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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 11/11/2023

1. D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
2. Delta Green: God’s Teeth
3. Cyberpunk Red
4. Manual of Adventurous Resources: Complete
5. The Silt Verses Roleplaying Game

Top News Stories

Lin Codega out at Gizmodo/iO9: In a development that’s sad but all too unsurprising, Gizmodo/iO9 has laid off 23 people as part of a restructuring effort. That includes Lin Codega, one of if not the only person to win an ENnie specifically for their games journalism. As a result, the only place we can really recommend you come for RPG news that goes beyond product announcements is, well, Cannibal Halfling Gaming. We kid, we kid (we wish we were kidding a bit more, honestly). You can keep up with Lin at their Substack.

Crowdfundr confirms Tabletop Nonstop for 2024: After becoming the de facto host of Zine Month in 2023, Crowdfundr has announced they’re doing it again, turning the month of February into Tabletop Nonstop, a celebration of TTRPG campaigns. While the continued support of Zine Month and its enthusiastic group of indie creators is great, pretty much nothing else about the announcement is. Crowdfundr is aiming to encourage more campaigns for full hardcovers (i.e. the thing indies most like to complain about during ZineQuest/Zine Month), dice and accessories (i.e. the most popular way to commit fraud in RPG crowdfunding), and Actual Plays (i.e. funding your ability to find four friends, two books, and a Blue Snowball). Glad to see Crowdfundr aspires to hide their indie RPG campaigns in between suspect dice dropshippers and plastic printed elf tits, just like Kickstarter.

Discussion of the Week

Are we returning to a less D&D dominant RPG scene?: While there’s really no getting around the scale of the D&D monopoly, more and more gamers are noticing that the RPG hobby is returning to a breadth of coverage likely last seen in the 90s. We are once again supporting multiple companies putting out high-end products that make their ways to tables and actually get played. There’s also plenty of fighting about whether or not Pathfinder ever outsold D&D 4e; the answer to that is that there were quarters where Pathfinder was moving more product, but they were at the end of 4e’s product lifecycle and overall the game never came close.

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.