Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 2/21/2026

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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 2/21/2026

  1. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite
  2. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
  3. Outgunned Superheroes
  4. Legend in the Mist – Hearts of Ravensdale
  5. ICRPG Power Tools: Game Mastery Book

Top News Stories

IEEPA tariffs struck down as illegal: In big news for American consumers as well as gamers, the US Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision that President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to levy tariffs was unlawful. Trump immediately lashed out with an executive order using Section 122 of the Trade Act to impose 10% tariffs worldwide, but 10% is lower than essentially all of the tariff rates from IEEPA and is also capped at 150 days. The dust is still settling (and refunds are, while legally entitled, going to be hard to get), but this is a win for anyone faced with importing goods from abroad.

From the Archives

On this day eight years ago, we were talking about the end of the world in an, er, more fun context than national news. From the archives this week is Level One Wonk: Post-Apocalypse, a whirlwind tour around themes and useful mechanics for the genre.

Discussion of the Week

Two of my players just broke up: While extreme, the OP here reminds us that scheduling continues to be the beast with the highest challenge rating of them all. There is among the responses the secret I’ve used to keep a group going for over two decades: “Play with whoever shows up. All the time, every time.”

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.

Articles, Level One Wonk

Five Tiers of RPG Publishing

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Hasbro’s annual earnings came out this week, so I took a look. It is truly staggering how much Wizards of the Coast has changed the company since they were acquired; when looking at unadjusted earnings the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Games division was the only one that turned a profit in the entire company. Not only that, but Wizards is responsible for roughly 47% of the entire company’s revenue and over 90% of all revenue growth over the last year. That’s over 2 billion dollars in revenue; roughly $1.7 billion is attributable to Magic: The Gathering and the rest is attributable to Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons is obviously the largest, most popular roleplaying game, but $400 million in revenue is staggering. If this was all books, it would be eight million copies. It’s not all books of course; one of the reasons D&D is growing (though perhaps not as fast as Magic is) is the continued expansion of digital services like D&D Beyond, products with high margins and minimal variable costs. This is the future, not because it makes for a better gaming experience, but because it makes for a better balance sheet.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2026

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Welcome back to another Crowdfunding Carnival! It’s not just any Crowdfunding Carnival, though…it’s February. And that means it’s time for Zine Month! And this is a big deal, because for the first time since 2022, it’s actually time for Zine Month, not just Zine Quest. Backerkit has stepped into the ring and it looks like they’re going to stand toe to toe with…wait, I’ve just gotten word that Backerkit’s Zinetopia event is capped at 63 projects? Meaning that if we extrapolate from Kickstarter’s typical Zine Quest growth profile they’ll end up being around 30% of the size? Hm. Oh dear.

It’s not a bad showing, to be clear; 63 non-Kickstarter projects is more than we’ve ever seen from the alternate Zine Event folks since Kickstarter made the confusing decision to move Zine Quest to August. But ultimately there were more Zine Quest projects live even by February 2nd, and unlike Backerkit Kickstarter will let you tag any zine project started in February as Zine Quest, so we’re likely to have well over 200 projects by February’s end, if not even more. It is notable, though, that while the number of projects live in the first week of Zine Month is similar this year and last (around 150), the split is around 60/40 Kickstarter and BackerKit, meaning that a lot of people took Backerkit’s rival Zinetopia event seriously.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 1

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It’s time to move from theory to practice. As we move on to the next stage of this System Hack, I’m going to start taking the elements we discussed in the first set of articles and make them into actual game elements. For today, that means character creation. When we discussed characters for this System Hack, we landed on some pretty straightforward prime sets: Attributes, Skills, and Distinctions. As such, we’re going to lock in our Attributes and Skills. For Distinctions, the number I’d want to write is perhaps a bit high to cover comprehensively in one article, but I am going to lock in what the three Distinctions each character has are, what they do mechanically, and how they’ll be roughly categorized.

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Articles, Editorial

Legend of the Five Rings: Imperials Histories Volume I & II

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We tend to look at new things here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Our mission of putting games and gamers together often takes the form of introducing something that might be unknown in front of someone who may be interested. But what about sharing new things to love about something you already love, something that provides ideas for play that had not been considered before? I didn’t know it when I first encountered it but these two volumes, Imperial Histories I & II, had been powerful influences on games I played and still remember fondly.

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Articles, Editorial

Curseborne: Onyx Path’s next dark world

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Instead of coming up with some TTRPG pablum for an introduction, I’m going to cut right to the chase: At first I thought it was really weird that Onyx Path Publishing released Curseborne. If you don’t look too closely, the game appears to ape World of Darkness, an entire fork of which Onyx Path is the licensee. The five lineages are clearly aligned to Vampire (Hungry), Werewolf (Primal), Mage (Sorcerer), Demon (Outcasts), and Wraith (Dead). And even if the game is in fact different, why did Onyx Path decide to make their own supernatural horror game now?

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