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 12/14/2024

1. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Deft Steps Light Fingers
2. Traveller: Clans of the Aslan
3. Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts
4. Carcass Crawler: Issue Four
5. Battletech: Hot Spots: Hinterlands

Top News Stories

Itch.io taken down due to FunkoPop AI “brand protection”: Itch.io is one of the top indie RPG marketplaces, though it is primarily a platform for indie gaming of the digital variety. Somewhere in itch a user made a fanpage for an existing Funko Pop video game, which sent Funko Pop’s copyright protection software, an AI-assisted outfit called BrandShield, into overdrive, causing the entire site to be taken down. Regardless of your opinion on the DMCA, BrandShield clearly overreacted; the entire incident, while resolved amicably in the end, begs some interesting questions about the efficacy of these AI tools and the amount of power we give them when an entire domain can be shut down without human intervention.

From the Archives

Polygon has published an article listing their ‘best new tabletop RPG books of 2024,’ and it’s a pretty decent sampling. There are a number of games on it that we might be writing about soon, but the most important when it comes to the ‘From The Archives’ angle is Eat the Reich. What better way to finish your 2024 gaming than by feeding some fascists to vampires, eh?

Discussion of the Week

A perspective on D&D 5e that I have recently come across: 5e more as a “social platform” than as an RPG: I will admit this discussion thread is a bit all over the place, but I think the underlying thesis is still worth thinking about. Instead of using the premise as an excuse to dismiss D&D, think about it in reverse: what would it take to enable a ‘social platform’ with another game? There are many fandoms within the RPG world, all of differing sizes, and as much as they vary there are at least a couple which have broken containment, so to speak (I’m thinking Cyberpunk here, as well as Vampire: the Masquerade). What’s our take on this? Well, there was a recent statement from this site that network effects make you play D&D.

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