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.

What about the rest of the industry? Well, things seem to be trundling along. Licensed RPGs have been big stories this year, with Avatar Legends finally getting some sales recognition after releasing physical product, and Free League dominating the year-end headlines with the Walking Dead RPG. On one hand, all these licenses are showing that there is an understanding of the potential of a tabletop game, of the audience that these games can reach. On the other, they’re at best inconsistent. For every Cowboy Bebop which evokes genuine positive surprise there’s an Avatar Legends; my middling review has been followed up by dozens of play reports expressing equal if not more disappointment that the game is just reshuffled and reskinned Masks.

When looking at the whole industry from my seat, from the perspective of an observer with no monetary stake in the thing (save my continued Kickstarter habit), I’m conflicted. These last few years TTRPGs have been in ‘growth mode’: Instead of pushing boundaries and innovating, the audience of the hobby has been marketed to aggressively with variants of things that have already been successful. This isn’t new; PbtA was the ‘growth mode’ champion when we started the site, then came Forged in the Dark, and now there’s, additionally, Mork Borg and its cousins. There’s no better example of this than Darrington Press using Forged in the Dark as the framework for Candela Obscura, a new non-D&D actual play vehicle.

Growth mode isn’t bad; it does mean more games for more tastes. At the same time, though, I’ve been feeling like innovation in the space has been stagnant. While I know that perception isn’t reality, it feels like I’ve been reporting on the same rulesets for, well, seven years! That said…Apocalypse World came out in 2010, and Blades in the Dark came out in 2017. Hell, Fate was originally published in 2003. Are we in a seven year cycle? Is 2024 going to be the release date of the next new indie darling? Only time will tell.

And what about us, your friendly local Cannibal Halflings? While Seamus and Aki have both been pushing themselves to write more behind the scenes, I’ve actually been doing the opposite. I’m still on the average cadence of an article a week, but this year I did have a few more skip weeks, giving myself space for other commitments and my mental health. The site is doing just fine even when I occasionally miss a week; we did not quite break our viewership record from 2021 but we came close. We also kicked 2022’s ass with more articles published and significantly more views (about 45,000 more as of this writing). Did I mention we got nominated for another ENnie? That happened too.

As I enter into another year, there’s a chance to reflect on why I write what I write, and what my goals are. I did move away from the negativity this year, and I’ve reviewed many fewer licensed games. The one I did review, Cowboy Bebop, got high marks in terms of trying to emulate the source material and just generally being a creative and interesting game. Perhaps reflecting some of my own thoughts about rules I had several reviews of ‘vintage’ properties including the newest versions of Rolemaster, BRP, and Paranoia. None of these were negative reviews either, though one could be excused for thinking that simply explaining how Rolemaster’s mechanics work sounds like mocking it. Similarly, while I think the new version of Paranoia is good, and an improvement over its predecessor, I couldn’t help but note how much less cachet Paranoia has these days among the core TTRPG audience. Of course, I also reviewed some things simply because I wanted to, like a pair of hacks for Burning Wheel and Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy, which I finally got a chance to read this year. More of what I wrote this year reflected where my head was at, and overall I think that’s a good thing.

My year in gaming was an interesting one, personally. 2023 was my first GMing break in five years, and other than a few one-shots (Mothership, Savage Rifts, Cowboy Bebop, DIE) I was only playing. Our group has been playing two games, one of Cyberpunk Red and one of Legend of the Five Rings. I’ve greatly enjoyed both, though in each case I’ve learned something about the system in question. For Cyberpunk Red, I’ve come around a bit from my personal Cyberpunk 2020 partisanship and have seen how the more drawn out combat in Red can make the game more fun. For Legend of the Five Rings, I’ve had more of an ‘Every game is good with a good GM’ moment. We’ve been having a great campaign and engaging nicely with the rules we’re using…but we threw out the entire Honor, Glory, and Status systems, both due to them being a pain to track and also never being additive to the roleplay we wanted. While there are good mechanics to induce character behavior, the heavy-handed ones developed in the 90s should have probably stayed there.

Of course, it’s hard to mention my gaming this year without mentioning DIE. Between both the Cannibal Halfling Radio one-shot and the longer game which Seamus discussed in his In-Depth review, DIE was the one game that left an indelible mark on us this year. While the mechanics are relatively simple, the procedures that push you to make a character that pulls some of you and your teenage experiences down onto the character sheet and then needles them relentlessly are, at the very least, unforgettable. In addition to the strong impression the game left on all of us who played, I’ve seen it create marked changes among some of our players who are now seeking character-driven experiences more directly than they were before. The game is not perfect by any means, but thanks to how it affected us it will both remain on the recommended list as well as induce us to buy the supplements which have been teased by the publisher.

As it is the holiday season, it’s only appropriate that I give you, our readers, a gift. This was a great year for me when it came to ‘soft prep’, that orbit of activities you do that don’t directly affect the game but help you get into the feel or vibe of a fictional character, place, or story. I made a playlist for my Cyberpunk Red character this year that was so good it showed up on Seamus’s Spotify Wrapped as opposed to my own. For DIE, though there were playlists and of course Table Fiction, we went further. In honor of Antonio, the DIE character from our game who ran a bar in the characters’ hometown (and perhaps also in honor of our own alcohol consumption habits), we created a DIE cocktail.

First credit for this cocktail actually goes to Greg over at How to Drink, an excellent cocktail Youtube channel. Back in the summer, Greg released a video about the ‘Last Word Formula’ and how it can be used with virtually anything that follows the formula. The formula is, in short, equal parts of a base spirit, something sour, something sweet, and something herbal. In the case of the Last Word itself, this is gin (spirit), maraschino (sweet), green chartreuse (herbal), and lime juice (sour). Using this formula we created a drink inspired first by the five core romantically entangled characters in our game (I’ll explain why five and not four in a second), and then more broadly by the game itself. Being that it is based on the Last Word, we of course had to name it after the ‘last words’ of a DIE game.

The Game Is Over

1 oz Rum (We used Plantation 3-star)

1 oz Lime Juice

1 oz Amaro Montenegro

1 oz Ancho Reyes

0.5 oz simple syrup

Combine all ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake vigorously and serve up in a coupe.

Now, the ‘fifth’ ingredient, the simple syrup, is to compensate for the fact that our ‘sweet’ ingredient, the Ancho Reyes, is not the sweetest of liqueurs. Greg made similar adjustments to some of the recipes in the video, and indeed if you find our recipe too sweet you can dial the simple back or even remove it entirely. When Seamus made the drink he actually used lavender simple, and while I haven’t tried this myself I think it’s a worthy modification. In this spec, though, I find the drink delightful and apropos; complicated and spicy, just like a good DIE game.

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It’s been an interesting year for games. Change is on the horizon; D&D’s fiftieth anniversary is coming up fast and the mainstream fantasy genre is changing even faster. While indies have been humming along as always, the lack of breakout hits may be resolved by the decades-long seven year cycle. The middle tier also continues to chug right along; Free League is doing well for itself, Modiphius has another Cthulhu release on the horizon, and Magpie might actually release the second edition of Urban Shadows next year (whoops, jinxed it). Over here on the East Coast, the Cannibal Halflings continue to do their best to read, write, review, and play games, just like we have been since 2016. To all of our readers, I hope you’ve had a happy holiday season no matter what you celebrate. May your 2024 be like ours: full of goals to strive for, new experiences to enjoy, and old experiences to appreciate. Have a happy new year; I’ll see you in January.

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