Wyatt Reviews: Kobold Quarterly 10

Posted: July 27, 2009 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: D&D, D&D 4e, Legacy D&D, Products, RPG |20 Comments »

I know I tend to start my reviews with some anecdote that begins with “I’ve always been wary” or “Usually I feel concerned about” and follows with a situation, and it is becoming a cliche.

I also, for new readers, always include silly anime references that you can ask me about later. Though why you would want to know about Yukkuri I cannot fathom, but if you want to know, if you must, I am your guru. We will convene in my hut in the midst of the elder pines, the scent of incense pervading the space, and we will exchange. I have studied many yukkuris in my time. I can help you take it easy~.

Anyway. As we’ve discussed previously (groan, another Wyatt cliche) I’m not good with openings. So here we go: I’ve always been wary and felt concerned about purchasing magazines. I know back when Dragon and Dungeon belonged to Paizo I did not buy an issue because it did not feel like a good use of my money. Especially because I really wanted player content and it seemed like every 3.5 book I opened contained heaps of fluff I’d never use.

This turned me into the knee-biting overly-cautious consumer you see today. I am such a cheap bastard I only bought Kobold Quarterly #10 because I mistakenly believed it cost 8 bucks normally and I could get it for 4, don’t ask me how I made this mistake, but my cheap bastardness was dispelled briefly by my illusion of a half price deal.

I didn’t even spend money on it, I spent gift credit I got from a very generous and loving soul. But I could have spent that gift credit elsewhere. Sadly, WOTC 4e books don’t go on PDF anymore, so just when Wootsie starts making clearly-labeled player option crunch books that give me loads of bang for my buck, I have to actually go out to the store to buy them.

And I ain’t havin’ that.

Back to Kobold Quarterly. For the longest time, Kobold Quarterly didn’t have D&D 4th Edition material, so it practically didn’t exist to me. Nowadays they do have such material, so suddenly the page of RPGNow with the latest issue didn’t show television static, garbled images and klingon language anymore. Now it was in plain English and I could even see the cover. Man I should get some medicine for that, but it’s been so useful to me lately.

The Letters Section From Hell

The letters section in Kobold Quarterly #10 is some sad stuff and it’s the kind of comments that I throw into my spam filter about once or twice a month. One letter in particular made me squirm. It was in a real sweet tone of voice but still talking all sorts of ridiculous gurblegurb that made me want to slam the magazine against a wall. Sadly, it was digital.

Here is a dramatic reenactment of the letter:

Dear Kobold Quarterly,

Hi. I’m one of your overly-entitled former subscribers. I’m totally against your decision to sell more products and expand the usefulness of your magazine to a wider variety of demographics. Because your addition of new content harms the soul Jesus gave me on a metaphysical and emotional level, I am dropping my subscription. But I totally enjoyed and purchased every issue before the ones that had 4e content! Hint hint hint.

Love, Wyatt.

P.S. Ron Paul 2012

I’m sorry, Kobold Quarterly. I can’t imagine the letters you DIDN’T choose to publish. It is soul crushing. I apologize on behalf of them. I want to hug you. I want to help you feel better. We can get through this, Kobold Quarterly. I’ll make you some hot cocoa.

This letter section was a stark revelation to me that most of the fanbase of this product doesn’t want me to benefit from it. I don’t hold this against Kobold Quarterly of course, but it is almost bizarre that I’m picking up this magazine, that I paid internet dollars for it, and I’m looking at this. Wyatt Salazar spent his e-cash, his cyber-monies, his digital dollars, to get hammered by edition wars garbage in the letter section of the magazine, right after the ads and table of contents. His first look ever at content from this magazine, is this. This is some yakety sax stuff folks. Stephen Lynch could write a song about this.

Watch out Pathfinder/3.5 fans! KQ will give you diabeetus.

The Hunt For Red Content (Starring Sean Connery)

This isn’t a Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 blog. So I’m not going to review any of the system-specific material for those editions, as it does not concern me nor my target audience. This may seem unfair, but there have already been many reviews which take into account the D&D 3.5 content in KQ and it is not my interest in reviewing. It’s not why I spent my netcoins on this.

I don’t subtract points from KQ for the inclusion of 3.5 material because that’s where it started and where it probably has its greatest strength, and also because I’m a reasonable human being.

If you like 3.5, I suggest you buy KQ, because the breadth of this material is for you, regardless of your qualms with 4e sharing a bit of space in the pages. That’s it for the review for you guys, you can go home now. Everyone else can stay.

So on that note, let’s look at the edition-unlabeled and 4e-specific content. We’re not going on an OCD page count trip wondering what percentage of the magazine is devoted to 4e content, because that’d be pointless and because if I could do math like that without clawing my eyes out, I would be studying for an awesome job right now!

0.

There’s a foreword by Wolfgang Baur, if you’re into that sort of thing.

1.

The first 4e article in the magazine is about skill challenges and underground dungeons.

There was some interesting stuff here, but also, I saw a cumulative percentage in there. This is fun, another Wyatt cliche, math. I haven’t seen a cumulative percentage since FATAL, and I could not have guessed that my reaction to seeing a cumulative percentage in this article was to wonder how I was supposed to use this in a game, and failing miserably at it.

Something about cumulative percentages just caught me off-guard. I gave up on it before dragging my calculator into this pitched battle. I thought what it meant was that you can do something a certain amount of times before something bad happens (vague so as to not give away the material here) but I could be wrong, and it seemed to me that phrasing that as cumulative percentage was silly.

However, these skill challenges were generally good. They wove in powers (yes, powers), skill checks and concrete (but not game-screwing) consequences of failure, pretty decent narrative, and just generally cool situations (a mine cart fight). Some were rather complicated, and not just in a math sense, however. The scope was ambitious and something I hadn’t seen before, but somewhat daunting. There’s one with two associated tables. Nonetheless, positive article, great start on the 4e content.

2.

There was an edition-unlabeled interview with Jeff Grubb. He’s this guy, you know. The first few pages are about establishing Grubb’s ghetto credz in the RPG industry and what a nice guy he is before the actual interview. It had some interesting worldbuilding tidbits and cool insight, as Jeff has worked on quite a varied number of projects in his life that he spoke of in some colorful detail.

3.

There was an edition-unlabeled article that talked about Old School and I get enough of that already so I didn’t read it. It is clearly not intended for me, or at least I assume it isn’t. It might be, and I may look at it later and in retrospect find it to be amazing, but it will take some time. It will be a process, reading an article by Monte Cook about “Old School.” We’ll get my therapist on the line, we’ll get some prescriptions, we’ll read it when we’re comfortable with ourselves.

The second person in “we” is part of the reason drugs are necessary.

4.

There was an edition-unlabeled article about Warlocks. It begins with some kind of weird collection of fluff text, each bit of which ends with riddles, or oaths or something that kind of sound like rap battles. I didn’t know what to make of that.

Further down, the piece clarifies that these are meant to be one-liners you throw at people at the same time as a ball of cthulhu space magic. I was disappointed because having Eminem as a fey pact warlock would have been so much cooler. You get a walkthrough of coming up with a patron for your warlock, including benign and malicious patrons, their temperaments, the nature of their relationship with the warlock, and so on. For the fluff-starved, this is cool inspiration. I am not fluff starved.

5.

Next up was an article about Haffuns, not be the confused with halflings though they are somewhat the same thing. Haffuns are little people that are used by humans as servants. I dreaded reading this because racial writeups, especially with stories to them, tended to make me snooze hard. But this piece was actually very enjoyable and humorous, as these little bastards tunneled through from the other side of the world running away from something they don’t speak of, then basically became the De-Facto maid and butler race of mankind overnight. They are pretty awesome.

The piece includes different Haffun backgrounds, such as hobo haffuns who run around the streets, having found no human home, and adventuring haffuns who are kind of a disgrace in the eyes of the servant haffuns. Haffuns have 3.5 stats I don’t care about and then 4e stats. The 4e stats have one flavor quirk I noticed immediately, that all Haffuns seem to have the same size and the same weight (it’s not expressed as a range like 4e races have). Despite being small, Haffun stats don’t reference where to find the “being small” rules in the PHB that other small races do. Not a foul, but would have been nice.

They have a made-up language they begin with called Phutuula along with Common and one other language. Being dextrous and charismatic, they are a perfect fit for artful dodger rogues.

What ruins it for me is their racial power, which is utterly freakish.

It is an encounter power with what amounts to a chunk of flavor text tacked on at the beginning and a terrible drawback at the end. Basically, you look into someone’s eyes (or something) and if you fulfill their desires (…or something) then they gain a +2 power bonus to a bunch of stuff until sunrise. I assume this means next sunrise, so should you do this in the morning, it lasts the whole day. Not to give away the ghost, but this power boosts practically every stat you should not be giving day-long bonuses to.

Wait.

Little people…fullfilling desires…lasts until sunrise…bonuses to everything good…

Ironic as hell, really.

Not only is this an encounter power, it’s an encounter power with an ungainly Special Clause tacked on that prevents you from using it more than certain times per day. At the end of it, the power says that other people can look into Haffun’s eyes as a standard action and give them penalties, equal to the bonuses they grant with their power, until you fullfill the enemy’s desire.

This is the drawback that’s apparently supposed to balance out the rest of it. It really doesn’t though, because if your Haffun healbot fulfills the desire of the Ranger, the super-powered mauling he’ll be able to deal out for the rest of the day balances out your sudden inability. That is, if you’re the most lenient team player in the world right now. Most people wouldn’t like this.

This article is really good fluff and the race is genuinely interesting, but I wouldn’t use the Haffun racial power. I would just make it an encounter power buffing ability, maybe an immediate reaction reroll you can grant to another ally or something. As it stands, this power is either overpowered when it works, or it may never work (if you can’t fulfill anyone’s desires by DM fiat).

Which is kind of sad, because this article was a home run until that came up.

6.

There’s book reviews here. They reviewed a bunch of other stuff I didn’t really care about much, AND the Open Game Table. I had fanciful childish hope of being mentioned, but I wasn’t. I moved on and got better. This is a good section to have, though.

7.

There’s an article here on PCs without background stories, which I enjoyed. It talks about developing backgrounds and story organically as you play, rather than jotting everything down immediately. It offers a good analysis on the benefits and pitfalls of such characters and gives general tips for playing without a concrete background set into stone. A lot more people really need to read this article than the Kobold Quarterly readership. While I don’t agree with a total lack of background story, everything in the article was still interesting and useful. Thumbs up to Amber E. Scott.

8.

There’s a feature called Maps of Fantasy where a fully detailed location (this time, an Inn) is given out. Edition-neutral, a very rich map that you can zoom the hell out of, making it huge for a good printing or something. Ah the joys of PDFs.

9.

At the end there is one page of fluff by Wolfgang Baur about elves and some elven gods. It includes a free love festival where even the celibate people may get down. I can dig that. It was pretty interesting and I like the culture presented.

Conclusion

Kobold Quarterly #10 gave me some good times. We laughed together, we cried together, we wondered whether the Haffun racial power was really sexual innuendo. Do I regret spending the money on it? Actually, I don’t, in spite of coming in with a pretty negative attitude about the whole thing. The 4th Edition content seemed sparse compared to the 3.5 content but that’s probably because of the rate of submissions.

There was only one egregious problem I saw in the 4e content, so I would have to (and probably will) buy another issue with 4e content in it before making any sort of decision. I still have gift credit for that. I know I won’t subscribe, because I’m too cheap, but buying an issue or two every year isn’t something I’m against if it gives me the nice little bits I found in this issue.

So overall, if any of this sounds to your liking, get KQ #10 from my link above and experience it yourself. Until next time, have lots of love, platypuses and snarky sheep.

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