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.