Tucker's kobolds

Tucker's kobolds were a fictional tribe of kobolds made famous by Roger E. Moore's editorial in Dragon magazine issue 127. The editorial described a dungeon crawl adventure designed and run by a Game Master in Fort Bragg, North Carolina named Tucker in which a party of high-level adventurers entered a dungeon whose first level was inhabited by kobolds.

While normally kobolds are considered extremely weak monsters of no significant threat, Tucker's kobolds were intimately familiar with their home territory and were well prepared to repel invaders using devious traps and ambushes. Tactics described in the editorial included trapping the party in a corridor filled with flammable materials that they then set on fire, shooting crossbows at the party through murder holes or from sniper positions with prepared escape routes, and hurling Molotov cocktails at the party from behind the cover of flaming barricades that groups of kobolds pushed ahead of them with metal poles. The party's hirelings and henchmen were all killed and they had to abandon their donkeys and many of their supplies in their hurry to get through the kobolds' territory. The party ultimately "escaped" down an air shaft that led to a very deep level of the dungeon inhabited by demons.

Tucker's kobolds became a famous part of Dungeons & Dragons lore, often referred to as an example of how cunning and local knowledge can be used by physically weak opponents to overcome much more powerful adversaries.