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 3/22/2025
- Fabula Ultima Atlas: Natural Fantasy
- Tome of Worldbuilding
- Warhammer 40k Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum, Macharian Requisition Guide
- The Nomicon
- Space Pulp
Top News Stories
Pocketopia 2025 at BackerKit: Pocketopia is Backerkit’s own spin on fostering smaller games like Zine Quest, but instead of the zine format it focuses on portability, which is a really cool idea. Pocketopia is also making heavy use of Backerkit’s unique ‘Cross-Collab’ features, which give rewards for backing multiple projects who are working together. In addition to Cross-Collab, Backerkit also has an event reward for backing at least six projects, a dice bag. If you think this is a marketing engine to turn your FOMO into money…it is. And it’s working, with a significant uptick in backers who have backed 6+ projects. Still, Backerkit is trying to diversify the crowdfunding events space, and I think this could work as well as Zine Quest after building some momentum. There are currently 66 projects live on Pocketopia, and it runs until April 3rd.
90% Of D&D’s Project Sigil Team Laid Off: In addition to D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast has been working on a virtual tabletop to bolster their digital TTRPG offerings, codenamed Project Sigil. Via ENWorld, the majority of the team working on Project Sigil, some 30 people, have been laid off, leaving a skeleton crew of about three. Now, in recent months the job openings at Wizards have been overwhelmingly software and digital-focused, and this has been a publicly announced strategic direction for the company for some time now. Even with public announcements that the scope of Project Sigil may being reduced, actually letting go this many people is uncertain news for whatever part of WotC’s digital strategy aligns with D&D.
From the Archives
Space Pulp has popped into the DriveThruRPG top sellers, and it uses a lesser known generic system to power its futuristic setting. Of course, lesser known doesn’t mean we don’t know it; from the archives this week is the review of Space Pulp’s engine, Everywhen.
Discussion of the Week
How I tricked players into creating a stable of PC’s with deep interconnected backstories: Despite the thread title, this post is really about how forcing your players to write backstories kind of sucks. You see, the OP here is talking about how the ‘trick’ to making players write backstories is to have them bring in characters who’ve already seen table time…who have “frontstories” if you will. While there are some excellent games with some excellent prompts about character history, playing out the character to see who they become always works better than a writing prompt.
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So …
I think Back Story and Front Story/Play have different purposes.
Back Story creates a Lens to operate through, and gives you some kind of grounding for making choices when you begin.
Play Time Character Development lets you answer “Who am I”, “What do I stand for”, “What mistakes Haunt me” and “Why does my arm always hurt”. It puts you into situations which don’t give you optimised questions. It’s where Life gets hard, and really out of your control (more or less).
I find the most interesting part, especially with a long lived Character who has adventured in multiple Campaigns, with multiple GMs and different player groups, is how the interplay from where the character started, and how they’ve been weathered by genuinely varied environments, gives the character chances to get more solid and more nuanced.
This may be possible if you start, as it were, in media res, finding out who your character is only through Play. That’s a fine experience, too. Both approaches can work.
One advantage of creating a backstory, is doing world building to reflect your own personal reality. Sometimes that world building doesn’t really enter the consciousness of the Table. But you have it. And it shapes you and your experience of your character.
I am not advocating forcing your viewpoint on a GM who has a different vision for their World. Or trying to get a Table to play in a way they are not comfortable with. Gaming is a Shared experience. The reality at the Table needs to be Negotiated by the Participants (even if that Negotiation ends up with, “Bob the GM does all the decision making”, as long as it works for everyone, more or less). But you can have your own private experience of play and of your Character. To some degree, we all do that anyway.
I will also say, I don’t view Back Stories to be carved in stone. Many times during play you ask yourself questions you had not thought of when you created your Character. Either because the questions revolve around something you are only connecting to now, or because that part of your background wasn’t something you even contemplated originally.
Or sometimes, play has given you new insights into who your Character is, and the answers you gave yourself in the Character’s Back Story, don’t ring so true anymore. You have to ask yourself, was this just a “nice/not nice” or idealised version of who I thought the Character would be? I love these questions. They get you deeper into the Character.
So Back Stories, I think, are ideally thought of as being “written” by Unreliable Narrators. Seeing the Character in the “Heat of the moment” (in play), can get underneath those Unreliable Narrations.
Finally, some people like to learn more about their Characters than just the Character’s Identity In Play. If I do art for my character, or invent new, never to be seen Factions for the World, or write poems or songs, that is all wonderful. It can be deeply rewarding part of the overall experience. Even if I am the only one who knows about it.
What people are essentially hung up on in this debate … is who gets to Author Reality?
I think the resolution to that question is not putting other people down for their preferences. It is acknowledging that at the Table we Negotiate a Shared Experience.
And when we are on our Own, or maybe with some like minded Peers, we may have other Experiences that are rewarding and different. Telling War Stories is an example of that.
The reality is, we are all, all of the time, experiencing a mix of Personal and Shared perceptions at the Table and away from it.
So, maybe we Respect both our Own and Other’s Spaces. And creativity.
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