All posts by Aaron Marks

Gaming for nearly twenty-five years and writing about it for over fifteen, I've always had a strong desire to find different and interesting things in the hobby. In addition to my writing at Cannibal Halfling Gaming, you can follow me on Bluesky at @levelonewonk.bsky.social and read my fiction and personal reflections at newwonkmedia.com.

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2026

April 2, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

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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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2

March 27, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

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

March 19, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

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, Level One Wonk

Breaking Down Random Generation

March 12, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

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, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2026

March 4, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We’re wrapping up Zine Month, but despite Backerkit’s more delineated timeline there are still some straggler campaigns here and there. We’ve also seen the big campaign space heat up, as not only were there several notable campaigns during Zine Month (looking at you, Blades 68) but we have big announcements at the end as well, including at least one out-of-nowhere success. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: Zine Month 2026

February 18, 2026 Aaron Marks Leave a comment

Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re more than halfway through February, and Zine Month is still going strong. As I covered a couple of weeks ago, Kickstarter’s Zine Quest and Backerkit’s Zinetopia are the key leaders of the month, with Kickstarter’s event currently a little more than double the size of Backerkit’s. Still, you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t check out both.

Overall funding rates are high, with the combined total being north of 70%. Still, there are a number of projects looking to still cross the finish line, and some of them are certainly deserving of more attention. For this mid-month check-in on our zine events, I’m going to focus solely on projects that are still looking for that final push before February is out.

Before we get into it, I’d like to highlight a few non-zine projects: Blades ‘68, the groovy supplement to Blades in the Dark, is campaigning on Backerkit and it looks smashing, baby, yeah! Over on Kickstarter, Free League is bringing the Trudvang setting to Dragonbane, and Green Ronin is campaigning Mutants and Masterminds 4e. Definitely some cool stuff going on, but let’s stay on target, and try to get some zines printed. Every campaign below isn’t quite funded yet, so if any of these sound interesting, consider throwing a few dollars towards the designers. They’ll notice and appreciate your contribution much more than the big guys above.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Five Tiers of RPG Publishing

February 11, 2026 Aaron Marks 29 Comments

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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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2026

February 4, 2026 Aaron Marks 3 Comments

Welcome back to another Crowdfunding Carnival! It’s not just any Crowdfunding Carnival, though…it’s February. And that means it’s time for Zine Month! And this is a big deal, because for the first time since 2022, it’s actually time for Zine Month, not just Zine Quest. Backerkit has stepped into the ring and it looks like they’re going to stand toe to toe with…wait, I’ve just gotten word that Backerkit’s Zinetopia event is capped at 63 projects? Meaning that if we extrapolate from Kickstarter’s typical Zine Quest growth profile they’ll end up being around 30% of the size? Hm. Oh dear.

It’s not a bad showing, to be clear; 63 non-Kickstarter projects is more than we’ve ever seen from the alternate Zine Event folks since Kickstarter made the confusing decision to move Zine Quest to August. But ultimately there were more Zine Quest projects live even by February 2nd, and unlike Backerkit Kickstarter will let you tag any zine project started in February as Zine Quest, so we’re likely to have well over 200 projects by February’s end, if not even more. It is notable, though, that while the number of projects live in the first week of Zine Month is similar this year and last (around 150), the split is around 60/40 Kickstarter and BackerKit, meaning that a lot of people took Backerkit’s rival Zinetopia event seriously.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 1

January 29, 2026 Aaron Marks 1 Comment

It’s time to move from theory to practice. As we move on to the next stage of this System Hack, I’m going to start taking the elements we discussed in the first set of articles and make them into actual game elements. For today, that means character creation. When we discussed characters for this System Hack, we landed on some pretty straightforward prime sets: Attributes, Skills, and Distinctions. As such, we’re going to lock in our Attributes and Skills. For Distinctions, the number I’d want to write is perhaps a bit high to cover comprehensively in one article, but I am going to lock in what the three Distinctions each character has are, what they do mechanically, and how they’ll be roughly categorized.

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Articles, Editorial

Curseborne: Onyx Path’s next dark world

January 22, 2026 Aaron Marks 2 Comments

Instead of coming up with some TTRPG pablum for an introduction, I’m going to cut right to the chase: At first I thought it was really weird that Onyx Path Publishing released Curseborne. If you don’t look too closely, the game appears to ape World of Darkness, an entire fork of which Onyx Path is the licensee. The five lineages are clearly aligned to Vampire (Hungry), Werewolf (Primal), Mage (Sorcerer), Demon (Outcasts), and Wraith (Dead). And even if the game is in fact different, why did Onyx Path decide to make their own supernatural horror game now?

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