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 2/3/2024

1. Exalted: Across the Eight Directions
2. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Tribes and Tribulations
3. Wrath and Glory: Aeldari: Inheritance of Embers
4. Alien: Building Better Worlds
5. Tomorrow City: Dieselpunk Roleplaying

Top News Stories

Hasbro seeks to sell D&D IP: This one has been causing all sorts of kerfluffles this week, so it’s important to break it down. Essentially, Chinese press reported that Tencent, a major Chinese conglomerate, has been in talks to acquire Dungeons and Dragons as intellectual property. Needless to say this caused a bit of hullabaloo when first picked up in hobby media, so we need to break down what it actually means. The initial Reddit thread was closed because using the headline I did here was considered deceptive; the conversations were about digital licensing rights. If you read the Pandaily article linked, though, that’s not what it says, at all. Tencent holds a minority stake in Larian, creators of Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as other software development studios, and in the article an insider is reported on saying that the licensing rights model has caused them problems in the past (using the example of a Nier mobile game) and that they’d rather own the entire IP. The words, in the article, are “dominant control over the IP Dungeons and Dragons”. So let’s not mince words here, or try to downplay.

On the complete other hand, the source of this appears to be insiders from early-stage conversations. As far as Tencent buying D&D is concerned, this leak may have scuppered the whole deal, and we have no way of knowing unless there is official recognition from either party, which (obviously) will not happen until the deal is either officially done or officially killed.

So what can we take away from this? Hasbro is in a serious financial crunch, and after their layoffs are still trying to free up working capital. D&D, being value-high but revenue-low, is an obvious candidate. More information on this when we have it.

From the Archives

Coming up in my Facebook memories today was a post about Cid, the cyborg taxi driver I played in a game of Interface Zero using the (then playtest-grade) Fate version of the system. I still think the Fate version of Interface Zero is one of the best worked examples of what ‘crunchy Fate’ looks like, and I discussed that at length in System Split: Interface Zero back in July of 2017. A perfect deep dive after the newer cyberpunk-adjacent System Split released this past week.

Discussion of the Week

Masculinity, socializing, and RPGs: This one strikes close to home for me. I can’t speak to the difficulties of men having close friendships and social lives in an expert or sociological context, but I can speak from personal experience; whether you agree with the gender aspect or not, making and having friends as an adult can be hard. Many of my closest friends are those who I game with, and I definitely identify with the stories and discussions in this thread.

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.