Monthly Archives: July 2021

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/31/2021

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/31/2021

  1. Blaster, Volume 3
  2. M20 Technocracy Reloaded
  3. Fading Suns 4 – Character Book
  4. Trails of Ash and Bone
  5. The Starship Warden

Top News Stories

PAX West to require proof of vaccination or negative COVID test: Running a con in September is dicey business with the current uncertain state of the pandemic, but PAX West is trying to walk the balance beam as carefully as they can. Earlier this week, con organizers announced that entry would require either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test. The con is also maintaining reduced capacity as well as a face covering requirement. Although evolving news on the pandemic front is making any mass gathering a calculated risk, hats off to the PAX West staff for keeping their event as safe as they can.

Discussion of the Week

Why were RPGs only invented in the 20th century?: Roleplay as an activity is hundreds, possibly thousands of years old. So why is the role-playing game as a product so relatively new? This Reddit thread contains both a lot of fascinating history as well as interesting discussions about the commercialization (and lack thereof) of roleplay over the years.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Meet the Party

Meet the Party: Avatar Legends Quickstart

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A waterbender of the North who refuses to hide behind walls. A firebender who suffered a great tragedy but knows who is really to blame. A scion of great shipbuilders who would much rather create things that helped instead of harm. An outlaw earthbender who has carved a line in the stone and refuses to let any cross it to hurt those behind her. Can they save their part of the world? What stories will they tell? Let’s Meet the Party for the Avatar Legends Quickstart from Magpie Games!

Continue reading Meet the Party: Avatar Legends Quickstart →

Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Generic RPGs: What’s Out There

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There’s a world of games out there, but they still just scratch the surface. Maybe your favorite book series or movie hasn’t caught the eye of anyone making RPG adaptations. Maybe you have your own spin on a popular genre that you just can’t pull off with an existing game. Or maybe you just want to run something wild and straight from your own head. No matter the reason, if a game off the shelf doesn’t quite do it for you, you’re looking for a generic RPG.

We’ve talked a bit about generic RPGs before, reviewing Cortex Prime and Everywhen, discussing Fate, and even using GURPS as an example text for looking at how to use generic games. This article is less about what to do with generic games, though, and more about how to find the right one for you. We’re going to discuss three broad types of generic games: Engines which are designed to model as many situations with as few rules as possible, Codexes which use a simple base ruleset and then expand it with a wide library of additional mechanics, and Chassis which take more traditional setting-driven RPGs, strip out the specific parts, and then (hopefully) build back up to something useful. The ‘Chassis’ generic RPG is the most common and popular, but the other two design modes may very well have more to offer the prospective game master.

Continue reading Generic RPGs: What’s Out There →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/24/2021

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/24/2021

  1. Blaster: Volume 3
  2. M20 Technocracy Reloaded
  3. The Starship Warden
  4. Trails of Ash and Bone
  5. WFRP: The Horned Rat

Top News Stories

ICv2 Sales Figures for Spring: ICv2’s RPG industry sales summary for spring of 2021 was released this week. D&D was first, surprising nobody, but in a fairly significant upset, R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk unseated Pathfinder for the #2 slot. The remainder of the top 5 went to Pathfinder, Free League’s Alien, and the most eyeroll-inducing category ever, D&D Third Party.

D&D Side Materials De-Canonized: According to this piece quoting Jeremy Crawford, Dungeons and Dragons video games, novels, and comic books are no longer considered ‘canon’. While in some cases this isn’t much of a change – Eberron stories weren’t even canon to each other until explicitly referenced in a text – it’s a significant change for settings like the Forgotten Realms which have often advanced the timeline via such material.

Discussion of the Week

Do mechanics or setting support genre? Twitter got all in a tizzy this week as someone stated that running a horror game is dependent on the setting material, not mechanics. Inevitably, others jumped in to defend the opposite tack. The answer, like in most of these “debates”, is that it depends, and both can be important. Only Sith and Twitter deal in absolutes. Like many of these snippy debates, it’s likely best that I don’t include a link to anyone.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Editorial

Avatar Legends Quickstart Review

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Water… Earth… Fire… Air. Long ago, Avatar: The Last Airbender told the story of a nascent master of all four elements and the group of young heroes that helped him save the world. Then everything changed when the Legend of Korra brought us the tale of his successor and her many trials and tribulations. But then, as these things go, that journey ended and that world vanished from the screen. Seven years passed, with the story continuing in novels and comics, but now we’ve discovered a new window into the Avatar world. Magpie Games is telling the story this time, and the prologue is the Quickstart for their newest roleplaying game: Avatar Legends!

Continue reading Avatar Legends Quickstart Review →

Articles, The Independents

The Independents: Dreampunk

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Role-playing games can be a perfect venue for the surreal. Exploring a strange world that has its own incomprehensible rules is often better done in games, where players have the opportunity to poke, prod, and learn, rather than being stuck in an author’s or director’s interpretation. That said, most games that embrace surreality these days embrace a designer’s vision, and are still one possible experience in a world that could be a whole lot weirder. Enter Dreampunk, a game currently being funded on Kickstarter. Dreampunk is a game that borrows heavily from the mechanics of Belonging Outside Belonging and, by extension, Powered by the Apocalypse. What makes Dreampunk unique, though, is the use of card drawing mechanics not only to pace the game, but to develop the very reality of the setting.

Continue reading The Independents: Dreampunk →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/17/2021

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/16/2021

  1. Blaster: Volume 3
  2. WFRP: The Horned Rat
  3. Trails of Ash and Bone
  4. Trinity Continuum: Under Alien Skies
  5. SCP the Tabletop RPG

Top News Stories

PAX East Online 2021 Is Ongoing: The digital replacement for the Bostonian PAX is on this weekend, running through Sunday; most of the relevant Discord’s channels are opening at noon EST and staying open until around midnight. Tabletop related content is sparse, despite the amount of activity in the server, perhaps proof that a digital convention needs a lot more focus on and support of tabletop games to succeed on that front. Sparse doesn’t mean barren, however – Paizo is organizing games through the server, and there are a number of related and interesting panels that are going to be streamed.

Diana Jones Award nominees announced: In the leadup to GenCon, six nominees for this year’s Diana Jones Award have been announced. Diana Jones Award nominees come from all corners of gaming, and this year represent the range of game design, marketing, and fandom. The six nominees are:

  • Big Bad Con’s 2019 Babble On Equity Project and PoC Programming, a fundraising effort to bring people of color to Big Bad Con. 
  • The Game Crafter, a print-on-demand manufacturing service for tabletop games. 
  • Nibcard Games, a game publisher/manufacturer. 
  • Mike Pondsmith, a game designer. 
  • Session Zero Online, an online tabletop gaming convention.
  • Wingspan, a board game by Elizabeth Hargrave, published by Stonemaier Games.

Discussion of the Week

The nonsense of the magic trade: Although magic items are written to be rare and mysterious, the volume of them that adventurers seem to find implies the need to trade, sell, and buy them at a much higher rate than written about in the rules of games like D&D. This discussion thread on Reddit talks about interesting in-universe ways to have a magic item trade or magic item shops that align with power curve and setting contradictions, but also aren’t completely ridiculous.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: Grimoire

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If you are reading this, there is a good chance you already know who I am, but just in case: Hello there! My name is Cory Deepwood, and I am a witch. I have been practicing for many years, now, learning the ways of the earth and the sky and quite a bit in between. At first it was tradition, passed down from my mother to me . Eventually, though, I began to think of myself as something of a steward, taking care of the lands I have worked on and the people within them. Within these pages are the spells and appurtenances I have used in my craft. Whether I have now passed it to you or you have found it in a dusty library somewhere, I hope you use my Grimoire well.

Continue reading Solitaire Storytelling: Grimoire →

Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3

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The life of an edgerunner is a tough one. And when you’re slumming it in Hydropolis there isn’t nearly as much work to go around as in glamorous Night City. Sometimes you have to pursue every lead you’re given. And sometimes, if your name is Jacob Capone, those leads include your ex-girlfriend.

When we last saw our merry band of corporate sycophants, they had followed up two leads from Biotechnica which led to improperly disseminated Jayhawk Agritech…tech. Biotechnica was pleased with Mason’s work so far, and now all of CabbageCorp had some money to spend. It was time to follow some leads, take some downtime, and most importantly, go shopping.

Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3 →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/10/2021

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/10/2021

  1. WFRP – The Horned Rat
  2. Trinity Continuum: Under Alien Skies
  3. Trails of Ash and Bone
  4. Soulbound: Steam and Steel
  5. SCP the Tabletop RPG

Top News Stories

A Tale of Two Cons: Essen Spiel, one of if not the largest board game trade show in the world, has officially announced they are mandating either proof of immunization or wearing a mask to attend the con. At nearly the same time, Gen Con, one of if not the largest role-playing game trade show in the world, has lifted their mask mandate. Although we in the US are celebrating easy access to vaccines and a drop in case numbers, the pandemic is not over, and the risk of Gen Con becoming a superspreader event is not overstated. Good on the Essen Spiel staff for putting the health and safety of their attendees first.

Discussion of the Week

Why Dungeons?: We know the RPG form has bloomed fractally into a million different genres, moods, and ways to play, but modern TTRPGs started with some dungeons, and some dragons. And out of the two of those, only one is guaranteed to show up. This Reddit thread has some interesting discussions on early RPG history, roots of the dungeon in Tolkien, and some later attempts to ‘explain’ dungeon ecology, like Earthdawn.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.