First impressions count My first impression upon seeing the front cover was utter amazement. I always thought Kobold magazine is a fanzine. It’s not. What immediately strikes you is the art; it’s a very pretty front cover by a Nicole Cardiff called the "Winter Druid", according to the credits.

My initial intention was to skip through the magazine, speed read to get an overview. I kept stopping to read articles and letters. The Style is good and the content is excellent. I’m glad to see plenty of Pathfinder specific stuff too. I guess that’s not really a surprise considering it’s the current pet favourite. It’s also the only d20 rule set I own, I love it. A couple of my favourite articles The Elves: the fallen ones. The idea seems to be to reinvent the core races over several issues. This particular issue was focused on the Elves. The Article provides three pages of fluff and crunch. They seemed heavily influenced by Dragonage, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s nice to see the races redone. You could use one of these articles to add unique flavour to your setting, instantly. No conversion required. The Ecology of the Froghemoth. This little piece introduces a cool new monster. A Froghemoth complete with fluff, life cycle, stats and really top quality art. What’s cool for me is the stats are provided for every stage of the life cycle. There’s even a rare variant included “the Electric Froghemoth”.

Lessons from the shadows: History’s greatest assassins. This article is about ninjas, seriously. Need I say more? There is never enough ninja.

Spice up your Combat Encounters: the Combat Skill Challenge The Chatty DM’s first ever published article. It’s full of good advice for a GM fed up with “You kick down the door and are faced with two Orcs, Roll initiative”. All in chatty’s familiar friendly, fatherly tone. The Conclusion Feel the love? I’m going to subscribe to a print copy. Kobold has some amazing art and great content. I would wholeheartedly recommend it. If you play another fantasy system which is not d20, you could mine it for ideas. However it is a d20 mag. It’s just nice to see a RPG exclusive magazine. The last one I seen was a friend’s old (1983) copy of white dwarf. Oh how times change.