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 5/31/2025

1. Daggerheart Corebook
2. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 4
3. Daggerheart NEXUS Corebook
4. Traveller: Great Rift Adventures 1-5
5. Rolemaster Creature Law Volume 1

Top News Stories

Goodbye to Alarums and Excursions: Alarums and Excursions was an early amateur press association (APA) which began publication in June of 1975. In essence, an APA collected and recirculated fan publications (typically fanzines) from a group of contributors. These zines often were in response to each other, creating an active RPG fan community long before the internet and even before the sanctioned magazines like Dragon. Alarums and Excursions, run by Lee Gold, was one of the earliest, and was able to continue until its April 2025 issue. Let’s both recognize the incredible contributions of Lee and the other long-time contributors, while also taking a bit of time to mourn the passing of a piece of RPG history.

A Solo TTRPG Gets Time On CNN: HOME, a giant robot versus kaiju game in the spirit of Pacific Rim from Deep Dark Games, was featured yesterday in CNN’s Game On series. Actually, it’s a 1-4 player game, but CNN was really highlighting the solo mode. Diving a bit into CNN’s archive looking for roleplaying games only reveals a couple board game entries and a single D&D one from last year, so this certainly seems like some kind of first – that the video feels the need to remind viewers that they’re not dealing with a video game only strengthens that vibe. Congrats to HOME for the spot, and let’s hope to see more of the like in the future!

From the Archives

We’ve been talking about generic games over the last couple weeks, what they can and can’t do and what rules they should and shouldn’t include. From the archives this week we have some 2018 work on a generic game that put tools together for horror, a hard genre to run at the table as it is and an especially hard one for a game like Fate. Check out the review of the Fate Horror Toolkit.

Discussion of the Week

My son, 6 is a better DM than me: I love reading stories people share of their RPG experiences with their kids because they remind us what true unbounded creativity looks like. A six-year old isn’t concerned with how RPG mechanics come together and therefore, as the OP writes, can be incredible storytellers without any of the second-guessing that happens to adults.

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