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 1/18/2025

1. BattleTech: ilKhan’s Eyes Only
2. Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set
3. Grimwild: Cinematic Fantasy Roleplaying
4. ACKS II Revised Rulebook
5. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG

Top News Stories

“It’s time for independent tabletop role-playing games to get loud”: So said a Polygon article earlier this week. There is some good to be found in it. Mothership got mentioned because of Mothership Month, the collab funding project that went on a few months ago, and the general vibe of collaborating and banding together is a good one. Then there’s this bit:

“Ask yourselves: Who is your audience, and what is your audience looking for? Where are they looking for it, and how can you best give them more of it? And what does success look like?”

That’s really good advice! Still the article was pretty quickly met by wide irritation – indies are plenty loud already, struggling to be heard in an environment which is increasingly algorithmically hostile to them, and Polygon spends most of their TTRPG time talking about the big dragon game in the first place. Mothership was the only indie game the article even mentioned. Ending with a line about indie creators sitting in their little corners of the internet and wringing their hands instead of ‘getting loud’ did not do the article any favors.

I do think it must be said that Polygon is under the influence of the dark art of algorithmancy themselves; when they do post indie TTRPG content, the only way to get more of it is to click on it. Or, you know. Hang around here (or the Indie TTRPG Newsletter, or with the Rascals, or-).

From the Archives

Mothership Month got mentioned right here in the Weekend Update while it was going on, and was then part of last month’s Crowdfunding Carnival – as it turned out, all of the campaigns successfully funded, so you can follow the chain of links to see how they’re doing now!

Discussion of the Week

Why are TRPG replay videos not that popular in English TRPG community? It’s a good question! Amusingly, when I went to find a definition of replays to sum them up here, they were defined in a much older reddit post as “essentially session transcripts that have been edited and re-written to be more entertaining and easily accessible. Replay videos are videos that are created in a similar fashion.“ It can be said we’ve done some written ones here with the Adventure Log, and the Legend of Vox Machina almost certainly counts. The thread has some interesting discussions (although there are some snide comments) about the cultural differences that make them rarer in the English-speaking world, and why it’s a wildly popular way to interact with TTRPGs in Japan – Record of Lodoss War being perhaps the most famous.

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.