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 10/18/2025

1. Cyberpunk Red: Single Player Mode
2. Phantasy Star Tabletop Roleplaying
3. Daggerheart Corebook
4. Household Volume II
5. Marvel Multiverse RPG Avengers Expansion

Top News Stories

The Cannibal Halflings are on vacation!

Seamus and I have joined a contingent of our long-running gaming group for our annual trip to Delaware to play games, drink some beer, and tell stories of campaigns past. We spent Friday playing Wildsea which was a great time. We spent Friday night, well…

One of our friends has an interest in bad media, especially bad roleplaying games. Two years ago he hunted down a copy of Dallas: the Television Roleplaying Game which we spent a night trying to play. Wild gem of gaming history, also a pretty bad game. This year he brought another bad game. THE bad game. So now, against my better judgment, I can say that I have played FATAL. Yeah. That one. The problem with FATAL is, once you get past the shock value and misogyny, it’s interminable. The rules are profoundly, profoundly bad. The game is nearly 1000 pages long and makes every fantasy heartbreaker mistake imaginable, often fractally. There were audible groans from the table every time one of us had to roll 1d2000 (yes, 1d2000) for a random effect, and the GM basically had to do a side data science project to make the game playable.

That is the caveat, I suppose; the GM edited the game significantly to bring even the horrifying morsel we played to the table. I give him a ton of credit for some work very well done…now please don’t ever do it again.

From the Archives

Possibly a repeat, but incredibly appropriate for the weekend we had: “Every Game is Good with a Good GM!”. Maybe not every game.

Discussion of the Week

Not a recent discussion per se, but an interesting one. As bad as FATAL is, it would have never left either the dustbin of history or the restraining order request documentation from Byron Hall’s therapist if it wasn’t for a hefty dose of The Streisand Effect. Darren MacLennan wrote a scathing, profanity-laced “review” of FATAL on RPGnet which, while hilarious, had the profoundly regrettable side effect of letting significantly more people know the game existed. In a way, the fact that I’ve now played FATAL is entirely Darren’s fault. So Darren, if you’re reading this, great work but also fuck you. Content warnings for bad language, bad game design, and sexual assault.

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.