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 4/13/2024

1. Grimdark Future World Book
2. This Is Free Trader Beowulf
3. Twilight Imperium: War for the Throne
4. Traveller: The Fifth Frontier War
5. Essential NPCs

From the Archives

This week Shannon Appelcline released his massive history of Traveller, This Is Free Trader Beowulf. Shannon first gained recognition in the TTRPG space in the early 2000s as a blogger and administrator on RPGnet but rose to prominence with the publication of Designers and Dragons, a massive four-volume history of the tabletop roleplaying game, publisher by publisher. From the archives this week I’m introducing you to Designers and Dragons through our review. The collection is still available from Evil Hat Productions.

Discussion of the Week

Alternate History: Traveller is the mainstream RPG: Just a little fun thread that I wanted to highlight in part due to the release of This Is Free Trader Beowulf. While there’s some serious analysis in here, I had more fun with things like ‘Bethesda’s biggest game is the Wayne Gretsky Hockey series since there’s no Elder Scrolls’ and ‘Firefly lasts three seasons’. When you remember just how much of the mainstream fantasy genre is at least part inspired by D&D, these sorts of counterfactuals can have surprising possibilities.

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