Knights of the Dinner Table is an award winning game magazine and has capturing the Origins award several times. The main stories focus on a group of friends who play the Hackmaster system. The strips originally started in Shadis Magazine back when Jolly Blackburn ran the ship and have appeared online and in Dragon magazine among other places.
Knights of the Dinner Table is however, more than funny strips about those core gamers. The coverage has evolved to cover different groups and has different stories going on with these different groups providing the reader some options and changes in personality and type.
Outside of those cartons though, the magazine provides some gaming material. Much of this is all-purpose material. It’ll be interesting to see how this fares now that Green Ronin has announced that they’ll be turning Freeport, one of the first d20 cities published by third party, into an all purpose city with game statistics coming in separate books.
About the only negative thing I’d note about the magazine is the high amount of advertisements and their placements. When opening a book, the first page shouldn’t be an ad, especially for a magazine that’s actually doubled in price since this ad for Game Trade magazine was published (from $1.99 to $3.99). It’s not really that there are pages and pages of them. No, we’ll save those for the regular comics from Marvel and DC (and I’ll keep buying the trades to avoid ‘em.) Rather it’s that their on a lot of the other non-strip pages and make those pages look very busy in comparison to the crisp clean lines of the comic itself.
In this issue, it starts off with a twist on the core group. The core group is B.A., normally the GM, followed by Bob and Dave, two ‘average’ gamers who are into the hacking, Sara, a relative of B.A. who is the more ‘serious’ gamer who enjoys the role playing aspects, and Brian, the rules lawyer from hell who occasionally resorts to violence to solve life’s little problems at the game table.
I stopped reading the Knights about the 40’s. It wasn’t that the comic was bad, it was just that space was becoming a premium and I felt that for the most part, I had read many of these comics before. B.A. runs a game. Bob and Dave attack some peasants. Sara tries vainly to keep the campaign in play. Brian winds up getting the most of the group by using his superior knowledge of the rules. Nothing bad but at the same time, nothing I felt the need to follow on a monthly basis.
Reading the first strips here though, “Big Man In Town.”, sees an immediate change in things. While the game group has switched systems before, showing the spoofs of each system and how these gamer types work in different genres, the biggest change of pace was that B.A. wasn’t running the show, instead it was Brian. Here we’re taken into a confrontation that’s already started in a western style game.
This worked well as it allowed a different light to be cast and still showcased the humor of things like fumbles with shotguns. Some other things are allowed to roll out of this game, including some plot lines forcing B.A. back into the game master’s chair, and an interesting conversation between Brian and Bob about how Bob, normally a fair reader of rules, all of the sudden knew every flaw and problem that the western game they were running.
In addition to the good old Knights of the Dinner Table, that first group, we also have a second group, the Black Hands. These are not carbon copies of the Knights but different players who tend to represent different types of gamers. Their normal game master is Nitro, an old school GM whose more forceful with the players than B.A., followed by Newt, a weasel like character, Gordo, a player of those odd and often effeminate style characters, Steve, the typical jerk of the game, and Pete, the grumpy game store owner whose either trying to pawn off some one legged dwarves or angered at the actions of those like Newt who undercut his store. The tale in this case involving some old foodstuffs sold by this world’s version of “WoTC” and the good old dumpster diving. More of this story involves the interaction between the people as opposed to the actual game itself. Good stuff.
In terms of the gaming articles, we have a wide variety of material by numerous authors. Mark Plemmons, one of the gurus of Kenzer, provides conversion notes and material for Hackmaster’s Pixie Fairies into D&D 3.5. Lloyd Brown III, a prolific author of various books, provides information on how to craft items on a budget.
If you’re like me and always in need of a good generic map, the Lair of the Ahsen Drake cavern is right up your alley. On the other hand, if you’re always in need of characters, the long running The Good, The Bad, and the Ulgy is still in print, this time with Jesse Morgan, Chou, and Pudence Branson. As I mentioned before, the guys at Knights of the Dinner Table have been doing generic resources under their Gamemasters’ Workshop for years and the quality is still good.
Each character comes with an illustration and breaks down the characters by skills, weaknesses, motivation, and the majority of detail comes in the background section. I can see the positive and negative side of doing things this way as say opposed to how the old City Books used to do thing with their various ranking scores. For one, it’s much more open ended and allows a greater degree of customization. On the other, if you’re running something like d20 Modern, GURPS, or Hero, it takes forever to come up with stats for those GMs that feel that they must have them.
Also included in these pages, are different reviews on a wide range of subjects. For example, Lost Game Safari covers over the old Thieves World board game, Sanctuary. A Gamer’s Rant on the Movies this time, discusses Asian Horror Films. Looking At Comics provides a quick run down on several different comics ranging from Sonic X #3 to Danger Girl #1 of 4. It’s a nice touch to see some reviews and thoughts in print on the smaller magazine style of thing s as often the internet is one of my first and last lines of reviews these days.
The comics are still well written. Some of the material is still, as ever, appropriate for all gamers to nod their heads in shame at, including my own. In the One-Two Punches, smaller comics that are told in one or two panels, I could feel myself nodding with Nitro, “Not for future reference—the arch duke of dark evil does not answer to the name “punk”. Classic stuff.
If you’re a gamer and have never read Knights of the Dinner Table, you owe it to yourself to pick up at least one issue.
