Kobolds Ate My Baby turns 25!

Celebrating 25 years of beer & pretzels roleplaying with a new edition of the classic rules-lite TTRPG! All Hail King Torg!

It’s not often that a joke is still funny a year later, much less 25 of them – but Kobolds Ate My Baby still elicits barks, growls, and chuckles wherever it goes. The now venerable beer and pretzels RPG has changed a lot over the years, but one thing is clear – it’s a hoot to read, and even funnier to play.

A new edition, Kobolds Ate My Baby: Orange, is now for sale from 9th Level Games. Buy now!

While playing Kobolds Ate My Baby (or KAMB as it is affectionately abbreviated) you will probably die multiple deaths. You may get hit by a falling cow, trampled by turtles, shot out of a cannon, distilled into a fine sipping liquor, or exploded into tiny puzzle pieces. The whole time, though, you will be gleefully hunting down supper for the biggest and roundest of the Kobolds –KING TORG (All Hail King Torg!).

Yes – as Kobolds Ate My Baby fans are only too aware, if you fail to shout All Hail King Torg upon mention of your glorious leader’s name, you’ll be forced to roll a death check. But where did this tradition come from?

It all started back in 1988. Designer Chris O’Neill’s Dungeons & Dragons group got its hands on the official Pool of Radiance AD&D module: FRC1 Ruins of Adventure. In the very first session, they nearly died at the hands of an orc band.

“We were so glad that we didn’t die we...well, we urinated on the corpse of their leader, a giant named Torg,” O’Neill says. “What can I say, we were like 12. Anyway, turns out it wasn’t Torg, it was Gorg, and we’ve had it wrong for all these years. But still, Torg became a rallying call for that group. People would say, ‘I’m going to torg that guy’ or ‘I torg the carpet that really pulls the room together.’ You get the picture.”

Flash forward to the mid-to-late-nineties. O’Neill was in a band, and had just founded 9th Level Games along with Dan Hansen-Landis.

As O’Neill tells it, “Our band was obsessed with Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and in particular, the character Brak. Brak was first introduced in a segment where all of the characters shouted “Hail Brak” every time his name was said. So, we’re at Origins, and we’re trying to answer the question, ‘Why haven’t kobolds been eradicated from the earth, since Adventurers are always killing them?’ and the corollary ‘Why do Kobolds keep fighting with Adventurers?’”

The solution: kobolds are very hungry, they eat human babies, and they’re more afraid of their king than of any adventurers.

“The King needed a name and good old Torg was just waiting there,” says O’Neill. “And so was All Hail.”

Over the years, KAMB has had a few different editions, but it’s still published by 9th Level Games, drawn by John Kovalic (yes, that John Kovalic of Munchkin fame), and written by Chris O’Neill (with help from a band of merry pranksters). This time around, KAMB has been completely modernized to use 9th Level Games’ polymorph system – making it the fastest, easiest, and deadliest version to date. In fact, it’s so easy, you can learn to play just by watching a 10-minute video.

If you’ve never played Kobolds Ate My Baby before, the new Orange Book edition is the perfect place for a new player to find the joys of Random Horrible Kobold Death for the first time. And for the fans who remember it from their youth: don’t forget to shout All Hail King Torg!