70% of the way through a decade of doing this! Might as well keep going at this point through sheer inertia! Luckily, it’s not just inertia driving us on – it’s because we’re really making genuine accomplishments and reaching great milestones!
Monthly Archives: December 2023
System Hack: Cyberpunk RED Minions
Two of the roads with the most traffic to Cyberpunk RED are, naturally, players of Cyberpunk 2077 and players of older tabletop editions like Cyberpunk 2020. However, once arriving at their new carmine destination there are naturally going to be a few disconnects, and one of the biggest is in the nature of combat. The smart Cyberpunk 2020 party wanted to blast their opponents to chunky salsa as fast as possible and often could, and V eventually becomes a cybergod capable of mowing through entire gangs on their own. Cyberpunk RED characters are themselves tougher in turn than their 2020 counterparts, but they simply can’t go through their enemies that fast. Aaron pondered changes to the combat rules but found that, as with anything else, fiddling with the wiring that already exists can pose a lot of challenges. I’m not fiddling with the wires, so much as I’m adding an attachment (much like the Cyberpunk RED Luck Deck from that same article) – and I’m stealing from a galaxy far, far away to do it.
Weekend Update: 12/30/23
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, discussions from elsewhere online, and something From the Archives.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 12/30/2023
- Scion Second Edition: Once and Future
- Candela Obscura Core Rulebook
- Traveller: Wrath of the Ancients
- D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
- Old Pavis (II): The Good, the Bad & the Rowdy (RuneQuest)
Top News Stories
Here in the last hours of 2023, the newsroom is quiet. From all of us at Cannibal Halfling, have a happy new year! Stay safe, play some games, we’ll be back next week.
From the Archives
The Mistborn Adventure Game from Crafty Games is coming to an end – the digital versions will no longer be available to purchase after tomorrow, December 31st, so they’re all at a pretty steep discount. Relevance to the CHG Archives? The review of the core game was the first article posted here at the same time as on the Mad Adventurers Society, as opposed to being ported over from the MAS Archive for preservation.
Discussion of the Week
Ending a 15 year Game Group: Keeping up any social group is tough; how many of your friends from high school have you called recently? Arguably a gaming group is even tougher, what with constantly trying to balance everyone’s schedules and play preferences for the months or years it takes to run a good campaign. While this discussion has some good subthreads about maintaining groups and getting back on the horse, as another member of a long running group I’m here to empathize with the OP, and pour one out for their group.
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.
Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2023
Happy holidays! 2023 is ending, and what a year it’s been. In a lot of ways, 2023 has been a bit quieter here than previous years; while COVID refuses to go away we’ve all lurched back towards normalization, and most of the upheaval in games came from picking up the pieces of events that happened in 2022. Twitter is dead, essentially; anyone who’s attempted to use the site knows that any attempt to see through the haze of algorithmic mud only results in, at best, the absence of continued conversation. Of course, RPG discussion continues, you just need to look a little harder to find it.
Casting a longer shadow over RPG news of the year was Wizards of the Coast. Starting with the OGL debacle and ending with a swathe of layoffs, things were rough this year for everyone’s favorite RPG monopolist. It does mean, though, that my prediction made last year about major players and rent-seeking were correct; MCDM, Kobold Press, Darrington Press and others are all fielding fantasy RPGs intended to be an alternative to D&D. This does mean that whatever happens with the revised D&D rulebooks coming out in 2024 is anyone’s guess; even the home run of Baldur’s Gate 3 has effectively been squandered on the tabletop side.
Continue reading Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2023Weekend Update: 12/23/2023
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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 12/23/2023
Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles
Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.
Continue reading Hobby Economics: RPGs and BicyclesWeekend Update: 12/16/23
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, discussions from elsewhere online, and something From The Archives!
A Glimpse Into The Unplugged Vault: Self Careless
It’s your day off! Obviously you should be spending some time on Care for yourself, but then there are all these Chores to do that you won’t otherwise be able to take care of until who knows when. There are only so many hours of the day, so you’re going to have to plan things out – don’t do too many Chores so you actually get some rest, don’t spend so much time on self Care so that the Chores just pile up. Coffee will help! Now if only that darn cat would stop knocking over all the cups. This is Self Careless, the life balance game for 1-2 players from Jason Anarchy Games and Cassandra Calin!
Continue reading A Glimpse Into The Unplugged Vault: Self Careless
System Hack: Advancement for GURPS
As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.
That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.
Continue reading System Hack: Advancement for GURPSWeekend Update: 12/9/2023
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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 12/9/2023
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