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Go ahead, pick any fantasy world, from novels or from role-playing games. Now tell me the name of a city in that world, and I bet you name the biggest. And in fact, I bet some of you named the city first, before you ever thought of the fantasy world it’s in! There is a long tradition of...

One of my all-time favorite quotes has to be from Arthur C. Clarke, when he asserted - “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And thinking back to how we used to play Dungeons & Dragons back in the 70s and 80s - using piles of hand-written character sheets and...

A surprisingly meek winter has faded away, and what can only be called a frightfully tempestuous springtime has roared its way in for much of the United States. And with the storms, the newest edition of Kobold Quarterly has blown into town, full of new articles for RPG gamers to ponder safely...

One of the complaints you sometimes hear about D&D 4E is the lack of material for high level tiers. While there are mounds of official Wizards of the Coast adventures for the Heroic Tier, there isn’t a lot of full scale modules written for the Paragon and Epic Tiers, unless they are part of the...

If you’ve ever had a character or two in the Forgotten Realms, prior to D&D 4E, chances are you have experienced – and possibly died in - the largest and nastiest dungeon crawl ever created: Undermountain! This sprawling labyrinth of a dungeon has been part of the D&D Forgotten Realms...

If you play D&D - or any other role-playing game for that matter – long enough, chances are you will participate in what can only be called an “evil campaign”. Instead of heroes, you’ll roll up villainous characters, and then embark on a series of adventures filled with robbery, debauchery...

So here we are in the wake of the weekend of the release of The Avengers Movie - and by all accounts, the movie has broken more box-office records than Hulk has smashed New York City landmarks! As a side note, if you haven’t gone to see the The Avengers Movie yet because you can’t believe the...

I can feel it the air… I can feel it in earth… I can watch it blowing up my email inbox! The summer rush of RPG products is starting way earlier this year than last year – after all, it’s still only spring - and I’m quickly getting buried with a whole range of awesome game systems, modules...

If you wanted to explain to a friend who knew nothing about Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or any other RPG, what might be an easy way to do it? Well, you could sit down and show them books, character sheets, or miniatures. Or if they liked computer games, you could invite them to play a few...

While there have been all kinds of role-playing games out there on the market, one of the rarer types you’ll run across has to be termed the Alternate History Role-playing Game. A lot of game designers prefer to create their own fantasy settings, generating a unique world setting separate from...

“Old School” is one phrase being kicked around the D&D roleplaying game community quite a bit these days. With the advent of the D&D Next Open Playtest, numerous message boards, blog sites, and articles have been very quickly transforming the concept of “Old School Heroic Fantasy gaming” into a...

A long time ago, in a gaming company far, far away… It was back in 1986, and TSR was looking on a way to expand upon the successes of Gygax’s famous D-series of modules. Many older D&D players will recall these modules with fondness - and perhaps with a bit of trepidation - because it was...

There’s something that’s both exciting and awesome when you find out your favorite game system has jumped genres. Sure there are game systems that are designed to be universal to a wide range of gaming genres – like Hero System and GURPS. But it’s always a refreshing surprise to see a system...

I’ve always been a huge fan of occult and horror, whether it’s movies, books, or role-playing games. When Call of Cthulhu first came out, I was ecstatic at finally being able to role-play out the plots and stories of Lovecraft, August Derleth, and other authors that I had read all during high...

All the signs of Summer are here, with massive heat outside and SciFi and Gaming Conventions offering a cool haven for the fan boys and fan girls across the country. And amidst the long mid-summer days, with Origins Game Fair behind us and only a few short weeks until we get to experience the...

In many respects, I think that if there are ever gaming historians looking back and penning their thoughts about trends in fantasy RPG game design, they will likely label 2010 to 2013 as the Era of the Retro-clones. In the past few years, we have seen a real proliferation of new games reaching...

Board games will never go out of style, and let’s face it, hardcore gamers have taken board games to places never envisioned by the typical “family board game” manufacturers out there. Name a genre, whether its warfare simulation or resource management and if it fits into a historical, science...

Before the release of D&D 4E, there were D&D Encounters, and before the Living Forgotten Realms, there was the RPGA-sanctioned Living Greyhawk Campaign. For over eight years, from 2000 to 2008, the RPGA’s Living Greyhawk Campaign was an opportunity for the D&D 3.X/d20 community to come together...

It was only one day after returning from the “best four days of gaming” at GenCon 2012 - where I had an absolutely AMAZING time, by the way – there was a knock at my door, and I was greeted by a guy from UPS with a package from Wizards of the Coast. Now I had debated all weekend whether to buy...

I think that if there was ever a historian from the future looking back at the long evolution of fantasy role-playing games, and they wanted to find that first crucial node where Dungeons & Dragons became the “mother” of the genre, they would probably focus their attention on the creation of the...