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. This week: chaos gods, Critical credit snafus, hurricane relief, dirty laundry, and dad discussions!

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 9/18/2021

1. Star Trek Adventures: Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide
2. Mummy: The Curse Second Edition
3. Deviant: the Renegades
4. Fallout: the Roleplaying Game Core Rules
5. Alien RPG Colonial Marines Operations Manual

Top News Stories

GenCon Summoning Circle for Nurgle is Complete: Okay, not really. But GenCon is certainly happening, and in terms of pandemic planning, well…

Granted this is from the pre-opening queue swarm, but still. We hope that everyone at GenCon remains safe and healthy, and especially that those who had to go to the convention for business are successful. We’ll simply remind you to wear a mask, maybe quarantine and get tested when you get home, and that – if you still think at this point that you’ll be fine without a vaccine – we’ve all had a dice roll that should’ve been no problem until it killed everyone in the party.

Hurricane Ida Relief Bundle on DTRPG: Battlefield Press has put together a relief bundle to help their native Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Ida, specifically through the lens of Imagine Water Works. From ICONS to Interface Zero, from Titan Effect to Time Heist, there’s a varied and plentiful number of games: $282.76 worth for a mere $20, all for a good cause.

Discussions of the Week

Critical Role, Credit, and IP: The Nautilus Ark: A Johnson Corp Odyssey was Critical Role’s September 9th episode, and was a homebrewed hack using Mothership and the ALIEN RPG. Neither game was credited in the actual episode. There was a bot in the Twitch chat shouting them out from time to time, and the two games were eventually tagged in a tweet on the 13th. The lack of credit in the actual show, however, definitely got the community riled up, especially considering the impact such a shout-out would have had for, say, an upcoming Kickstarter. This is not the first time this year an Update has had to cover a big name production failing to give proper ‘on screen’ credit to the games they use, which is more sad than anything considering how many smaller actual plays manage to do it correctly right out of the gate. 

The fervor of discourse over using the creations of others only grew when Critical Role announced a new IP policy two hours after the tweet giving proper credit to Mothership and ALIEN – a reminder to those who may have forgotten that this is a company we’re talking about. The discourse raged over what this may mean for fan creators, and someone at CR listened because a clarification was made on the 16th, but the fire has yet to fully die down.

Our takeaways from all the back and forth: credit the damn games you’re using up front, and make sure to read IP policies carefully, no matter how friendly the faces of the company releasing them may seem to be.

Paizo’s Dirty Laundry: In response to a questionably motivated firing coming out of the #2 largest RPG design firm, former Paizo employee Jessica Price took the opportunity of the company losing “the last person they might retaliate against” to air the mother of all dirty laundry threads against the company. While direct responses from Paizo employees former and current have been all over the map (how surprising), the thread brings to the surface the continuing issues at large gaming companies. The “you’re lucky to work in this field” attitude pervades both analogue and digital games, and frankly means that the toxic companies outnumber the less-toxic ones by a fairly significant number. While there have been various and sundry defenses of companies like Paizo and Wizards (which itself had a fairly lurid recounting of the company’s early days a few years ago), most are in the context of their products, and do nothing to justify the environment for their employees. Word to the wise in the game design field, when it comes to large companies? Avoid.

Soon-to-be-Dad Asks for No-Prep Games: Someone imminently facing down fatherhood asked r/RPG for some no-prep games so that the new parents could still take hobby nights off to maintain sanity. What followed was a quite diverse and long list of said games, along with a lot of hard-earned advice and encouragement. As there are several wee halflings cannibal around as well, it’s nice to see a community offering a helping hand and some kind words. 

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