Twenty years! An impressive amount of time for any RPG company, but even more so for a small but fierce kobold!
Although I wasn’t around for those first few years, I have been lucky enough to be around for most of ‘em!
As Wolfgang said last week, it all started for me with the Spell-less Ranger! When the Pathfinder RPG Beta was released, I loved what Paizo had done, but I was bummed that the ranger was still a spellcaster. (I’ve always been in the “Aragorn didn’t cast spells!” camp.)
So, I wrote up a variant class called the spell-less ranger. I had been a fan of Dragon magazine since I was a kid, and probably would have submitted the spell-less ranger to them, but the magazine had recently ceased print production (catch my story on that topic in The Quest for One Thousand Dragons ).
Fortunately, there was a cool new magazine in town called Kobold Quarterly, so I took a shot and sent it to them. I was elated when I learned that my little class would be published in Kobold Quarterly #11!
The Spell-less Ranger turned out to be popular, which led to additional articles of mine being published in subsequent issues of the magazine, including Beast Masters, and the white necromancer and shaman classes.
In 2011, I was in Seattle for PaizoCon, and Wolfgang mentioned that the person who did layout for him wasn’t available to do an upcoming book. He was scrambling to find someone else to tackle it. I mentioned that my day job was as a graphic designer and I’d be happy to lend a hand. I remember Wolfgang being a little surprised since he mainly knew me as a contributor to Kobold Quarterly, not an art, layout, and graphics guy!
2012–2013: Maybe I Can Help?
If memory serves, that first book I laid out was Journeys to the West. I also did the layout for the Midgard Bestiary and many others during this period. Interestingly, Wolfgang was still the one working with artists and procuring art for these early books, most of which was black and white. Over time however, I began to work more with the artists directly, a task I suspect Wolfgang was all too happy to turn over!
Eventually, Wolfgang asked me to take on more responsibility in the growing company, and I transitioned from the ‘layout guy’ to Kobold Press Art Director!
2014 -2015: Bigger, Better . . . and in Color!
Things grew rapidly for Kobold Press during the next few years. It was an exciting (and busy!) time. I’m pretty sure it was at some point during this period that I first began using my now oft uttered mantra “sleep is for the weak!” ha ha
Kickstarter became increasingly important, and each new Kobold Press Kickstarter campaign pulled in more backers than the previous one. Projects like Southlands, Advanced Races Compendium, and Deep Magic were all very successful.
Paul Stanely of Kiss (yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Kiss Army!) once said when talking about the band as they were beginning to get popular: “it was like when you are on a roller-coaster climbing up toward the top . . . you can just feel that things are about to get crazy, so you had to keep doing what you were doing and hang on tight.” This period in the company’s history felt like that to me.
Kobold Press also moved fairly quickly from black and white interior art to beautiful color art for our books. I was thrilled by this, as it allowed me to level up the visual look of our books and work with some fantastic artists. It fills me with pride that Kobold Press is consistently praised for the quality of the art in our books.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Tyranny of Dragons. Wizards of the Coast was working on the (at the time) brand-new fifth edition D&D rules and they selected Kobold Press to work with them to produce the very first set of fifth edition D&D adventures! Working on Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat was extremely exciting, but also nerve-wracking, since we were working on the adventures while the folks at Wizards of the Coast were still actively tweaking and finalizing the rules. Oh, fun fact – this was the first time in my life I had to sign an actual NDA!
Check out Southlands and more for one low price in the Fanatical Bundle!
2016: A Big Ol’ Tome Full of Beasts
This year, Kobold Press released Tome of Beasts, the monster book that really put the company on the map. Tome of Beasts was a big, beautiful hard cover that had hundreds of awesome monsters and featured tons of great art. The book also spawned many additional, equally awesome monster books, including Creature Codex, Tome of Beasts 2, Tome of Beasts 3, Monster Vault 1, Monster Vault 2 . . . but I’m getting way ahead of myself! The story of those books is for others to tell …
Oh, one last thing! All this talk of Kobold Press’s history, and all of the awesome art brings me to The Art of Kobold Press, a beautiful coffee-table book that celebrate the company’s history and the amazing art that has been such an important part of our legacy. Be sure to grab your copy and help celebrate 20 years of Kobold Press!
Read more at this site