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 3/30/2024

1. Traveller: The Fifth Frontier War
2. Fallout the RPG Wanderer’s Guidebook
3. Dragonslayer RPG
4. Changeling the Lost: The Hedge
5. Exalted: Many-Faced Strangers

Top News Stories

Maximum Mike Wins Lifetime Achievement Award: Mike Pondsmith, founder of R. Talsorian Games and creator of the long-running Cyberpunk TTRPG line, was awarded the E. Gary Gygax Lifetime Achievement Award at GaryCon this week. Even if we foolishly forget everything else Mike has done, from mecha to realms forgotten to adolescents beyond the Kármán line, Cyberpunk alone has put four three editions on the tabletop and spawned a video game, anime, comics, and more, leaving an indelible mark on the TTRPG industry and media at large. A well-earned award, choom!

Disappointing? A Tough Win? The ICv2 Reports Are In For 2023: According to ICv2 reports covering 2023, hobby games continued to grow… but not as fast as inflation did, and to much less a degree than in the preceding years. The ENWorld coverage of the report takes a much more negative tone than the ICv2 article covering the report, but the hard fact is that TTRPG sales were down overall – D&D remained in the top spot but dropped dramatically, not too surprising considering an upcoming edition change, the pivot to more digital offerings, etc. 

There are some interesting facts to be found among the Top 10 of TTRPGS as well. Paizo grabbed 2/5ths of the top five slots by themselves with Pathfinder and Starfinder, Cyberpunk RED grabbed 3rd place, Kobold Press got 8th place all to themselves, and Pirate Borg was in the 10th slot, making the absence of certain licensed RPGs very stark.

From the Archives

News about growing the TTRPG hobby recently has been a little grim because it’s been tied to either the D&D-specific phenomena of Hasbro’s dismal performance or the broader phenomena of hobby games growth rates reverting to the mean after a COVID-induced explosion between 2020 and 2022. Buried in the ICv2 coverage is their market forecast, which is similar or even negative growth through 2024. When talking about growing the hobby, though, we can’t depend on something like a global pandemic forcing everyone towards alternative means of entertainment; we have to understand what causes people to start playing RPGs in the first place, and demographically, ‘people’ means kids. From the archives today we’re taking a look at one of Seamus’s first reviews of an RPG targeted towards young roleplayers, Power Outage. RPGs aimed below the typical age cohort of active roleplayers (teens to twenties) are a potent but underutilized tool in the toolbox for expanding and diversifying the hobby, and Power Outage in particular is worth checking out.

Discussion of the Week

High profile comedian makes discourse, everyone talks at once: Twitter discourse made a return this week after Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM on Dropout’s Dimension 20, made a comment about how much D&D is/isn’t a combat game. If one perceives his comment as taxonomical it’s simply wrong, but the entirety of his comment was more about the ‘fruitful void’ between mechanics, an idea worth talking about although taken to extremes by many more into RPG theory than RPG playing. Still, all the discussion about fruitful voids and table culture misses one key point: How a game system does or does not enable storytelling for a paid comedian with a writing team is irrelevant to the rest of us. The linked article is satire.

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.