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 11/9/2024

1. Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts
2. Exalted 3e: Sidereals: Charting Fate’s Course
3. Cyberpunk RED: Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn
4. Warhammer 40k Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum Inquisition Player’s Guide
5. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Dwarf Player’s Guide

Top News Stories

PAX (Unplugged) Rising Showcase Games Announced: The media emails for the upcoming PAX Unplugged 2024 have started rolling in, and among them was the notice that the Rising Showcase games have been announced. A game is chosen for the Showcase by the PAX team when they “believe the title stands out from the crowd in gameplay, entertainment, or inventiveness; regardless of which genres you favor.” There’s a nice selection of board, card, and roll-and-write games (no roleplaying games, alas; we suggest Games on Demand or the RPG Designer Meet and Greet, wink wink). We’ll definitely be swinging by for a look, but we actually  got to try Pirates of the High Teas at a local showcase a few months ago, and can already highly recommend it.

From the Archives

Speaking of which, we walked away from Unplugged 2023 with a number of non-roleplaying game review copies, so they’re an easy pull from the archives: Retrograde, a roll-and-write game of arcade shooters like Galaga, and Self Careless, a card games of balancing chores, coffee, and that darn cat with the art of  Cassandra Calin!

Discussion of the Week

What system did your 5e-only players respond best to?: Alright, so you want to follow our general advice and expand your group’s roleplaying game palette. This discussion features a lot of good ideas on specific games that people have had success with, but we’d like to highlight part of a comment from calevmir_ that’s useful in a more general sense:

“And that’s the main thing, is the GM running a game they like and running it how it’s designed to be run.

If you just slot in a d&d-alike game and run it like d&d, players will rightly ask why bother swapping systems. Run something different and don’t treat it like d&d.”

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.