Monthly Archives: October 2024

Articles, Editorial

Zombie World Review

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Apocalypse World won accolades due to its design, but Powered by the Apocalypse won sales thanks to its handling of genre. The minute that someone took a stylized post-apocalyptic soap opera and ran D&D with it, everyone wanted to see what they could do with the framework. Horror is no different; PbtA has proven adept as a basis for monster hunting, urban fantasy, and Victorian Penny Dreadful, among others. Naturally, someone turned to zombies.

Zombie World is a Magpie Games production, primarily designed by Brendan Conway (of Masks fame). Given coverage of their current licensed games, one could easily surmise I have a chip on my shoulder regarding Magpie’s output. Luckily, Zombie World is a great example to show that this is not the case; the game is both intensely innovative and intense to play. There are some problems with the game but the biggest one affects how well the game has sold, not the quality of the play experience. What is that problem? The game is card-based, and for all of the (positive) impacts it has on the play and packaging, it has made the game difficult to translate into a digital counterpart, affecting sales and availability.

As a card-based game, Zombie World threads the needle of using tried and true PbtA mechanics while making the best use of its unique form factor. In my opinion this is accomplished well; the game reads and plays fast and the 32 page rulebook included really is all you need. To really test how this all worked, I picked up a copy of Zombie World and took it to my online gaming group’s in-person gaming weekend for a one-shot. While the players were going harder than normal given the vibe of the weekend, I was still surprised at how quickly and easily Zombie World devolved into Walking Dead-like drama; our game involved backstabbings, double-dealing factions, and, of course, overrunning both the harbor and city hall of a large city with zombies.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 10/26/2024

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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 10/26/2024

  1. Traveller: Traders and Gunboats
  2. Tales from the RED: Hope Reborn
  3. WH40k Imperium Maledictum: Inquisition Player’s Guide
  4. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Dwarf Player’s Guide
  5. The Mutant Epoch RPG Expansion Rules

Top News Stories

Dire Wolf Digital closes books on Cortex Prime Kickstarter: Perhaps a niche bit of news, but Dire Wolf Digital put out a statement on the long-running Cortex Prime Kickstarter. Cortex Prime funded on Kickstarter seven years ago, and over that time the system has changed owners twice; Dire Wolf Digital acquired the game from Fandom. Here in 2024 there was one outstanding element of the Kickstarter rewards, print copies of the Cortex Spotlights, and Dire Wolf decided to officially not pursue printing the spotlights given the costs. For the several hundred people who backed at that level, they’re out a potential reward. On the other hand, thanks to the game changing ownership, Dire Wolf never received any money from the Kickstarter campaign.

I think this is worth discussing because it shows the third outcome of a Kickstarter, one that (unlike failing outright) is more common in large, corporate-backed games. The core product of the Kickstarter is released, but due to the post-campaign sales lagging, the money to get the rest of the goals over the finish line never materializes, and the campaign drags on 90% fulfilled. With Cortex, unfortunately, you can see this happen: A very late campaign, for a system with enough promise that not one but two different media companies see it as worth buying, that for multiple reasons is not really selling.

I am a big fan of Cortex Prime. I also think it’s been saddled with some terrible business decisions, including the decision to try and sell the game in a closed ecosystem (which not even Marvel is truly getting away with). While Dire Wolf will likely at least break even continuing to support Tales of Xadia, the real way for them to make a return on this investment and get Cortex Prime the attention it deserves is to nut up, kill their dead storefront, and get PDFs on DriveThruRPG. 30% of nothing is nothing, and that’s how much the Cortex Prime distribution strategy is earning them.

From the Archives

Cortex Prime suffered and may die at the hands of boneheaded distribution, but the game is a truly fascinating set of mechanics that, with some good supplements, could outperform GURPS as a generic system for a lot of gamers. From the archives we’re looking at Aaron’s review of Cortex Prime.

Discussion of the Week

One of my biggest weaknesses is struggling to improv: While you’re not going to learn how to improv solely from a Reddit thread, this discussion does set down some good ways to think about improv, and things you can do to improve your skills.

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.

Articles, Editorial

The Digital Divide

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There was in fact a great split between roleplaying games at a table and those on a computer, but it happened years ago. The first digital version of D&D came about in 1975, merely a year after the game was released; it was called Dungeon and was originally developed for the PDP-10 mainframe. Although Dungeon was an unlicensed emulation of the D&D ruleset, the primary thing that prevented it from taking off in university computer labs was its exceptionally steep memory requirement…36 kilobytes. Needless to say, the reality of the RPG video game has changed.

Dungeon, and its successors like DND (Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain, but we all know the intent of the acronym) helped to kick off the RPG video game in the mid 1970s, but by the 1990s it was a completely different world. While TSR was failing and getting acquired by Wizards of the Coast, games like Baldur’s Gate and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall were both imminently successful and also almost nothing like their tabletop forbears. Video games were already doing things that no tabletop GM could have dreamed of, while also casting aside the elements of RPGs that computers weren’t really capable of doing at the time. Baldur’s Gate has faster and flashier combat than any game table you can imagine, but no matter how many times you play it, the basic story will be the same each time.

Let’s gather back here in 2024. Video games, aided by unimaginable computing hardware and multi-million dollar budgets, have become something that the average nerd in the 1990s (let alone the 1970s) could only have dreamed of. At the same time, though, tabletop games have continued to capture imaginations and, over the last ten years have also exploded in popularity. The RPG has also headed back to the digital realm, just like it did in 1975. This time, though, there’s recognition. The massive, high fidelity world of video games exists, and it’s big business. Tabletop RPGs, though, are wandering back to the digital realm with virtual tabletops, digital assistants, and soon, AI game masters. With the continued re-integration of software into the hobby, it seems like a prudent time to ask: Where is the line? And, perhaps more importantly, how is this time different than it was in 1975?

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Articles, Editorial

Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review

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A world, and a mirror of worlds. Atop four giant elephants atop a giant turtle rests Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – where the most dangerous barbarian is an old barbarian, where fleeing your destiny is the surest way to run into it, where a million-to-one chance always works out, where a single humble hero will always win while outnumbered, and where you have to practice believing in the little lies (stories) in order to make the big ones become true (justice, mercy, etc.. It’s been the subject of Roundworld-made roleplaying games before, but sometimes stories like to repeat themselves with a new twist, and this time there’s something of a primer. This is the Discworld Quickstart Guide from Modiphius Entertainment!

Continue reading Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review →

Articles, Level One Wonk

On Escapism

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I think I’m getting tired of cyberpunk.

I’ve been deep into the cyberpunk genre since at least high school, reading, watching, and playing everything I could find. It was science fiction that actually resonated with me; computers and body modification and AI all seemed much more pressing, more real than space travel and distant planets, let alone magic and wizards and vampires. When I played Cyberpunk 2020, something I started doing at about 16 years old, I embraced the dystopia of the setting and leaned into the idea that a better way to play the game was a grittier, grimier way to play the game. Even as I lightened up a bit about black market modifiers and blunt trauma damage, the game was an inherently grim one. One of my gaming friends in college reflected on a Cyberpunk game we played where his character was killed at the hands of another PC, the second of a series of exchanges that killed half the party in the span of two sessions. It was actually a great ending for how much intrigue had built up between the characters, but it could still be summed up in three words:

“The future sucks.”

Those are the watchwords of not just Cyberpunk 2020, but arguably the entire genre. Neuromancer is not a book about a hero who changes the world, it’s about a character who, through acting in his own self-interest, releases one of the biggest existential threats the world has yet seen and then nothing happens. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, George Alec Effinger and other preeminent cyberpunk authors were at their best when writing characters who accepted the worlds around them even as the readers were drawn in to how alien yet upsettingly familiar they were. Good cyberpunk made you think because, like all good science fiction, it was the issues of the present cast upon a vision of the future. The problem is that those visions of the future are here, and yeah, the future sucks.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 10/12/2024

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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 10/12/2024

  1. Cyberpunk RED: Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn
  2. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Dwarf Player’s Guide
  3. Lands of RuneQuest: Dragon Pass
  4. BattleTech Universe
  5. Aether Nexus: Fantasy Mecha Roleplaying Game

Top News Stories

Hurricane Helene’s (and Milton’s) Impact on Tabletop: Rascal’s Rowan Zeoli writes:

“In the last two weeks, a pair of catastrophic storms have made landfall in the southeastern United States. Helene and Milton, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes respectively, have caused immense amounts of damage across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; both from their direct impact and the subsequent infrastructure destruction of these climate change-induced catastrophes. While Rascal is a publication about games, it is also a publication about people who love them—their lives, their passions, their hopes, their fears—and to go without acknowledging the effect of these storms would be a disservice to them, to you—our community of readers—and to anyone who believes there is a possibility for a better world. We must know what we are up against and how we can come together to keep each other safe.”

It’s a damn solid article with first hand accounts, community efforts, justified alarm, calls to action, and genuine hope. 

From the Archives

As discussed in the Crowdfunding Carnival this month, Onyx Path is campaigning Curseborne, a different twist on the urban fantasy that typifies the World of Darkness…which is also (at least in part) published by Onyx Path. From the archives today we’ll look at another design house which double-dipped into Urban Fantasy, albeit in the opposite direction. While Magpie Games is well known for releasing Urban Shadows, a fantastic PbtA take on World of Darkness style urban fantasy, they also released Undying, focusing more specifically on vampires and taking a different (diceless) approach to PbtA mechanics. Check out Aki’s review.

Discussion of the Week

Is this hobby just wildly inaccessible to dyslexics and non-readers?: This week’s OP is working with teenagers with different learning disabilities, and even in spite of these disabilities they’re still using RPGs as a core activity in their program. It may not come up with all (or even most) of our gaming groups, but it is important to remember that delivering a game experience as a big book or multiple big books does lock out potential players; potential players who would be perfectly capable of the actual act of roleplay itself. It’s hardly just RPGs where accessibility is overlooked, but it’s one place that we as hobbyists can give some hard thoughts to.

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.

Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 24 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2

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3, 2, 1…

Forte, Ichigo, and Matias have collected some winnings at the House of Dice casino, but someone is tipping the scales – and it’s not in favor of the bounty hunters’ employer. As the chips and whiskey fly, cybernetic eyeballs are put through their paces, and oddly similar figures move through the crowd, will the crew of the Progressive figure out who’s rigging the game?

Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2!

Continue reading Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 24 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2 →

Articles, Level One Wonk

Guide for the Perplexed: Scandinavian Game Stores

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As some of you may have noticed, I took two weeks off at the end of September. During that time I was traveling, walking and taking trains in Scandinavia with my parents, my brother, and my partner Emily. We started in Stockholm, then visited Göteborg and Malmö before crossing the Øresund to go to Copenhagen. We also took a day trip to Uppsala in there; my parents were impressed at my initiative in planning to visit the city, but in all honesty 85% of my reasoning was that Vaesen is set there. Nevertheless. We visited some incredible cities, ate some incredible food, saw fantastic bicycle infrastructure, and spent two weeks doing something very different.

Not entirely different, though. Sweden is the home of Free League and Denmark is the origin country of LARP camp, so of course I couldn’t take a trip like this one without visiting some gaming stores. What I experienced was quite a bit different than the norm in the US…and to be honest, better in a lot of ways. Given that I had just gone over the landscape of RPG retail maybe a month before, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring the Guide for the Perplexed series to Scandinavia for a little bonus.

Continue reading Guide for the Perplexed: Scandinavian Game Stores →