The first issue of Kobold Quarterly turned up in my inbox this morning. I haven’t finished reading it yet (I’ve got a weekend ahead of me for that), but my first impressions are favourable.

It has a fair bit of crunch (game mechanics), but most of the content is fluff (setting information) which is how I like it. I have access to more then enough D&D game mechanics already so I’d rather have inspiration for plots then anything else (and I’ll confess to finding fluff more enjoyable to read than tables of combat statistics).

Having a high fluff content has the added bonus of making it handy for people who are running non-D&D games with a sword and sorcery setting (I know at least one person planning a RuneQuest game in a D&Desque setting).

One feature I’m happy to see is the Ecology of series, which was one of my favourite bits of the late Dragon magazine.

If you like RPGs then I suggest you pick up a subscription. At $16/year it is pretty inexpensive and is aimed at both DMs and players (although, it seems slightly more suited to the former).

A friend of mine is in the process of setting up a MUD, and we’re going through a world building exercise.

I’d managed to come up with a description of a location (and the journey to get to it) that I was pretty happy with, and then someone came up with a map which contradicted it. There were two choices, either the description needed to be changed or the map did.

I didn’t want to add an ocean voyage so I set about amending the map so I could make my proposal for the general layout of the world. It was soon after that that I realized my error. The start of the journey that was described was in a temperate region, while the end was in a desert, and they were at the same Latitude. That, combined with their closeness, mean that the weather simply didn’t make sense.

In future, I’ll always draw a map to make sure that where I put things makes sense.