While the web offers a lot of wonderful stuff for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fans, it’s important to remember that there are plenty of print magazines on your local bookstore shelves that deserve your attention. Some of them have been steadily supplying news and features to fandom for decades, while others are new publications bravely stepping into the breach. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be featuring a few of these magazines for your consideration. Today’s magazine is Kobold Quarterly.
Kobold Quarterly is an ENnie award-winning gaming magazine focusing on Dungeons & Dragons in its many different incarnations, and is one of a very small handful of print periodicals that continue to offer roleplaying game coverage on the national market. Author and gamer Ed Greenwood described it as “what a roleplaying magazine should be.”
When I asked editor Wolfgang Baur why Suvudu readers should read Kobold Quarterly, here’s what he had to say:
“Kobold Quarterly’s motto is ‘Small but Fierce’, and it lives up to that with a relentless focus on D&D and Pathfinder coverage that you’re not likely to find elsewhere. The multiple-award-winning KQ offers a surprising number of articles by Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and current and former WotC and Paizo employees. After 4 years of shipping on time, it’s become a pillar of the core-fantasy gaming scene, and it inspires both DMs and players to cackle with kobold glee: the focus is on playable material as well as practical advice for better gaming and game design.”
In this day and age, it’s not magazines that have value, but the content and information within. The age of the magazine may have been overtaken by the age of the blog, but the value of the information within in no less important.
If anything, it has improved, and even subjects like gaming and games design have become a science thanks to the ability to apply the principles of the scientific method – critical thinking, reasoned debate, professional discourse, and standardised methodology.