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. This update has been delayed due to a Fiasco, but we will be back on the Saturday schedule next week!
Continue reading Weekend Update: 6/30/2024Monthly Archives: June 2024
System Hack 101
Here at Cannibal Halfling we’ve been system hacking for more than six years: Taking game systems we know and love and making them do something else. In some cases this has been fairly concrete, like adding mecha to Genesys or designing a way to play Fiasco with two tables that switch it up at The Tilt. Other times we’ve gotten abstract, talking about dice or playing cards or what ‘advancement’ is. In every case, though, there’s been a common thread: We’ve looked at an existing piece of game design and, with our experience playing and running games, made it do something else.
This sort of hacking is both easier and harder than clean-sheet game design. We’re working with the assumption that the game we’ve chosen works, and works very well, for a core of what we want our game to be about. That means that as we address the things that it doesn’t do well or doesn’t do at all, we need to preserve the strengths that already incited us to pick the game in the first place. Luckily, hacking is built into the culture of roleplaying and, because of that, is often built into the games we play from go. Apocalypse World had an entire chapter on creating custom moves before anyone knew that there was a demand for it. Fate has structured essentially all of its rules supplements into ‘toolkits’ for helping you make the system do what you want. The OSR is predicated on backwards compatibility with the entire d20 universe. We are a hobby composed of hackers.
Continue reading System Hack 101
A Look Back at aethereal FORGE’s Comedy Games
aethereal FORGE was a small independent RPG publisher active during the aughts. While multiple artists, editors, and other contributors were hired by æF, the publisher’s products were largely conceptualized and written by a single person, Michael Fiegel.
Continue reading A Look Back at aethereal FORGE’s Comedy GamesWeekend Update: 6/22/2024
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.
Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4
Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you missed them. Anyways, this week’s post is going to be a lot shorter than usual.
After finishing 90% of an entry on Prowlers & Paragons I discovered Sean Patrick Fannon, co-author of the “Ultimate Edition”, has an extensive history of sexual harassment. The original version of the game that Fannon did not work on is still available on DriveThruRPG, but I cannot personally comment on its quality.
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4Weekend Update: 6/15/2024
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.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Few tabletop roleplaying games have leveraged other forms of licensed media into improved sales of the original material better than R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk. No game has popped back into our weekendly noting of bestsellers more times long after initial release than Cyberpunk RED, and while they’re not the only factor the biggest noticeable spikes were in the wake of first Cyberpunk 2077 and then Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. For those who played as V and watched David Martinez chrome up and went looking for more, though, RED could be a bit jarring: it’s still Night City, but a very different one, not 1:1 the setting the players and viewers would have been hooked by. Clearly the bait was good enough, but a certain Fixer got us a look at something that will pull them in ever better ahead of its release: the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit. Wake up, samurai. We’ve got a beginner’s game to review.
Continue reading Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Game Changer and the ‘Twist’ campaign
Our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning, so without further ado, let’s begin!
Kicking off in 2019, Game Changer has been a big hit for Dropout, the streaming service which subsumed the CollegeHumor brand after the site was dropped by IAC in 2020. The show consists of host Sam Reich running a game show for a rotating cast of contestants, but the actual ‘game’ of the game show changes every episode. One episode may be a particularly twisted variant of Simon Says, while another calls on contestants to make sounds imitating the onscreen prompts, while yet another locks three contestants in their green room only then to explain that escaping the green room is actually the game.
What makes Game Changer so funny is the combination of new and odd gameplay that the contestants are exposed to and the contestants themselves, all comedians who are part of the broader Dropout cast.The way the contestants react to their circumstances (and to Reich himself, who is as much a ringmaster as a host) generates some great laughs, even when facing the real discomfort of handing over their phones, being hooked up to heart rate monitors as a game mechanic, or even having an entire segment set up where the express purpose is to make you (‘you’ in this case being Brennan Lee Mulligan) lose.
Continue reading Game Changer and the ‘Twist’ campaign
DOGS Review
Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard occupies a strange place in TTRPG history. The game’s thematic content relating to Mormonism in the wild west was unusual in itself, and it was the reason the game ultimately was removed from circulation by Baker. Games disappear all the time, but because Vincent Baker was an acclaimed designer even before he created Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard has gained a certain level of mystique. Of course, we live in the age of the internet. If you really want to find a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard, you can. But there’s a newer option that divorces the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard from its setting.
Continue reading DOGS ReviewWeekend Update: 6/8/2024
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 6/8/2024
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit Pre-Order
- Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
- Deathship One
- Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit
- Warhammer 40k: Imperium Maledictum Starter Set
Top News Stories
Roll20 acquires Demiplane: Roll20 has announced they’ve acquired Demiplane, a character-building software-as-a-service platform which seeks to compete with D&D Beyond in the broader RPG space. For now the services remain separate, although Roll20’s FAQ notes they’ve already received permission for cross-platform unlocks, which will likely entice Roll20 users to check out the Demiplane platform if they haven’t already. Roll20 notes a broader integration strategy, which is now less clear as the parent company will control no fewer than three completely separate platforms (Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and now Demiplane).
Mike Mearls in at Chaosium: Mike Mearls, a designer best known for mishandling contributions by known bad actors in the space (and some work on 5e), is now in at Chaosium. Hopefully they keep him far away from community management and contributor vetting roles.
From the Archives
This week my Facebook memories featured pictures of a gaggle of college friends from back in 2014, digging a hole on the beach and showing off a brace of bottles of limited edition beer. This is the gaming group that, back in 2010, arguably was the genesis of Cannibal Halfling as it provided the platform for a large number of contributors here (Seamus, Aaron, Aki, Geni) to play games together for the first time. From the archives this week we’re talking about the Long-term Gaming Group, and how and why to have one as a social mainstay both in and out of gaming.
Discussion of the Week
Learning RPGs really isn’t that hard: Sure, it’s easy to pick out threads that profess opinions that I personally agree with, but the discussion here is valuable too. A breadth of opinions on why RPGs are easy to learn, harder to learn, and the perceptions that encourage and discourage players from picking up new games.
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.
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