Category Archives: Articles

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2026

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! It’s spring now, which means I’m spending more time outside riding my bike and less time writing. That’s why this post is going up on a Thursday! Okay, that’s…not entirely true (it’s also not entirely false). The post is going up on a Thursday also because I didn’t want to post on April Fool’s Day. Also also, some really cool stuff went live on Wednesday, and if I posted too early I wouldn’t get to talk about it. In addition to all of the campaigns below, Orbital Blues Month started on April 1st on Backerkit, and there are a bunch of neat campaigns supporting that particular game of sad space cowboys. It’s all underpinned by Outlaws and Corporations, a new Orbital Blues first-party supplement.

With that, let’s get into it. The major campaigns section is a bit negative this month; as it turns out money corrupts, and that’s how we get proprietary apps and wholly unnecessary D&D 5e money-grabs. Luckily, Pelgrane Press and The Gauntlet also come to the rescue with two big and worthy campaigns.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

PAX East 2026: A Tabletop Roundup

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I returned, once again, to the halls of PAX East this weekend! When I wasn’t just wandering around, reading RPG books, or running sessions at Games on Demand (two sessions each of A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase and Fabula Ultima this time) I was sitting down to try games out. In case you’re attending PAX East 2026 Sunday Edition, I’ve provided the booth numbers you can find these games at to peruse them, but by and large I expect this will be something for folks to follow up on afterwards – so please peruse the many fine and elegantly crafted links to these fine and elegantly crafted games!

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2

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Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.

RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing

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There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.

Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 3/14/2026

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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 3/14/2026

  1. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
  2. Traveller: The Core Expeditions
  3. Outgunned Superheroes
  4. Public Access
  5. Traveller: Vehicle Handbook Update 2026

From the Archives

About this week seven years ago, we started taking a look at stories very closely, a thread that would wind its way across many articles and musings from then to now. From the archives this week is Level One Wonk: Narrative, a discussion of prescriptive and emergent narrative and likely the first time we reference simulation video games like RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress.

Discussion of the Week

Apologia for plain paragraphs: Sam Sorensen wrote a blogpost comparing heavily broken up, bulleted game text with minimally formatted prose, and based on the quote replies (linked above) it perhaps did not go the way that was intended. Reading through the post there’s two intermingled arguments: That RPG designers do bullets and secondary formatting poorly (likely true, requires bringing receipts) and that minimally formatted prose is better than highly structured bullets (non-falsifiable, controversial). As usual, the real answer is almost certainly to use both, and to learn the underlying layout skills that allow you to make both prose and lists as usable as possible.

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

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.