Kobold Press Delivers An RPG Book That Focuses On Roleplaying

Welcome to the table,

I’m a fan of Kobold Press. When I say I’m a fan, I feel I need to make this a little more clear. Three walls in my office have beautiful bookshelves filled with TTRPG books from just about every publisher. These books range in publication date starting before I was even thought about to books that are not even available for preorder yet. Those books are fantastic, they are constant sources of inspiration and enjoyment. I love them very much. However, my favorite shelves are the three small ones that were purchased to hang above my desk.

One of these small shelves contains a collection of notebooks I rotate out as they get filled with various game notes, maps, and ideas that come to me while I’m working through projects. One of them has a collection of Warduke-themed merch on it. The last one is stuffed with gaming Zines, most notably almost every release from Feral Indie Studio and a decent chunk of the Warlock Zines Kobold Press put out through their Patreon.

To this day, I frequent various storefronts and gaming sites trying to track down the Zines missing from my collection due to early issues I missed and a mixup at the post office where a bunch of them were sent to an old address and the people living there told me they threw them out.

Don’t get me wrong, Kobold Press publishes way more than those Zines. They have a ton of amazing content that line my other larger wall shelves as well. I have the collection hardback versions of these Zines that they put out as their Warlock Grimoire. I think they are some of the best TTRPG supplements to have on hand when you are plotting out an adventure or want to ponder new possibilities.

I also have their Creature Codex, as it is one of the best resources for unique creature encounters and strange monsters that you can toss at your players. You can be sure I have almost all of the Tombs of Beasts books. I adore monster lore and those bound volumes have some great ecologies as far as the lairs go and some truly twisted creatures to plague your adventuring parties with.

When I had a chance to sit down with their newest offering, the Kobold Guide to Roleplaying, I was delighted to take the time.

In the landscape of TTRPG books, the Kobold Guide to Roleplaying fills a very important need. Editors John Joseph Adams and Wendy N. Wagner have compiled a collection of thought-provoking essays on the very nature of the hobby that provides non-judgmental guidance, unique perspective. It speaks, in one way or another, to every facet of the roleplaying community in a thoughtful and accessible way.

The subject matter of these essays ranges from rediscovering the love for play as an adult by comic luminary Gail Simone, to the importance of knowing when to shine and when to let your GM take the wheel by globe trotting, and speculative fiction author Christopher M. Cevasco.

What is most striking, aside from the team at Kobold Press being able to assemble a who’s who of authors and personalities from across the gaming space including Clint McElroy, Luke Gygax, Scott Lynch, and B. David Walters, is that each essay provides thoughtful reflection on an aspect of the hobby and feels as if it is presented with little to no judgment of the reader. In a space that is mostly fueled by imagination and flights of fancy where multiple people look for different things from a shared hobby, it can be difficult to strike a balance between what could be interpreted as guidance and would could be seen as gatekeeping.

I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that people take different things from the shared experience of roleplaying. For example, I have a severe degenerative mobility disability and have always seen roleplaying as a way to join with others on an equal playing field. While I can’t kick a ball or run the bases, I have always been able to see myself as somewhat of an equal in the theater of the mind where the dice show us how nimbly I can scale a wall even when my own body can never do such things. Someone instructing me on ways to better imagine how I would do things I wish I could do, like run alongside my friends or climb a rope could easily, at least when I was younger and even less sure of myself, caused me to pull back even more.

What the Kobold Guide to Roleplaying does so incredibly well is that it manages to provide something useful to the open-minded veteran or the fresh-faced novice looking for ways to better hone their roleplaying tactics and grow their group storytelling skills without feeling at any point judgmental or critical of the skills you currently have in your toolbox.

While there are no new stat blocks for ghoul lords to terrorize your players with and the review copy I received had no brilliantly illustrated bits of art filling the inside of these pages, for those who are looking to better find their voice, explore the nature of collaborative play, and get some new perspectives while learning a little bit more about how we all came to the table, Kobold Guide to Roleplaying is a must-have addition to your shelf.

Until next time, my favorite takeaway, and there are a lot of good ones but the one I think a lot of players and storytellers could benefit from is The Hidden E in RPG: Using Empathy to Improve Your Roleplay by Rajan Khanna. There is a lot of good advice contained in that essay and if you have some players who are struggling to share the space or a storyteller who may be a little heavy-handed with the direction of the story this may be a good bit of text to offer them for some reflective perspective.