Koboldcon 2025: A Brief Review

EricMesa

March 30, 2025 - 4 minutes read - 826 words

If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.

First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.

KoboldCon essentially consisted of a series of Live Streamed videos on both YouTube and Twitch plus Organized Play - aka virtual tabletop gaming. I think it worked out quite well. People were moderately interactive on Twitch (the platform I chose to watch on) and while I didn’t attend the virtual gaming sessions (I have a regular game scheduled sometime soon), those are definitely a solved problem in the TTRPG space.

One thing that Kobold Press did better than most of the tech conventions I’ve been to is that they posted videos of the sessions to YouTube extremely quickly. Some of the tech conventions I go to don’t do that for months. It might have helped that a lot of the sections of KoboldCon seemed to be pre-recorded. This was nice as the Kobold Press staff could be in the chat to talk about the content. That said, it wasn’t all pre-recorded and I think they had a good amount of question and answer sessions where they took live questions from the chat.

Overall, I would give the virtual nature of the convention a 10/10.

Second, let’s discuss the content. There was a lot of great content and the team is still small enough to be extremely quirky (vs the eventual smoothing out of humor that happens as companies get larger/more corporate). As an example, Dot’s delivery on a lot of this video was great:

(Also, it was fun to hear there’s going to be a sequel to the Player’s Guide! As a Midgard fan, I’m excited about the Northlands book)

At the time of writing, they haven’t broken out the video for Late Night New in the Warrens yet, but on the video below, go to the timestamp 2 hours 16 minutes

Dot is AMAZING in that segment.

As a convention focused on the company sponsoring it, it was obviously part marketing, but Kobold Press did this in the best way. For example, for their Necromancer card game, they had a team of content creators play it live:

Then they interviewed the creator. They also interviewed the creator of the Riverbank RPG (Kij Johnson - one of my favorite SFF short story authors) and the company they contracted with to make their new starter set. Also, by being a small company, we still get the creator/CEO directly involved in both creation and in conventions as in this Labyrinth panel:

As a Kickstarter backer I was very interested in what they had to say about the Labyrinth.

For me, the ABSOLUTELY BEST part of the weekend was the Live Play entitled, “Oops! All Kobolds”. It’s at the beginning of this long video (the same one with Dot’s news segment):

I was DYING laughing the entire time. I would watch them play at EVERY year’s convention.

This content was EXACTLY what I wanted out of a Kobold Press convention: information about the books I’ve already kickstarted, information on future books, and live plays.

Is there anything that could have been done better (ie what could KP do better next year?) To me, it was mostly perfect for a nice little convention. If there’s one thing I think they could do better, it would be if they could integrate their Discord server a little better with the convention. What would that look like or what benefit would it provide? I think the benefit would be instead of having the audience forked over two different chats (YouTube and Twitch) we could all be interacting together. It would also provide continuity or a kind of “hallway track” between videos. Like a place for people to hang all weekend or in between Organized Play. Other than that, I thought it was great and I loved not having to wait in line or getting stuck out of a panel because a room was full. If there was one other thing (and KP might be too small to do this in case people don’t buy into it), but I LOVE my convention tshirts and badges. Even if we don’t need them for a virtual convention I would be willing to pay $20-ish for a KoboldCon shirt and badge.