Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 4/27/2024

1. Grimdark Future World Book
2. Wrath and Glory: Vow of Absolution
3. Fallout the RPG Wanderer’s Guidebook
4. Fallout the RPG Core Rulebook
5. Traveller: The Fifth Frontier War

Top News Stories

Asmodee being spun out of Embracer Group: Games industry private equity firm Embracer Group is planning to separate into three separate companies, and they’ve left a clarion call to the market on which one they expect to tank. The Group has used a classic private equity trick of shoveling debt onto one of its investments in order to glow up the others, and in this case the sacrificial lamb is Asmodee, being saddled with nearly a billion dollars of debt against its assets. When all is said and done Asmodee will have a debt-to-equity ratio seven times higher than the other Embracer companies. When your parent company is the one putting the concrete shoes on, all I have to say is good luck, you’re going to need it.

From the Archives

On Reddit this week was another escalator about players and “crunchy rules”, a severe misappellation as the OP included D&D as their first example of a crunchy game. Oh brother. Here’s a crunchy game. From 2019, check out our overview of EABA.

Discussion of the Week

What are some games where violence is not simply discouraged, but effectively a failure state?: Our opinions about violence in RPGs are pretty clear; the hobby descended from wargames, sure, but you’d think after fifty years we’d be able to expand the palette a little bit. This discussion has some great suggestions of games that couch violence in the expected gameplay very differently, including Unknown Armies, Vaesen, Do: Fate of the Flying Temple, and Wanderhome.

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