1st edition: Kenzer & Co. David Kenzer and his friends Brian Jelke and Steve Johansson, who played
AD&D, decided to start the game company Kenzer & Company in 1994 to produce material for the 2nd edition of
AD&D. Their first project was
The Kingdoms of Kalamar, an unlicensed fantasy world created without permission of TSR.
Kalamar specifically did not mention
AD&D, and was advertised as a generic setting that could be adapted to any role-playing game system but was designed to be compatible with the second edition of
AD&D. and included: • "Volume 1: Sourcebook of the Sovereign Lands" details the people and places of Tellene, the campaign's continent (and world). It divides the continent into six regions and examines each one on a large scale. In the December 1996 edition of
Dragon (Issue #236),
Rick Swan especially liked the religion section, and called the color maps "lush". Swan concluded with a recommendation to buy, saying, "the mountain of campaign fodder should be enough to keep your players busy until they're ready for the rest home." In the 2014 ''Designers & Dragons: The '90s
, game historian Shannon Appelcline noted that "Though small press, [Kalamar''] was lauded for its colorful maps and its attention to details — making it in some ways like a more fantasy-oriented version of
Columbia Games' classic
Hârn."
Other 1st edition reviews •
d8 Magazine Issue 1 (1995, p. 66) •
The Guild Companion (December 2001) •
Legions Realm Monthly Issue 5 (January 2003, p. 1)
Dungeons & Dragons 3 In the late 1990s, as
Wizards of the Coast (WotC) developed a
Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, Kenzer & Co. negotiated with them to produce a licensed version that would use the new rules. On November 1, 2000, WotC announced via press release that
Kingdoms of Kalamar, produced by Kenzer & Company, would become an official
Dungeons & Dragons world using the Third Edition rules. The
Sourcebook of the Sovereign Lands and the
Mythos of the Divine and Worldly were combined, and nearly 100,000 words of new material were added to create a hardcover book retitled
Kingdoms of Kalamar Campaign Setting that was published in 2001.
Reception to D&D 3 edition In Issue 31 of the French games magazine '''', Michaël Croitoriu compared this edition to watching
Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal, saying, "After half an hour, you're sound asleep. In fact, it took me no less than ten days to digest this game world." Croitoriu blamed this on the strategy of simply reprinting all of the old material from the 1st edition and adding some new material rather than starting from scratch and rewriting the entire setting. Croitoriu also was not impressed with the interior art, calling it "worthy of an eight-year-old child." He also noted that there were no new races, character classes, or significant new rules in this edition. Croitoriu recommended that any other rival campaign setting for the Third Edition would be a better alternative to this product.
Pyramid found that while the original edition of
The Kingdoms of Kalamar originally had numerous game stats relating to 2nd edition
Dungeons & Dragons, once the Kingdoms were made an official
Dungeons & Dragons setting in third edition, it had very few
D&D specific references.
Hackmaster In 2006, Kenzer & Company announced that
Kingdoms of Kalamar would be the official setting of the second version of their
HackMaster roleplaying game.
Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition In 2008, WotC released
Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. In the summer of 2008, Kenzer & Company released a compilation of the
Campaign Setting and
Atlas as a new PDF updated to Fourth Edition rules. This release was not published under the terms of WotC's
Game System License (GSL), becoming the first third-party publication to do so. Company president David Kenzer, a lawyer specializing in
Intellectual Property, posted on the internet, "Copyright infringement is basing your work on someone else's creative expression. Rules are not creative expression. Also, it is not ‘based’ on their rules. It happens to 'work with' their rules." Like many products created by various publishers using Fourth Edition rules, this edition of
Kalamar was unsuccessful, and Kenzer and Company did not produce any supplements. ==References==