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 1/6/2024

1. Scion Second Edition: Once and Future
2. Candela Obscura Core Rulebook
3. Beyond the Wall: A Kingless Realm
4. Traveller: Wrath of the Ancients
5. Cities Without Number

From the Archives

MCDM cleared $4.6 million and 30,000 backers for their D&D-adjacent MCDM RPG this week, becoming not only one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in TTRPG history but also the largest, by a massive margin, to execute on a service other than Kickstarter. Today we go back two years ago (almost to the day) to The Trouble With Kickstarter, my discussion of Kickstarter’s stranglehold on TTRPG financing and the problem that posed when the company made a mistaken (and fortunately since dismissed) dalliance into blockchain (at least using the word; it’s still unclear what they would have actually done). While this week’s campaign is a massive success for Backerkit and for crowdfunding competition in general, Kickstarter still casts a long shadow over the early stage tabletop game design world.

Discussion of the Week

The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead: Twitter has, in my words, come back from its coma to do a Discourse. The thread linked above is stating, essentially, that the RPG hobby is now slouching back into the basement since 5e is fragmenting thanks to Wizards spending most of 2023, for lack of a better term, screwing up royally. Ben Riggs, the author, has done much research on the ascendance of WotC-published D&D, and shares many insights in the form of sales figures from all across Wizards and TSR history. This sentiment makes a lot of sense when couched in the perspective of sales figures. For anyone actually playing games, though, it is wrong. One need only look at the top performing Kickstarter campaigns all the way back to 2019 to see that Fifth Edition and Wizards’ mode of marketing it has choked out innovation, reduced the number of potential full-time positions in gaming, and generally made the hobby less accessible to the exact people who lifted it up and laid the groundwork in the 90s and then again in the early 2010s. The fact that there is no longer any place to have fruitful discussions which turn into new game ideas has been blamed on Google (for killing Google Plus), The Forge (for many reasons), and Elon Musk (for emaciating Twitter), but I honestly think most of the blame lies at the feet of Wizards of the Coast. You can bemoan growth rates like a consultant, or you can look at the hobby like a player of games.

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