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 6/15/2024

1. Pendragon: Core Rulebook
2. Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
3. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit
4. Wrath & Glory: Threat Assessment: Daemons and Heretics
5. Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit

Top News Stories

Senior Dicebreaker staff laid off: What we were all expecting to happen after the acquisition has started happening. Several folks from Dicebreaker including the editor-in-chief Matt Jarvis have confirmed that they were laid off on Twitter. Pour one out for another gaming outlet folks; the burial plot is next to Kotaku.

From the Archives

Not a very deep dive in the archives this week. Mothership 1e is finally available to the public after a long, COVID-strained Kickstarter campaign. You can buy physical and digital products from Tuesday Knight Games; as a note there isn’t currently any discount for purchasing a PDF so if you need an excuse to get the very nice physical set, this is it. Of course, the Player’s Survival Guide is still available for free in PDF. Back to the archives, though, we’re only going back nine months: Check out the System Split review of Death in Space and Mothership.

Discussion of the Week

To GMs that run a session or even entire campaign with just a few bullet points: How do you do it?: While GMing has traditionally been associated with notebooks of material and hours of prep time, you don’t need any of that to make a good game. You need some, arguably, but many GMs, especially at the beginning of a campaign, start with an idea, a rulebook, and maybe a notecard worth of bullet points. This thread goes over what low-prep gaming needs: Some of it is advice, like about what players will actually remember. Some of it is just learned; many of the reactions or ideas that make good GMs quick on their feet come from experience as opposed to any specific preparation.

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