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 10/5/2024

1. BattleTech Universe
2. The Electric State Roleplaying Game
3. Aether Nexus: Fantasy Mecha Roleplaying Game
4. Salvage & Sorcery: Scraphounds of Cygnus
5. Scion Second Edition Book Four: God

Top News Stories

ILA strike in summary: Earlier this week the International Longshoremen’s Association called a strike across US ports on the East Coast and Gulf Coast as their existing agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) expired. The strike lasted all of three days, with the two sides coming to a tentative agreement including higher wage increases than were originally agreed to. What this has to do with RPGs, of course, is supply chains. In the short term, even this brief strike is likely to need weeks to fully unwind delayed shipments. In the longer term, everyone needs to remember that supply chain disruptions aren’t just some weird thing that happened during COVID; as the majority of RPG rulebooks are printed either in Europe or in Asia, shipping is going to continue to be a key issue. Keep abreast of the news, and please don’t write nasty comments to creators for things that are outside of their control.

From the Archives

A mild kerfluffle arose around the release of the licensed TTRPG for the JRPG series Ys, mainly around the use of AI art. We’ve recently discussed AI at length, but one of the other dimensions here is that Ys: Age of Heroes is a licensed game (no links, links imply support). From the archives today we’re revisiting the not-that-old Trouble With Licensed RPGs. As AI pervades creative works, licensed works like games and tie-in literature are going to need to receive more scrutiny than ever; there are already too many of these works which are marketing line items rather than labors of love.

Discussion of the Week

The Twilight: 2000 Problem or: Can a mechanic be too good?: It’s rare that I find discussion about a singular game to be particularly valuable or thought-provoking, but this is one of the exceptions. Twilight:2000 as a game splits the difference between military escapism and military horror, and like many people I found the prospect of running the game right around the time Russia invaded Ukraine to be a bit of a daunting one. One thing that makes this discussion particularly resonant is the top-rated comment from a Redditor who was living in Ukraine at the time of the game’s release.

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.