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As someone whose main role-playing outlet is DMing D&D 4e, I found Kobold Quarterly 21 to be a bit thin on good material. As someone whose day job is on a university’s religion faculty, I was fascinated by the varied treatments of divine magic in this issue and the varied ways of translating ideas about divine magic and faith into game mechanics.
Although “Daughters of Lilith: Ecology of the Succubus” is marked as a 4e article, it’s mostly free of game mechanics—and thus equally appropriate for any fantasy RPG that includes succubi—until the very end. Zeb Cook’s article on mystery religions is completely systemless, and very useful. Tim and Eileen Connors’ article on “Clerical Conflicts” employs a lot of Pathfinder crunch, but has a lot of story elements too that could easily be ported over to 4e or other systems. Steve Winter’s column asks “Why No Monotheism?” is pretty short, and actually spends more time answering the titular question than providing any hints for GMs wishing to run monotheistic settings (the advice occupies basically the final column of the two-page article). I enjoyed the interview with Bill Slavicsek. The “Scriveners of Allain” article, though 4e in mechanics, didn’t light my fire; the Pathfinder article presenting the witch louse was much more engaging (though somewhat disgusting).
Kobold Quarterly is always a mixed bag, unless you play several different game systems or are willing to put in the extra work to convert other crunch to your favorite system. If you’re strictly looking for material for just one system, I’d say this issue is worthwhile for Pathfinder, less so for 4e. If you’re up for mining articles written for a different system than the one you usually play or run, KQ 21 is a worthy entry in the series.
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I’d say this track definitely has more of the “happily” than “depressed” in it. It’s very bouncy, almost bubbly. Even the slower interlude in the middle feels more peaceful than depressed. It’s not a bad choice to loop this for fifteen minutes or so when you have the after-lunch sleepies just to pep up a little bit. For use at the gaming table, you’ll want a scene in your story where everything is pretty much happy-go-lucky. My only serious complaint about the track is that it doesn’t loop well at all, both because of the slide-in/slide-out and a couple of seconds of silence at the end. An updated version with better population of the ID3 tags would be nice to. Although by my usual calculus this track ought probably to receive three stars, I went ahead with four just because the track makes me feel good.
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This piece might serve well to score a modern or sci-fi role-playing scene where there isn’t really any immediate danger, but you still want to infuse a bit of intensity and maybe a bit of urgency. It doesn’t quite have the feel of a “race against time,” but it does give you the sense that things are moving along at a decent clip. On the down side, the low-pitched, indistinct vocals—almost a growl—at the beginning of the track seem distracting to me, there’s an electronic pulse throughout much of the piece that’s a bit too intense, and the track doesn’t loop well at all. This offering predates some of the ID3 tag improvements Fishwife Games employed later on. For both quality and usefulness, this track falls somewhere in the middle range of Fishwife Games’s musical offerings.
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This track has enough variety to avoid tedium, but not so much that the changes are distracting. For the most part, it’s fairly minimalist in instrumentation, and—no doubt I’m influenced by the title here—puts me in mind of an alien world where advanced technology and tribal societal structures work hand in hand. The track doesn’t seem to be designed for looping, but it does begin and end gracefully enough that looping it won’t be disruptive. The ID3 tags need to be cleaned up; only the title field is populated, and it shouldn’t have all those underscores in it. Otherwise, this piece is a good addition to your musical library for scoring sci-fi role-playing scenes, especially when the PCs are out of their element.
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I’m not really sure what it is about this track, but it just doesn’t “work” for me. There’s nothing especially bad about the piece, but nothing especially great about it, either. It’s solidly midrange in quality and effectiveness. It’s one of Fishwife Games’s longer pieces, which is nice, and its loops well if you trim off the second or two of silence at the end (though this is something the end user shouldn’t have to do). It does embody the feel of 70s/80s crime movies, so from that point of view it hits the mark. I think maybe my tepid reaction to the track stems from the fact that the name and artwork imply gunplay, but the music doesn’t. (The ID3 tags need cleanup, too, but I don’t think that perfect ID3 tags would make me like this track better.)
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These maps were apparently designed by Jonathan Roberts to accompany an adventure called “A Trail of Poison.” I don’t know anything about that adventure, but it doesn’t matter. Any fantasy setting can use a generic, three-level tower. The artwork is well done in Roberts’s signature style (distinct black outlines with a hand-drawn feel). The layout is well-conceived and leaves everything but the walls and stairs to the DM’s imagination, giving it very high replay value. There must be dozens of towers dotting your fantasy landscape that could be represented with this layout. The download includes both gridded and non-gridded versions, in JPG format, and this brings us to the products big downside. Each map is 15" square, so unless you’re printing direct to poster-sized paper, you’ll need to slice up and tile the maps yourself. A pre-tiled PDF or even JPGs would make the product much easier to use. I would give the product 5 stars for quality, but only 3 for ease of use.
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Using the 3D terrain models that make up Winterhawk: Ruins can really enhance any fantasy role-playing experience that uses 25–30mm miniatures. This set uses Fat Dragon’s “E-Z Lock” system, which means a little more work for the crafter on the front end and a better experience at the table on the back end (less slipping and sliding of terrain pieces). The product description provides an excellent overview of the model you can craft with this set. You’ll need some crafting supplies, a lot of patience, and an intermediate level of paper crafting skill to get the most out of this product.
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The nine tracks that make up this “soundtrack” to a nonexistent movie are short (the longest tops out at 3:42, and all nine tracks combined last fewer than 25 minutes), simple, and repetitive. Even the “Main Title,” the most complex of the compositions, consists essentially of the same chord progression over and over. This can actually be beneficial at the gaming table, where you want to be able to loop a track under your scene and then forget about it until it’s time to change to another track. However, for listening out-of-game, it gets tedious quickly. Given the brevity and relative simplicity of the tracks, the price point may be just a tad high (by a dollar or two). The ID3 tags are well-populated (something that some game music publishers overlook), and album art is even embedded in the MP3s (something that most game music publishers overlook). All in all, “Ghost in the Graveyard” isn’t something you’re likely to listen to for pleasure, but it’s a reasonably good investment for scoring horror or suspense RPGs.
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This is a fairly complex but very satisfying set of 3D terrain, usable with any role-playing genre where you want to stage a miniatures-scale scene in a forest. You will need at least an intermediate level of crafting skill to put these models together well. In my opinion, the trees are the best innovation in this set, as they look pretty good on the table and allow you to place snipers within. This is a great addition to the Fat Dragon line, though admittedly, a somewhat expensive one.
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This is a smooth, nonintrusive track that could play very well under a variety of role-playing scenes in any setting from about the 1970s onward, into the distant future. I’d recommend using it for relatively calm scenes when the PCs are in non-threatening situations. It would be good backing for montage moments, travel scenes, or extended periods of investigation in libraries, government offices, and so on—scenes that advance the plot but don’t involve combat, hazards, or other obvious dangers. The ID tags need some cleanup (Fishwife Games has been doing a better job with these in more recent releases), and the track doesn’t loop as well as I’d like, but otherwise it’s a very fine piece of RPG background music.
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“E-Z” may not be quite the right moniker for this product. You’ll need an intermediate level of skill with paper modeling and a whole lot of patience to put these pieces together. However, the extensive instructions that Fat Dragon provides will help jumpstart your paper modeling experience if you’re new to this aspect of the hobby. Once you build these expansion pieces, however, the results are fantastic. This set and the related offerings from Fat Dragon can really make your tabletop pop. The shrine with the beholder idol in it is a particularly fun touch here. Keep in mind that this is an “expansion”; you’ll want to combine it with a base set for maximum usefulness.
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This track will take you through a number of different musical styles, from spacy electronica to rock and roll to lounge jazz. You were expecting creepy, due to the name “Haunted House”? The sounds of wind and indistinct voices—possibly moans or cries—try to inject this into the piece, but the sound effects aren’t enough to turn basically non-creepy music into a scary experience. I wouldn’t use this track to score an exploration of a haunted house. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use it; I just think the name and the music are mismatched. I’d use this track instead to score something like a night of investigation or patrol up and down the Las Vegas strip or a similar setting. Even here, though, the dramatic changes in mood, genre, and (especially) volume make this track less well suited to continuous looping under an RPG scene, unless the scene just happened to play out in a way that exactly corresponds to the music’s rises and falls.
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This track definitely hits the target on both the “creepy” and “carnivalesque” scales. Composer Randin Graves deserves a giant teddy bear from the midway for getting the atmosphere just right. He’s also cleverly engineered the track so that it both ends well and loops well, a good accomplishment with this piece. However, the shifts in tone and mood take you from the bright lights of the midway and the rides to the dark shadows behind the attractions and perhaps inside the freakshows. While this makes for a great listen and evokes the carnival mood exceedingly well, it also detracts from the track’s usefulness at the table. These variations make it hard to know what kind of scene to score with this piece.
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Parts of this track are really catchy, memorable, and enjoyable … but other parts are just weird and distracting. The basic riffs do a good job of creating an energetic, suspenseful atmosphere, but starting around 2:15 there are odd sound effects that make me think of giant mutant pigeons cooing. This really brings the track down for me; I like everything else about the track, but that center section can’t be ignored. (The ID3 tags are also “messy,” with underscores in the track name and such, but the publisher has being doing a better job with the tags in more recent releases.)
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As always, Jonathan Roberts delivers fine artwork for this map, and Rite Publishing delivers multiple formats to meet a wide variety of needs. The clockwork maze provides an interesting encounter location, and the layout is clever, although clearer indication of elevation might be useful (it might also interfere with the map’s aesthetics, so I waffle on this matter). The level of technology on evidence here might be too high for a typical fantasy role-playing campaign, unless you’re playing in a setting like Eberron that incorporates some steampunk-type elements. The “maze” doesn’t seem to have an entrance or exit; the whole thing is surrounded by a solid wall. DMs using the map will need to provide their own entrances and exits.
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