In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.

Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.

What Isn’t News

If I’m going to say there aren’t any dedicated news outlets in the TTRPG space, I do have to start with the fact that Cannibal Halfling Gaming, Weekend Update or not, is not a news outlet. We do aggregated news posts every week, but the vast majority of our content is editorial. Rascal News, despite ‘news’ being in the title, is very much the same; on their front page now are two items that could be considered news, reporting on the United Wizards of the Coast Union (as we did in the last two Weekend Updates) and the Canada Role Awards. Everything else is editorial content or feature content like interviews. To be clear, this isn’t saying anything about the quality of the site, but given the use of the word ‘news’ it seems like a fair place to put a stake in the ground. For the most part this isn’t an issue; my entire thesis here is that no one can run a site entirely on what’s conventionally considered news. That said it has gotten them into trouble; I’d argue a recent story on a contract dispute regarding Possum Creek Games poorly danced a line between editorial and investigative journalism that ended up hurting the credibility of the piece and the integrity of the outlet.

There is room in the hobby for a ‘trade magazine’, and that is the niche Rascal aims to occupy; magazines like Variety were both news sources and pioneered the very format of the written review for film. The issue that comes up is the same one that Variety and the Hollywood Reporter face: revenue is tied to readership. When you’re trying to cover the entire film industry, succeeding in making yourself seem essential to insiders could make you very rich. When you’re covering the RPG hobby and trying vainly to not cede all the column-inches to Wizards of the Coast, making yourself seem essential is perhaps the only way to keep paying people at all. The problem then ends up being that the percentage of the hobby which truly needs news is even smaller than the percentage that has never played D&D. That in large part is due to what the vast majority of RPG news actually is.

What Is News

The most common industry news is the exact industry news I try not to cover in Weekend Update: Product announcements. What new game is coming out? Who has sold what rights to who? What’s the next big Kickstarter? To be fair, we do cover crowdfunding, just not in Weekend Update. We then get to the next level of inside baseball announcements that we do cover, which are typically only interesting at the highest level. When high-profile designers get tapped for new jobs or projects, we cover that, though I think the last job change we covered was when Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins got hired by Darrington Press. We cover obituaries; while morbid a Hollywood obituary section (and even a full necrology, technically) was one of the things Variety was known for and is something that people want to know about, especially as the first generation of RPG designers are of fairly advanced age if they’re still around. There are also snippets of actual business news, like union formations and mergers and acquisitions, as well as broader news that’s relevant to the hobby like tariff changes and shipping interruptions (it is perhaps a happy coincidence that both hobby games and my day job benefit from paying attention to shipping news).

In terms of covering news objectively, I think that ENWorld likely has the best aggregator from simply a collection perspective. The problem is that with the utter deluge of both D&D-specific content and product announcements, being a good aggregator doesn’t necessarily make you a useful news source to most people. Rascal is following the model set forth by former Gawker sites Kotaku and iO9 (and others like Polygon) fairly well, though the much more granular segmentation makes their paywall model both a necessity and a barrier to ever truly being central in hobby discourse. Their recent shift to having a free subscription tier is likely an improvement, and though I may be pessimistic on their performance relative to larger nerd sites the fact is that every month they’re still paying the bills is a victory. To be clear, I bear Rascal no ill will but they’re going to need to be more deliberate about their editorial strategy…I’m not sure their credibility will survive them triggering another gish gallop, no matter how many corrections they issue.

And this brings us back to the Weekend Update. While I have no pretensions of trying to do more news coverage, spending Saturday morning going ‘okay, what the hell are gamers actually talking about?’ is a useful exercise for me, and hopefully to those who read the output. It’s also typically sobering…while hobbyists have a range of opinions on the value of large discussion portals like r/RPG on Reddit (and fairly so), the fact is that Reddit is likely one of the best cross-sections of hobby discourse from a representation perspective (and they still likely underrepresent D&D, though you can fix that by adding a another subreddit to your reading). As much as the actual discourse is often reductive if not toxic, what people are talking about is a much more effective barometer on the hobby than the self-selected follows most people have on something like BlueSky. And as much as people can be assholes, you do in fact get to read their opinions and remind yourself how much of the hobby actually cares about yours. While I do think most gamers are better suited with following the advice of Ron Edwards and self-selecting into a more aligned play culture, if you’re deigning to write TTRPG hobby news (like myself), you need to get a wider sample. Given that, we have every intent to keep writing Weekend Updates. Find out what’s happening, sure, but also see what others are saying and buying, and how that’s actually driving the hobby.

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As we approach our tenth anniversary, there are more smaller and weirder anniversaries to celebrate. We hit five years of crowdfunding coverage in 2023 (ten is coming up in 2028!), and five years of news updates here in 2026. In two weeks, it’s also the fifth anniversary of our solo RPG coverage…maybe Seamus will write a retrospective on that. For news specifically, though, looking back on five years of news coverage is a good way to reflect on how the hobby’s changed, but also how getting our news has changed. In 2021 Dicebreaker still existed and Polygon was still nominally relevant; ICv2 was still releasing game charts instead of hiding them behind a paywall and Roll20’s Orr Report, while switched to their less useful format in 2019, still existed. Hell, in 2021 most of us were still on Twitter. The information landscape has changed, and doing something, anything to get that information out there is needed. Imperfect as the landscape is, outlets like Rascal, ENWorld, ICv2, and GeekNative do exist, and if you read between the lines of product announcements, reviews, and D&D headlines, there is useful news to be had on all of them. My hope, then, is that for some of you the answer to the question of TTRPG news is to boot us up every Saturday morning and do a quick skim of the Weekend Update.

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