the good ways.
If KQ can keep this up, they may have overtaken their
draconic ancestor…
Read the full review at Fame & Fortune.
And…
My initial intention was to skip through the magazine, speed read to get an overview. I kept stopping to read articles and letters… I’m glad to see plenty of Pathfinder specific stuff too.
Kobold has some amazing art and great content. I would wholeheartedly recommend it. If you play another fantasy system which is not d20, you could mine it for ideas.
Read the full review at Blog of a New RPGer (and with 5-stars at DriveThruRPG).
We’ve got a little something for everybody. Pick up your own copy of Kobold Quarterly #12.
“Gaimanesque in all the good ways,” huh? Yeah, Jon and I will take that compliment. Many, many thanks.
I am not 4e’s biggest fan, but that article did give me a view how it could be (fun, cool, etc)
And that IS a compliment.
Darkjoy:
I’m not sure whether anyone other than my gaming group (my co-author is a player in the group) is playing 4e in the way suggested by our article, but I can attest that this article is pretty much the theme of our game.
I’m not sure how much fun I’d have playing in a 4e game that ran the modules and was focused on dungeon crawling, but I’ve found the system lets me do all the creepy weird stuff I want to do incredibly easily, with a minimum of houserules. It’s a simple enough system that I can work in all the Unknown Armies style flavor I want and not break the game (minus the madness/stress checks, of course).
If we’re ever both at Gen Con, I’ll be happy to run something for you just so you can see what we’re doing with the system.
Gen Con? That’s in Ohio, right?
Chances are very slim that I’ll cross the Atlantic for that ;>
But I did enjoy the article very much, I’ll notify my DM that less dungeoncrawling is in order.
Ohio, Indiana, it’s the Great Midwest where I was born and raised.
I hope Neal does run a game or two there. I’m curious how he melds in Unknown Armies.
Unknown Armies is a filter through which you see the world, actually. I can read the newspaper each morning and come up with an Unknown Armies session.
The motto of the game is “You Did It,” and that’s reflected in the game. I’ve ported it into my 4e game without a problem. Nothing should be scarier than what people are capable of; and all drama should be human(oid).
Our games are best when they’re about 70 to 80 percent roleplaying. Combat is fun, but I focus on WHY we’re fighting and stakes more than anything – the game’s mechanics are designed for combat to be interesting, so I don’t have to focus much on that since the default combat is pretty damn interesting without much help. But then, I’m a theatre person and acted for something like 10 years: everything is about character stakes and character relevant hooks for me.
When I run a fantasy game, I usually ignore Tolkien and steal from Mieville (which is often VERY UA in and of itself), and then layer on the Unknown Armies style flavor and weirdness.
I actually think 4e is better suited for UA style weirdness than 3e just because of the nature of the rulesets: 3e has a rule for everything, and game mastery generally amounts to a mastery of the world’s physics (and metaphysics) while exhaustively enumerating the possible. And look, that’s great – it’s staggering how exhaustive this stuff really is. But what I like about 4e is how underdefined and abstracted the rules are – it gives me just enough to run a narrative game.
My secret suspicion is that Mike Mearls’ influence on the system is what made this possible: Mearls has a design credit on the Unknown Armies supplement Statosphere.
My money’s on Rob Heinsoo’s influence being the more likely source than Mearls, but it could be both of them.
Interesting take on 4E, anyway. Can 4E Modern be far behind? :)