It’s been a very busy Labor Day weekend for the Cannibal Halflings, so we’ve brought this update to you a day late. Apologies for the disruption, we’ll be back on our regular schedule next week!

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 9/1/2024

1. Traveller: War Fleets of the Fifth Frontier War
2. Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Core Rulebook
3. Metro:Otherscape Corebook
4. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit
5. Solasta Campaign Rulebook: Revised Edition

Top News Stories

Mongoose Publishing Now Owns Traveller: This news is pretty ‘inside baseball’, but it’s important for anyone who’s been around the hobby and knows how difficult IP continuity can be. Marc Miller, original creator of Traveller, has transferred ownership of the Traveller IP to its current publisher, Mongoose. As Mongoose has been the lead publisher for over 15 years now, it’s unlikely this will have any real consequences for the game line. However, Miller is 77 this year (at the end of the month, happy early birthday Marc!), and intellectual property rights get rough without a succession plan in place. What’s happened here is an important step to ensure Traveller can continue to get published for the foreseeable future.

From the Archives

Traveller is setting up to be the premier space opera RPG for some time; in addition to Marc Miller securing Traveller’s succession, the game is quickly steaming towards it’s fiftieth birthday in 2027, only a few years after D&D. As befits a game of that age, Traveller has a deep bench of supplements, both for the original and Mongoose editions. Here at Cannibal Halfling we’ve only played a bit of Traveller, but it certainly left a mark when we did. From the Archives today we’re looking at Aki’s review and discussion of The Pirates of Drinax, a massive sandbox campaign which builds upon the alien race the Aslan, first seen back in 1984.

Discussion of the Week

The ORC License was released over a year ago now. How is it holding up?: Kind of hard to believe so much time has passed since Wizards kicked off the OGL kerfluffle. The ORC License is likely the largest alternative license available in the RPG sphere (excepting more generalized ones like Creative Commons), and this discussion covers whether it was ‘successful’ and who it may actually work well for. It’s of course important to note that if as a designer you write your own material and aren’t concerned with marketing compatibility, you don’t need a license at all.

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.