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 2/8/2025

1. Grimwild: Cinematic Fantasy Roleplaying
2. ACKS II Revised Rulebook
3. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG
4. Ancient Wonders
5. BattleTech: ilKhan’s Eyes Only

Top News Stories

It’s Zine Quest: As you may have seen from the Crowdfunding Carnival, Zine Quest 2025 is on and there’s a lot going on. If you want to drink from the firehose yourself, Kickstarter has a tag for Zine Quest projects, and Crowdfundr has a Tabletop Nonstop landing page. Otherwise, read our coverage and be on the lookout for more zines in about a week and a half.

Wizards of the Coast releases day 1 errata for 2025 Monster Manual: In a truly exalted show of product management prowess, Wizards of the Coast has needed to release error corrections for a book that will be released in about two weeks. In a hobby where gamers complain incessantly about typos in indie publications, surely the largest, most well-funded, and popular gaming company in the land can complete an editing pass before sending a product to print…right? Incidentally, WotC has no open positions for editorial staff; apparently they couldn’t get the headcount approved after asking for all those software development positions.

From the Archives

While Zine Quest 2024 represented a return to normalcy, Zine Quest 2025 begins a track record of normalcy. Zine Quest is only six years old and has held onto its popularity and success amidst several shake-ups, most of which were self-inflicted. First, Kickstarter made public management announcements regarding blockchain that were, to say the least, unpopular (and like the majority of Web3 tech, went nowhere). Then, the Kickstarter team decided to move the event from February to August, for somewhat baffling reasons (International Zine Month is in July, which is close but not the same, and August is GenCon month, which would end up being worse for a zine-focused event). This was happening amidst a shakeup of the Kickstarter management, especially including the ouster of the employee who helped found ZineQuest in the first place (that ouster was his fault, not Kickstarter’s, but it didn’t help anything).

The appetite for an indie, low-budget RPG event is clearly huge if said event can survive two off years out of only six total. It also shows that Zine Quest is something Kickstarter does very well; even in the opportunity space created by all the missteps, no alternate crowdfunding provider or event comes close. That said, from the archives this weekend we have the Crowdfunding Carnival Kickoff. While the games are long past, the kickoff helps explain how and why we started broadening our horizon from Kickstarter, even if the results didn’t stick. Of course we do still highlight campaigns from multiple crowdfunding sites, but the most successful alt crowdfunder, Backerkit, wasn’t even operating as a crowdfunding site back in February of 2022.

Discussion of the Week

Solo roleplaying makes me a better GM and player: Not only are we fans of solo games around these parts, but this discussion also ties solo gaming back to the rest of the games we play. This is both in terms of how solo gaming affects them, but also the benefits of using the solo rules which are coming with more and more traditional games these days.

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.