Designers & Dragons: The Column
The Coming of the Kobold: 2007-Present
On April 19, 2007, Paizo Publishing announced that they'd lost the license to publish the two longest-running professional magazines in the RPG industry: Dragon and Dungeon. Perhaps more surprising was Wizards of the Coast's decision to discontinue the print magazines entirely, moving them online. This alone would probably have left a magazine-sized hole in the RPG industry, but when Wizards started publishing the magazines themselves, that October, their initial efforts were very limited. Much of the "magazines" were spent hyping the then-upcoming fourth edition of D&D and even with those marketing articles in hand, Wizads was unable to offer up much regular content for Dragon or (to a greater degree) Dungeon for almost a year.
This offered a great opportunity for someone in the industry and Open Design stepped up to the plate. On May 21st, well before Paizo's publication of their final magaazine--Dragon #359 (September, 2007)--Wolfgang Baur announced that he was working on a new magazine for gamers. The result was Kobold Quarterly #1 (Summer, 2007). As Baur wrote in his first editorial, Kobold Quarterly #1 wasn't the lavish full-color production that Dragon had been, but it had attitude. He was too humble to say it, but it also had terrific experience, since Baur himself had been the head honcho at Dragon just over a decade previous.
| "My guiding principle is that Kobold Quarterly should not only offer something valuable to the D&D gaming world, it should do it with attitude. That’s the meaning behind the 'small but fierce' credo: kobolds may not have the big marketing dollars or the massive staff of a multinational corporation, but we’re also free to do as we please." --Wolfgang Baur, "Editorial: Small but Fierce", Kobold Quarterly #1 (Summer, 2007) |
Beyond that, Kobold Quarterly had the support of the vibrant community of designers that had arisen within the d20 market. Though Baur wrote much of the first issue of Kobold Quarterly himself, he also included an interview with Erik Mona of Paizo Publishing. It was the beginning of a constant relationship with designers and publishers from the rest of the post-d20 industry. The second issue alone included articles by: Ed Greenwood, designer of the Forgotten Realms; Jeff Grubb, one of Baur's inspirations at TSR and the creator of many notable products including Marvel Super Heroes (1984) and The Manual of the Planes (1987); Nicolas Logue, who we've already met as an Open Design contributor, and who was just then getting his start with books for Paizo and Wizards; Robert J. Schwalb, a d20 author for Goodman Games, Green Ronin, Mongoose, and others; and Skip Williams, one of the co-designers of D&D 3e.
When Open Design published Kobold Quarterly #1 it didn't do so as a patronage project, but it did follow the same model for distribution: the magazine was sold primarily as a PDF, but a limited number of POD books were also produced. The small print run of Kobold Quarterly #1 sold out in September. Thanks to its success, Kobold Quarterly #2 (Fall, 2007) was printed in larger quantities and was made available in game stores--unlike any other Open Design product to that date.
By January, 2008, the magazine had 1000 subscribers. Later that year Baur was given a Diana Jones Award for excellence in gaming, in part for his innovative patronage system and in part for his creation of a new print RPG magazine in a market that seemed hostile to such an endeavor.
Ever since, the story of Kobold Quarterly has been one of confident success. It's managed at least four issues every year and its full-color interior today looks a lot like that of Dragon in its waning days. A bit of controversy arose for the magazine with issue #7 (Fall, 2008), when Kobold Quarterly supplemented its d20 coverage with a single Dungeons & Dragons 4e article, "Ecology of the Centaur"--by Baur himself. Where much of the mainstream RPG industry still wars between d20 and 4e, Open Design has managed to walk a fine line between them. Just as with Open Design's adventures, today's Kobold Quarterly supports both 4e and d20's modern successor, Paizo's Pathfinder. Articles for Green Ronin's Dragon AGE show up in Kobold Quarterly as well, mainly because Baur likes the system.
Though Open Design's patronage projects were all well-received, Kobold Quarterly gave the company much more attention thanks to its appearance in game stores. It's no surprise that this would soon affect everything else that Open Design was doing.
Moving Away from Exclusivity: 2008-2010
The success of Kobold Quarterly was soon followed by a second move toward the mass-market. In the earliest days of Open Design, Baur wrote a series of game design articles--mainly to keep his first patrons entertained while waiting to see if he could garner enough support to make the company viable. Following the success of Kobold Quarterly, Baur collected many of these articles as The Kobold Guide to Game Design Volume 1: Adventures (2008). It was first published as a PDF, but it quickly achieved a high level of success. A print book was thus created just a few week's after the PDF's appearance. The PDF and the book would soon become Open Design's first "unlimited" release.
Open Design continued this trend of opening up its publications with Tales of Zobeck (2009), its sixth patronage project. The book of six adventures was a limited edition--as all the patronage projects were to that point--but the 48-page Zobeck Gazetteer (2008) which was produced as part of the project was created non-exclusively. When it was released in December of 2008, Baur loudly lauded it as "the first public Open Design".
| "The piracy of some Open Design work was a hugely depressing blow at a time I really didn't need more bad news. The ongoing piracy is an argument in favor of quitting as a designer of patron projects, because the whole point of a patron system was some form of mutual trust." --Wolfgang Baur, www.koboldquarterly.com forums (December, 2008) |
Meanwhile, discontent continued to bubble among fans over the exclusivity of the rest of Open Design's adventures. Online piracy was one of the results--something which nearly drove Baur to give up, since it went against the core of trust that Baur expected in the patronage relationship. By the end of 2008, Baur was polling supporters to see what they thought of exclusivity. Most of them said that they wanted projects to remain private--only available to Open Design patrons, not to the general public. Thus Open Design continued on with Wrath of the River King (2008), and Halls of the Mountain King (2009), but those would be Open Design's final exclusive releases.
Having set a precedent with the first Zobeck Gazetteer, Open Design dramatically opened up its production in 2009. It did so by developing and publishing additional volumes of the Zobeck Gazetteer--though patrons still received private editions with some unique material. Dwarves of the Ironcrags (2009) was the second book made publicly available in this way. More gazetteers would follow.
Shortly afterward, Open Design announced an even more mass-market product: From Shore to Sea (2010), a patronage product being produced for Paizo as part of their "Pathfinder module line". From Shore to Sea was written by Brandon Hodge, who had originally been an Open Design patron and who had contributed to earlier projects such as Halls of the Mountain King. This marked another change at Open Design, which in 2009 ceased being just Wolfgang Baur's design house and instead became something larger.
Following the release of Halls of the Mountain King, exclusivity's other shoe finally dropped. For three years, Open Design had been moving toward more open content--from Kobold Quarterly through the Kobold Guides to Game Design and into the Zobeck Gazetteers. Beginning with the 4e adventure Courts of the Shadow Fey (2010), all patronage projects were made widely available on the mass market following their creation--bringing the patronage products into better sync with the modern reality of Open Design.
Opening Up the Future: 2010-Present
Today, Open Design is in a phase of considerable expansion. Patronage products are being initiated by a variety of designers for a variety of systems. Siegfried Trent was one of the new authors who led the way with a series of "Advanced Feats" PDFs for Pathfinder (2010-Present). Eileen Connors, Tim Connors, and Richard Pett were among the first authors other than Baur to produce a print patronage adventure with their Tales of the Old Margreve (2010). At the same time as these other expansions, Kobold Quarterly rented its first booth at GenCon in 2010.
Even more books by even more authors seems to be the trend in 2011 while Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, and Brandon Hodge are working on what may be Open Design's biggest patronage product to date, the Midgard Campaign Setting (2011?), which will present the World of Zobeck--a setting built on Slavic and Germanic roots, rather than the Celtic and British roots more common in FRPGs.
| "The project was never meant to happen: I tried very hard to keep the Open Design default setting for our adventures--the Free City of Zobeck--totally self-contained. It was meant to be droppable into any campaign, from Greyhawk to Golarion and Eberron to your homebrew. That worked for a while, but each adventure by Open Design added a bit more about the world, and fans kept asking about what was over the next hill." --Wolfgang Baur, Interview, dragonageoracle.com (January, 2011) |
With a strong and unique campaign setting, a collection of talented designers eager to write for that world, and a unique way for those designers to interact with their customers and fans, Open Design looks to be headed upward into the future.
Links of Note
The following links will provide you with more info on Open Design:
- The Kobold Quarterly Blog
- Open Design FAQ: Patronage Explained
- Patronage Page for Midgard Campaign Setting
- Kobold Quarterly Magazine Index
The following histories (found in Designers & Dragons) contain more information on some of the topics in this article:
- For the company that got Wolfgang Baur his start in gaming, read TSR (pages 6-32) and for his second employer, read Wizards of the Coast (pages 276-303). The story of how Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR is found in both of those articles and also notably in the history of AEG (pages 262-267).
- For Arc Dream's ransom model, read their mini-history (page 250) under Pagan Publishing (pages 244-251).
- For another attempt to take advantage of the magazine-sized hole in the RPG industry, read about Level Up in Goodman Games (pages 386-391). Sadly for them, Open Design got there two years earlier.
- For two companies receiving good support through Kobold Quarterly, read Green Ronin Publishing (pages 369-377) and Paizo Publishing (pages 412-418).
Special Thanks
Thanks to Wolfgang Baur for his comments on this article.
Be back here next month for some apocrypha that didn't make it into Designers & Dragons. Then, following a look at comics in December, I'll be offering up my yearly look at the industry on January 1 of the new year.
