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 8/15/2026

1. Mutants and Masterminds 3e Complete Collection
2. Fabula Ultima Bestiary Vol. 1
3. Exalted: Alechemicals: Forged by the Machine God
4. Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying
5. Somnus Domina: The Soul of Trickery (5E)

Top News Stories

The workers at Rowan, Rook and Decard have unionised: Rowan, Rook, and Decard has recognized members of the Game Workers Union of the International Workers of Great Britain, or IWGB. This is the first union recognition in the UK tabletop game industry, and comes shortly after the IWGB secured the first union recognition in the broader gaming industry at ZA/UM last October.

Paizo’s catalog is now on DriveThruRPG: Paizo has opted to expand its distribution deal with DriveThruRPG, meaning its entire 1200+ item catalog of Pathfinder and Starfinder PDFs is now on the site. In this way, DriveThruRPG is now moving closer to becoming a Steam analogue in the TTRPG space: while TTRPG distribution doesn’t have nearly as many infrastructure requirements and challenges as digital games, DTRPG’s network effects still contribute heavily to the site’s utility for RPG designers. Pathfinder being on the site now means that essentially every major publisher, save of course Wizards of the Coast itself, uses the service.

From the Archives

DriveThruRPG has consolidated its position in the RPG distribution universe; while the site can’t be a ‘gatekeeper’ for listing and selling PDFs, it can serve as a tunnel through the mountain you’d otherwise be hiking over to get potential buyers to your site (personal, on itch.io, or otherwise). This is but one dimension of the core problem in selling your games at scale: how do I find the people who’d actually want to buy them? From the archives this week is The Trouble With Marketing.

Discussion of the Week

Was told by a friend who ran some Dungeon Crawler Carl at Gen Con that quite a few players were upset that they didn’t get to “play as Carl”: The Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG is one of the largest TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns ever, and it shares that space with other licensed games. The question of ‘playing the lead’ in RPGs hasn’t ever gone away; while Indiana Jones was famously panned for including no character creation rules, only movie characters, there are to this day game lines which are built around single popular characters (for a vintage example, James Bond, for a more recent example, Doctor Who). It’s worth thinking about different ways that fannish engagement is going to look in the RPG world; we’re only going to see more of it. At the same time, it’s hard to disagree with a point made by u/CaravanCult: “I say this with love but repeating references and/or recounting things to and/or at each other is a specific kind of fandom.”

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.