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 3/9/2024

1. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Vol. 3
2. Dragonslayer
3. Exalted: Across the Eight Directions
4. Call of Cthulhu: Arkham
5. Shadow of the Weird Wizard

Top News Stories

Chaosium offers cash prizes to aspiring RPG designers: Following off of last year’s release of the new edition of BRP, Chaosium has announced that it will be using its generic RPG as a springboard for a contest with over $10,000 in cash prizes. Ten creators will receive $500 prizes while an additional three will then receive $2,000 more. Of particular note here is that the contest is more than just game design, it requires designers to also submit a marketing plan and production budget for their game. And, following on their embrace of the ORC license, Chaosium has stressed that no rights will be transferred as a result of winning this contest. While the monetary amounts are modest, the exposure from Chaosium and the push for smart business decisions as well as game design makes this contest both worth entering and also, from a critic’s perspective, makes it worth checking out the winners.

From the Archives

March of 2018 was a heady time for the Cannibal Halflings. There were design projects in the air, and the recently released Genesys was spurring ideas all over the place. Almost to the day, six years ago Seamus released the first prototype mecha for his Genesys Mecha hack. Genesys Mecha was a project that got a lot of love and attention, so in addition to the anniversary of the Prototype article, you should also check out the Design Goals article and, perhaps, the entire series.

Discussion of the Week

Did I give bad “old man” advice?: The OP told a friend who’s just starting out to be careful with writing too much backstory. Then, the OP worried that’s just old man advice. Is it? No! This thread is a good encapsulation of what is (in our opinion) very good backstory and character building guidance: Build your character to tell a story at the table, not in a sheaf of backstory pages.

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.