Tag Archives: D&D

Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

It’s still all old games

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It’s a Tuesday night. The Steve Jackson Games forums have over 220 active users right now, and Mongoose Publishing’s forums have nearly 600. While sandwiched between a few anime-styled games, DriveThruRPG’s top sellers are heavily represented by vintage properties. Their top 10 is split between four anime games (Fabula Ultima, two Twilight Sword books, and ‘The Legend of Heroes’) and six systems with original publication dates between 1977 and 1987 (Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Traveller, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay). While the anime part may be a bit new, the overall trend is not: Legacy properties being shepherded by Mongoose, Cubicle 7, and Arc Dream consistently jump to the top of sales charts, essentially every time a new supplement is released. Even if these companies aren’t doing WotC numbers, they’re consistently Tier 3 or maybe even better in the RPG world, on the success of old games. Calling these nostalgia plays may be technically true, but it misses the point; we’re in a world where fandom-creating Mothership is able to generate a little less than $1.5 million once in a Kickstarter, but Mongoose Publishing, mostly on the weight of a space game ten years older than I am, generates enough revenue year after year to securely buy the building their office is located in. Old games are built differently, and it begs the question: Is there something older games are actually doing better for their audiences, or are newer games simply being starved of new blood?

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Articles, Editorial

Twilight Sword: Filtering reactions to D&D through video games

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Most fantasy RPGs are a reaction to D&D in one way or another. This has likely been true for some time; while games like RuneQuest have had time to evolve and develop their own base principles, many of them, especially ones as old as RuneQuest, were very much about being either in alignment with or in opposition to what D&D did when they were first released. Given D&D’s current market share, this has become more nakedly true in the bestselling entries in the fantasy genre; Tales of the Valiant, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart are all essentially versions of the D&D formula and none of them purport to offer a different sort of game than D&D beyond differing priority rankings for things like narrative development, tactical combat, or power level.

A new trend I’ve observed is typified by game designers taking a different tack to how they ‘react’ to D&D, and this is generally one filtered through other media. Break, Fabula Ultima, and Twilight Sword are all versions of this to one extent or another. While these games all differ from each other, hidden in each is a similar underlying thesis: In order to make tabletop roleplaying more accessible, this game is derived from the most accessible D&D derivative, the fantasy RPG video game. The fact that these are all more from a JRPG lens likely has to do with legacy as well as differentiation; the first Final Fantasy outsold its licensed D&D contemporary Pool of Radiance by about 50%, and the gap only got wider. Final Fantasy VII outsold Baldur’s Gate, its licensed D&D contemporary, by about fivefold (and that’s only to 2005, not including any of the remakes or re-releases of either). Even if Baldur’s Gate III and the recent explosion in popularity for D&D have shifted this narrative, there’s no question that through the 90s, the JRPG reigned supreme when it came to sales volume and cultural impact.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play”

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As is becoming perhaps more common, I feel compelled to react to an interesting piece from elsewhere in the RPG blogosphere. High Level Play and Scaffolding takes a Bluesky thread from Sam Sorensen and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss why there are noted trends of hesitancy among players to move into “high-level play” in an OSR sense, that is to say gameplay which shifts from focusing on dungeon crawling and party-level combat and treasure hunting to play where the characters become leaders of mercenary companies, warbands, or even nations. Post author Zak H. frames this as a scaffolding problem, essentially stating that the mode of play that “high-level play” requires isn’t set up or framed by any of the levels or modes of play that come before it. I find that perfectly reasonable; it makes sense that dungeon crawling doesn’t prepare you for factional intrigue or morale management. What I’m more interested in is where this all fits into the broader hobby here in 2026.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric Ebb

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Video games owe a lot to tabletop roleplaying games, with mechanics, terminology, and tropes all being borrowed during the 1980s and 1990s. For obvious reasons, though, the two media drifted, and even video games calling themselves roleplaying games have little to do with their forbears, given both the capabilities of digital games in terms of graphics and gameplay as well as their limitations in terms of breadth and story. All this to say, when I see a claim that a video game is able to capture some of the feel of a good tabletop session, I perk up. This was the case with Esoteric Ebb.

Esoteric Ebb is not the first video game I’ve seen making this claim; we covered Wildermyth a ways back, and I appreciated the way that game tried to incorporate emergent storytelling and feel more like a sandbox than other games in the tactical RPG genre. Esoteric Ebb is perhaps not as different as Wildermyth; it’s built strongly around the mechanics and tropes of another (admittedly very good) video game. However, its writing and the understanding of the TTRPG medium that that writing demonstrates still end up making Esoteric Ebb, in my view at least, a must-play.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Breaking Down Random Generation

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Random character generation is an artifact of older editions of D&D, with the OSR and other throwback movements embracing it wholeheartedly. In the present day both old-school D&D derivatives as well as the range of games derived from WFRP’s take on d100 mechanics are still locked in with random generation, with the classic ‘roll 3d6 six times in order’ being both common mechanic and a meme. The problem with random generation in this way is that putting characters arbitrarily at different places on a probability distribution, in effect making characters better or worse based on nothing but luck, is a pretty poor way to accomplish the ultimate goal of random character generation, which is to introduce variability to the type of characters that players ultimately play.

In reviewing how a number of different games handle random character generation, specifically random attribute generation, I can’t help but think that these designers know that players don’t like random generation and don’t actually like rolling bad characters. It’s widely known what the most common response to early D&D’s attribute requirements for certain character classes was: Cheat! It therefore stands to reason that games which still commit to random generation either create a system that employs randomness more deliberately, or create a system which softens the blow of the dice.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 3/7/2026

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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 3/27/2026

  1. Traveller: The Core Expeditions
  2. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
  3. BattleTech: Force Manual: Mercenaries
  4. Traveller: Vehicle Handbook Update 2026
  5. Storypath Ultra Core Manual

Top News Stories

D&D 2024 is now officially called ‘5.5e’: I suppose this is news.

From the Archives

At this time in 2018, designer Fraser Simons was kickstarting his follow-up to The Veil, Cyberpunk FitD game Hack the Planet. While perhaps not the most ambitious extension of the mechanics from Blades in the Dark, the game took the setting building and storytelling present in The Veil and expanded it, envisioning a dystopian future city where the residents were only protected from the ravages of climate change by mitigations from massive corporations. The PCs, of course, are out to change that. From the archives this week is The Independents: Hack the Planet.

Discussion of the Week

I wish it was easier to go broad in this hobby: It’s good to occasionally remind people, as I like to say, that there’s a wide world of games out there, and at a wide range of price points. Fate, one of the cornerstones of 2010s indie, is Pay-What-You-Want. All of the ‘Without Number’ games have free versions. Many, many more expensive trad games have starter sets, which we are big proponents of here. And this isn’t even getting into things like Bundle of Holding, massive itch.io bundles, and other (completely legal) secondary markets. When accounting for inflation, AD&D 1e cost $180…we don’t have to accept “sticker shock” as a reason to devalue game designers’ work.

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.

Articles, Level One Wonk

Five Tiers of RPG Publishing

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Hasbro’s annual earnings came out this week, so I took a look. It is truly staggering how much Wizards of the Coast has changed the company since they were acquired; when looking at unadjusted earnings the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Games division was the only one that turned a profit in the entire company. Not only that, but Wizards is responsible for roughly 47% of the entire company’s revenue and over 90% of all revenue growth over the last year. That’s over 2 billion dollars in revenue; roughly $1.7 billion is attributable to Magic: The Gathering and the rest is attributable to Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons is obviously the largest, most popular roleplaying game, but $400 million in revenue is staggering. If this was all books, it would be eight million copies. It’s not all books of course; one of the reasons D&D is growing (though perhaps not as fast as Magic is) is the continued expansion of digital services like D&D Beyond, products with high margins and minimal variable costs. This is the future, not because it makes for a better gaming experience, but because it makes for a better balance sheet.

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