Wolfgang Baur of Open Design
By Cape Rust
Wolfgang Baur has overcome his background in biochemistry and Molecular biology to become an accomplished and celebrated game designer. His RPG Pedigree includes extensive work with Dungeon and Dragon magazines, Planescape, Al-Qadim, StarDrive, and the Doom of Daggerdale module for The Forgotten Realms, Dark Matter and Alternity. Currently he is the HMFKIC for Open Design games and the Editor-in-Chief for Kobold Quarterly. He has won enough prestigious awards to fill up three I love me walls and two I love me shelves and through all of this he is still a nice guy!
CR: Five words that best describe the first character you ever played.
WB: “Human cleric with a hammer.” (Though I confess that I spent most of my early RPG career as the DM, and only got to play quite a bit later.)
CR: What is your all time favorite RPG and why?
WB: Dungeons & Dragons is the one that I started with, the one that gave me my first job out of college, and the one that paid for my first car. I really should be more grateful to it, but I’m one of those fickle gamers who likes trying new things before running back to my one true love. Plus I’ve had a steady thing on the side with Call of Cthulhu for about 20 years.
The new hotness that makes me dizzy at the moment is AGE, the ruleset for the Dragon Age RPG. It’s fun and furious, and when you spend as much time with fine-grained, detailed, and complex RPGs as I do, simple and fast and fun is very, very appealing.
CR: Who have you not worked with in the RPG industry that you would like to work with? (I fully understand that there are only like 4 or 5 big names you haven’t worked with so this question should be easy…)
WB: It’s not that easy to choose, but if pressed, I’d love to work with Kenneth Hite on something Cthulhu-like and decadent; or work with Robin Laws on design essays or a character builder. I could easily have named six others, but you’re right, I’ve been lucky to work at the same company or on the same project with dozens of great folks. The RPG field is loaded with talented designers, which is probably why video game companies grab talent from it so often.
CR: I understand you and your dog are a big fans of dog shows… What is your breed of choice?
WB: Sadly, our dog died a few years back but we’re looking for another one soon. If we go with family tradition, though, we’ll probably wind up getting a rescue dog from the shelter: purebred or mutt.
CR: Have you ever looked at a game and thought I wish I had that Idea?
WB: All the time—the games field is generating great stuff! I’ve found great games cooking in the Indie area (like Fiasco) and in bigger game companies (like the great Ravenloft board game from Wizards), and in the odd little corners of PDF publishing. My most recent “duh” moment was the Super Genius Guide to Horrifically Overpowered Feats, which is just damn amusing. Chris Pramas’s stunt dice mechanic in Dragon Age RPG is another one of those.
CR: From a design standpoint, how hard is it to find or commission art that actually fits in with your concepts?
WB: My problem is I have champagne tastes and a beer budget. It’s not hard to find artists capable of creating art much better than I can dream up, but it is very difficult to afford them. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky to work with some extremely talented folks who either haven’t broken into the industry, or who can do some projects at less than New York publishing cover prices. One day, I dream of commissioning one of the hot artists who is doing killer work for novels and hardcovers and posters, but the sensible pocketbook side of me says that Open Design needs to be a lot bigger company to pull that off.
CR: Roll playing or Role playing?
WB: Oh, some of both, please. I like seeing players get into character and speak in their character’s voices, but at some point, the wands and swords come out and it is time to roll some dice! The most rewarding moments for me fuse dice and character elements: for example, the paladin who calls for strength and makes the roll.
CR: Kobold Quarterly, why Kobolds? Why not, say, Beholder Quarterly?
WB: Bah, beholders! Always destroying everything they look at! Fearsome but useless, though I hear some WotC art directors use them as enforcers.
Kobolds have no money, no Hit Dice to speak of, and long odds against them. That’s what small press publishing really is: a struggle to bring good writing and good game design to a wider public. I figured if we couldn’t be a soaring dragon, at least we could be a clever kobold. “Small but fierce” is the magazine’s motto, and we live it.
CR: I remember when Kobold Quarterly first came out, I was excited to see it, but was worried it would be a Dragon Magazine clone, please explain why I was completely wrong.
WB: You are completely wrong because Kobold Quarterly lacks Dragon’s three main weapons: its prodigious art budget, its early access to WotC releases, and its fanatical devotion to the Pope. Fortunately, the kobolds have access to four things that Dragon lacks: kobolds are not bound by corporate restrictions on content (ask me about the Ecology of the Succubus, I dare ya!), kobolds have freelancers they have never heard of, kobolds have excellent skills in stealth and trapsetting, and hey, we’re scrappy!
Seriously, every magazine is its own thing. I did want to recreate Dragon when that magazine folded and went electronic. Kobold Quarterly has since acquired its own joys and quirks, and I’m quite proud of the progress we’ve made and the voice it offers to gamers, in print and in PDF. Every time I feel a little down about the art budget or something, I pull out Kobold issue #1, and I see how far we’ve come!
CR: What do you love most about Kobold Quarterly?
WB: The chance it gives new writers is a close second, but I think these days, it is the opportunity to surprise readers with something they aren’t getting from the industry heavyweights.
CR: How Difficult is it to produce the quality material that the Kobold team produces so often?
WB: It’s a ton of mind-shattering work to review the slush, whip articles into shape, write the contracts, get the art together, and do the less-obvious-but-vital stuff like accounting and taxes and customer service. Fortunately, I have excellent, excellent help, starting with my wife Shelly and also including a crack crew of kobold editors, graphic artists, business folk, and bill collector-assassins.
I would say it is about a DC 30 Publishing skill check to keep any small press venture alive. I have learned why publishers get ulcers; I haven’t quite figured out why they don’t get paid better.
CR: This summer we all look forward to “Things to Loot and Treasures edition” of Kobold Quarterly. Can you give us an idea of some possible future subjects you guys might cover?
WB: Part of the fun of Kobold is reinventing it when a new writer has a great idea. (And if anyone wants to contribute, the writer’s guidelines are on the web site!) Since we depend on submissions, it’s hard to predict. But I do know a few things we are likely to cover, such as villains, devils, new monsters, official Pathfinder Society articles, new weapons for AGE, a look at the Midgard campaign setting, great columns by Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and Steve Winter, maybe something about demonic cannibal apes, and perhaps even something special about D&D Next.
CR: Could you give our readers a quick synopsis of Midgard?
WB: Sure! It’s my home campaign setting of the last 5 years, with elements of Norse, German, and Slavic legends. What makes it great is the emphasis on sword-and-sorcery, meddling gods, special new magic like shadow magic and wild new elements like ley lines and clockwork creations.
There’s no grinding rat-killing boredom, there’s no meaningless crawls; there’s adventures where the stakes are high. Ghouls, dragons, and vampires might seize power. Kingdoms sink below the waves, and horrors from another world might trample cities to dust. Midgard is all about seizing the day, because it’s grim and life is short. Also, the world is flat and Loki’s giants are coming, so by the Eleven Hells, do not waste another hour! Thor and Rava save us!
CR: With all of the settings out there, why should my players and I visit Midgard?
WB: Because if you don’t, you will never get to gaming Valhalla. Seriously, Open Design has been about great adventures from the start, and unlike many published settings (in fact, unlike most since Greyhawk and the Realms), it grew in the stone-by-stone, gradual way, through years of play. Settings like Dark Sun or Eberron were written in a great hurry by comparison.
On top of that, I’ve been working with a lot of talented adventure designers who usually work for the big boys. From the Midgard Tales collection to the gritty Streets of Zobeck hardboiled urban tales, down to the horrors of the Empire of the Ghouls, the adventures are what make Midgard great. Play them in your homebrew setting if you like, but you’ll be surprised how many players say, “Yeah, that was cool, let’s do another Zobeck adventure.” And it is about the adventures.
CR: Your Midgard campaign setting has been a long time coming, is Midgard your Opus?
WB: Good question! I think it’s all the best elements of the last 5 years of my design work, informed and guided by other designers like Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb. However, it’s not just my baby. It’s a collaboration with all the people who have designed adventures in the Free City of Zobeck and who have been part of the Open Design team.
So, it might be an opus (I leave that to the critics to decide), but it’s also takes a broader view of design. The ideas, playtest, adventure design, and monster design were all done with the goal of creating tension and lots of story hooks, and with keeping traditional fantasy elements and showing them off in a new way.
CR: What in your opinion is the most unique thing about Midgard?
WB: Midgard is about player characters who change the world—it has a thousand story hooks built into it that are starting points for big stories. The whole setting is built not to churn out a 30-year treadmill of supplements and sourcebooks, but instead to inspire a blazing heroic comet across the sky. Shine a light in the darkness. Every DM who runs it can see his players make a difference to more than their level or their bank account. The stories have some mythic resonances, and the consequences of failure are stark: demons win, or lands plunge into darkness, or entire nations are enslaved.
That’s the creative side. As a publisher, I also have to point out that Midgard is part of a rare breed: a new Pathfinder RPG campaign setting (there’s not nearly as many as D&D has), and a non-licensed setting. Increasingly, we’re seeing RPG companies license their settings from elsewhere, giving us great games like Leverage or Marvel or Dragon Age or the like. I like the tradition of RPG settings that come from within the RPG community, so a license was never in the cards here.
CR: You seem to have embraced public input into your projects before many other designers, do you feel like Judging the RPG Superstar competitions made it easier to reach out to the public?
WB: I think it did, though I did public projects before I judged the RPG Superstar contest. It’s probably because I have worked as an editor as well as a designer, and because I had two very positive design collaborations early in my career, one with Steve Kurtz for Dungeon Magazine, the other with Monte Cook on the Dark*Matter campaign setting.
Public input can be destructive if you don’t know what you want, or if you lack the social skills to keep a community focused. But it can also be tremendously powerful at generating lots of ideas, evaluating them, and sharpening the best ones. Like any other element of the designer’s toolset, it’s something you learn by doing.
I think we’ll see more and more collaborative design work in tabletop games—it’s the way CRPGs have operated for years.
CR: Crowd funding is all the rage these days, is it a fad or the future?
WB: It is the future, for at least two reasons. First off, it gets things made that people want. Dumb ideas don’t get funded. Overly ambitious ideas don’t get funded. Projects that don’t deliver something real to the audience don’t get funded.
Second, the RPG audience is a relatively small niche, it’s a hobby for millions but it will never have a Hollywood budget or a triple-A CRPG budget with hundreds of staffers and millions or tens of millions in funding. Crowdfunding at its best is do-it-yourself, punk publishing for a passionate, engaged audience. And dammit, tabletop gamers are nothing if not passionate and engaged, and they’ll kick in a few bucks to get cool things done.
That said, it’s a bit overhyped right now, and I suspect we’ll see a crash at some point. Not every project is worthy, and some of the pitches I see are not thought through. But yeah… I think a lot of designers will find Kickstarter a good way to get started, and a lot of freelancing veterans are making it work for them and their fans.
CR: How different is your game company Open Design vs. other companies you’ve worked for? Do you ever find yourself making decisions or choices that you resented the higher ups making in the past?
WB: All the time. Budget decisions, creative decisions, hiring, and even marketing decisions sometimes fall to me, because Open Design is a small firm. On the one hand, bwa ha ha, I have the power now! Look out! On the other hand, I know that in many areas, I just don’t know what I’m doing, so I get help and ask advice and try to learn as quickly as possible. No one likes to think of game companies as a business, but every creative person learns sooner or later that the creative business is still a business. If you don’t learn it, you go hungry.
CR: I am a big fan of the Party of One adventures, what inspired you to re-engage this choose your own adventure style format?
WB: The credit goes entirely to Matthew J. Hanson, who pitched it to Kobold Quarterly magazine as an article. The Party of One series got fan letters and the articles were great, so I asked him to write a few of them as standalone PDFs. They seem to be very popular, and they work great with the Beginner Box rules and characters for Pathfinder, or with any stripped down sort of rules.
CR: There are rumors going around that you are quite the pillow fighter, can you confirm or deny this?
WB: True, true, though it’s been a decade since I’ve been required to defend my title. I’m probably due for a Rocky training montage before I can lift a feather pillow in anger again.
CR: What’s next for Wolfgang Baur and Open Design?
WB: If things work out as planned, I’ll be doing a little less business-work and a little more game design work in 2013. Plus Open Design will ship its first full-color hardback books for Midgard, carving out a space for heroes inspired by Germanic, Polish, Nordic, and Russian legends alongside all the Celtic and British legends we have in gaming today. I can barely wait for this. It is haunting my dreams right now, and OMG it is looking so fine.
CR: Is there anything else you like to discuss that I didn’t ask about (go ahead pimp yourself, you deserve it!)?
WB: Well, there is one thing…. The Midgard Tales Kickstarter is closing on May 20, and it puts all of that design work to the test, to forge some new legends. I’m looking for backers and for people to bounce ideas around with, and I hope you’ll give Midgard a look. Thanks!
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