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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 4/11/2026Video games owe a lot to tabletop roleplaying games, with mechanics, terminology, and tropes all being borrowed during the 1980s and 1990s. For obvious reasons, though, the two media drifted, and even video games calling themselves roleplaying games have little to do with their forbears, given both the capabilities of digital games in terms of graphics and gameplay as well as their limitations in terms of breadth and story. All this to say, when I see a claim that a video game is able to capture some of the feel of a good tabletop session, I perk up. This was the case with Esoteric Ebb.
Esoteric Ebb is not the first video game I’ve seen making this claim; we covered Wildermyth a ways back, and I appreciated the way that game tried to incorporate emergent storytelling and feel more like a sandbox than other games in the tactical RPG genre. Esoteric Ebb is perhaps not as different as Wildermyth; it’s built strongly around the mechanics and tropes of another (admittedly very good) video game. However, its writing and the understanding of the TTRPG medium that that writing demonstrates still end up making Esoteric Ebb, in my view at least, a must-play.
Continue reading A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric EbbWelcome 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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 4/4/2026I returned, once again, to the halls of PAX East this weekend! When I wasn’t just wandering around, reading RPG books, or running sessions at Games on Demand (two sessions each of A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase and Fabula Ultima this time) I was sitting down to try games out. In case you’re attending PAX East 2026 Sunday Edition, I’ve provided the booth numbers you can find these games at to peruse them, but by and large I expect this will be something for folks to follow up on afterwards – so please peruse the many fine and elegantly crafted links to these fine and elegantly crafted games!
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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 3/28/2026Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.
RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.
Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2Welcome 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.
There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.
Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.
Continue reading Three Tiers of RPG PurchasingWelcome 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.
About this week seven years ago, we started taking a look at stories very closely, a thread that would wind its way across many articles and musings from then to now. From the archives this week is Level One Wonk: Narrative, a discussion of prescriptive and emergent narrative and likely the first time we reference simulation video games like RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress.
Apologia for plain paragraphs: Sam Sorensen wrote a blogpost comparing heavily broken up, bulleted game text with minimally formatted prose, and based on the quote replies (linked above) it perhaps did not go the way that was intended. Reading through the post there’s two intermingled arguments: That RPG designers do bullets and secondary formatting poorly (likely true, requires bringing receipts) and that minimally formatted prose is better than highly structured bullets (non-falsifiable, controversial). As usual, the real answer is almost certainly to use both, and to learn the underlying layout skills that allow you to make both prose and lists as usable as possible.
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Random character generation is an artifact of older editions of D&D, with the OSR and other throwback movements embracing it wholeheartedly. In the present day both old-school D&D derivatives as well as the range of games derived from WFRP’s take on d100 mechanics are still locked in with random generation, with the classic ‘roll 3d6 six times in order’ being both common mechanic and a meme. The problem with random generation in this way is that putting characters arbitrarily at different places on a probability distribution, in effect making characters better or worse based on nothing but luck, is a pretty poor way to accomplish the ultimate goal of random character generation, which is to introduce variability to the type of characters that players ultimately play.
In reviewing how a number of different games handle random character generation, specifically random attribute generation, I can’t help but think that these designers know that players don’t like random generation and don’t actually like rolling bad characters. It’s widely known what the most common response to early D&D’s attribute requirements for certain character classes was: Cheat! It therefore stands to reason that games which still commit to random generation either create a system that employs randomness more deliberately, or create a system which softens the blow of the dice.
Continue reading Breaking Down Random Generation
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