Kobold Guides

There’s a reason it’s called a tabletop roleplaying game. Taking on the personae of different characters in the story brings a richness and depth to the experience and can make your game sessions exciting and memorable. But how can the poor, harried Game Master wrangle a whole slew of unique personalities on top of all the other work that goes into preparing each week? The Kobold Guide to Roleplaying has the answers you seek.

The essential elements for building a world. Roleplaying games and fantasy fiction are filled with rich and fascinating worlds: the Forgotten Realms, Glorantha, Narnia, R'lyeh, Middle-earth, Barsoom, and so many more. It took startling leaps of imagination as well as careful thought and planning to create places like these: places that readers and players want to come back to again and again.

You want your games to be many things: creative. Innovative. Playable. Fun. If you're a designer, add "published" to that list. The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design gives you an insider's view on how to make a game that people will want to play again and again. Author Mike Selinker has invited some of the world's most talented and experienced game designers to share their secrets on game conception, design, development, and presentation. In these minutes, you'll learn about storyboarding, balancing, prototyping, and playtesting from the best in the business.

The Best Role in Roleplaying! Whether you're a new game master or a seasoned vet looking for a new angle to shake up your game, these 19 essays by expert game masters help construct your campaign from the ground up - and keep your players engaged until the dramatic conclusion. Complete with discussions on plotting, tone, branching storytelling, pacing, and crafting action scenes, you'll find all the tips and advice you need to take on the best role in role-playing - and become an expert game master, too!

Decades of GMing experience! Whether it’s advice from grognards who were running games at the dawn of RPGs, or suggestions from the new generation of game designers, these 21 essays by experts are here to help you improve your GMing skills and create fun, amazing, memorable campaigns that’ll be talked about for years. In this audiobook, master GMs and storytellers give you advice about solo campaigns, shy players, cell phones, and making rulings on the fly.

What makes a fantasy fantastic? Magic, of course! Whether it’s unearthly beasts, scheming sorcerers, legendary swords, or locales that defy logic and physics, a compelling fantasy story needs magical elements. The tricky part is that in order for the story to work, you have to get your reader or player to believe the unbelievable. The Kobold Guide to Magic takes you behind the scenes to learn the secrets of designing and writing about magic from 20 top fantasy authors and game designers.

You can’t control what players are going to do. That’s half the fun. But you can control where they do it. That’s a whole other half! The Kobold Guide to Dungeons gives both new and experienced Game Masters insight and ideas into making dungeons great. In-depth essays from industry luminaries teach you to think outside your own boxes, and into a larger realm of challenge, discovery, and good old monster bashing.