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 9/14/2024

1. Savage Worlds Adventure Edition: Science Fiction Companion
2. Star Trek Adventures Second Edition – Core Rulebook
3. Five Leagues from the Borderlands: Expansion 2
4. Traveller The Fifth Frontier War: Opening Moves
5. Traveller: War Fleets of the Fifth Frontier War

Top News Stories

Hasbro CEO says all his mates are using AI for their D&D games, which is apparently ‘a clear signal that we need to be embracing it’: Wizards of the Coast has had a few minor AI scandals, always resulting in backpedaling, apologia, and resetting the counter until they’re caught out again. The parent company, on the other hand, is full steam ahead on replacing artists and designers with self-replicating, plagiarizing statistical models. Caveat emptor.

From the Archives

Renegade Game Studios has ascended in the tabletop world mostly as a business, using their reputation and scale to take on profitable publishing ventures like Vampire: the Masquerade and selling games based on Hasbro licenses in order to reach wider audiences. From the archives today we’re looking at the Power Rangers RPG Review from two years ago. While Essence20 is competent, it’s hard to view any of the Essence20 games, not the least of which Power Rangers, as anything more than millennial nostalgia-bait.

Discussion of the Week

Why Crafting?: Video games and RPGs grew up together, and the amount of cross-pollination between the two is pretty significant. That said, the sorts of gameplay mechanics that work at a table with friends and dice are often quite different from the ones best used with a computer doing all the work in the background. In this discussion, crafting mechanics are highlighted as a mechanic that is being ported from video games to tabletop games, with often mixed results.

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