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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 2/24/2024

1. Call of Cthulhu: Arkham
2. Shadow of the Weird Wizard
3. Dragonslayer Role-Playing Game
4. Cepheus Universal
5. Exalted: Across the Eight Directions

Top News Stories

Wizards ceases D&D publication in Portuguese: Wizards put out an announcement on Twitter stating they would no longer be translating D&D products into Portuguese, halting the products ‘later this year’. This means that the Brazilian market will no longer be served by Wizards of the Coast, which based on the size of the market seems like a prime example of being penny wise and pound foolish. The Forgotten Realms Wiki notes in a reply that Portuguese is the third most used language on the wiki. If you want an example of why local games (like Drakar Och Demoner in Sweden) are so foundational to the hobby, this right here is it.

Rascal soft launches: Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter have come together on Rascal, a new site for independent professional tabletop RPG journalism. This is huge, because most sites in the space are either not RPG-focused (e.g. Dicebreaker) or not professional (e.g., well, Cannibal Halfling Gaming). We’re looking forward to seeing what the site puts out in the coming months.

From the Archives

It is LGBT+ History Month in the UK in February, which makes it a perfect time to look again at how queer fanbases expand and enhance the gaming community. Today’s pull from the archives is Maria’s examination of how Powered by the Apocalypse nurtures a queer fanbase, released right around this time of the year in 2020.

Discussion of the Week

Why does there seem to be such a culture around the impossibility to scheduling D&D?: You’ve all seen the meme of the comic with a girl sitting on Santa’s lap. Santa asks her what she wants for Christmas, and she says, “I want a dragon!” Santa says he couldn’t possibly get her a dragon, what else does she want? She then says “I want a D&D group that is able to meet at a regular time twice a month”. Santa sighs, and says “what color dragon do you want?” This thread, though, does examine some of the reality of this continuing phenomenon, including the cultural minimization of “gaming”, a lack of buy-in on the part of tardy and missing players, and perhaps most importantly, the fact that pretty much no other hobby is as attendance-dependent as tabletop RPGs.

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.