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.
For over twenty years, Fate has been a pillar in indie gaming. From its newsgroup origins in 2003 through its Kickstarter breakout in 2013 and on to today, Fate’s clever design and extensive modularity have kept it relevant to mechanics nerds and rules hackers and inspired designers and players alike. That said, Fate is a design for hackers above all others, and the popularity of systems as granular and mechanical as Fate has waned in favor of frameworks with fewer moving parts. Even Evil Hat Productions, publisher of Fate, is spending more development resources on publishing games like Apocalypse Keys and Blades in the Dark than it is on the Fate ecosystem. And it’s this context into which Umdaar bursts onto the scene.
Masters of Umdaar was originally published back in 2015 as one of the settings in Fate Worlds: Worlds Rise Up. In that original format, the setting was intended to use Fate Accelerated rules and allow for semi-random generation of character species and monsters to fit into its ‘planetary romance’ setting which read like a beautiful car crash of Star Wars and He-Man. The new Umdaar is much, much more than that original entry. Clocking in at over 450 pages and now using the more traditional skills-based Fate Core framework, Umdaar has evolved from a small setting guide to a full-fledged game, complete with its own set of completely new frameworks employing Fate’s usual building blocks of Aspects, Stunts, and Extras. Both the volume of content and number of new structures not seen (or only vaguely alluded to) in Fate Condensed or Fate Core is what solidifies Umdaar’s role in the Fate line-up: Fate’s current and primary worked example.
Character questionnaires aren’t new tech by any means; even before they started to be ingrained into character creation and session zero procedures, lists of key questions have been used extensively in TTRPGs to give players a starting point from where they could figure out who they wanted their character to be outside of mechanical determinants. In recent years, though, the character questionnaire has developed into a procedure all its own, with some interesting tech for making the process more specific to both TTRPGs in general and the given TTRPG a questionnaire was packaged with. One character questionnaire I’ve used recently, the persona generation questionnaire from the DIE RPG, is both powerful enough and generalizable enough that I want to break down what it does in an attempt to make writing a character questionnaire for your own session zero easier.
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close enough to GenCon to suck the air out of the room, it is close enough that most of the major publishers will wait a couple months before any big announcements, giving the little guys a chance for some more spotlight. We’re seeing it now and, as you’ll see later in the article, we saw it five years ago as well. With that said, let’s get into it. No major publishers this month, but we do have the newest campaign from one of the most successful singular designers going.
As readers of the site know, I’m a cyclist in addition to a gamer. I spend at least as much if not more time riding and working on my bikes as I do playing, reading, and writing about RPGs, and riding my bike is an integral part of how I get around and interact with my community. I’ve even written about RPGs and bicycles before, though in that article I was speaking more to how the economics and business models of the hobbies compare. There are also comparisons to be made about how one actually rides a bike compared to how they play a game, and while this analogy is imperfect it can provide some insight to how we both play games and engage in games discourse.
In RimWorld, the tech tree is the conceit which allows the game to work with its ‘societal drift’ conceit. Tribes of nearly cavemen, “modern” colonies, and ultra-tech feudal lords all coexist thanks to a set of technological ‘research projects’ which separate each colony by level of development. In our System Hack, we’re going to need the same tech tree conceit, but the underlying mechanics are going to be quite a bit different.
Before we go any further, I want to make sure you know that Cortex Prime is now available on DriveThruRPG. While digital versions of the game have been available before, you can now finally own a PDF version unfettered by a walled garden app which made the game significantly less accessible. With Cortex Prime finally available in the broader ecosystem, my hope is that there’s much more interest in this and a whole host of other projects using the system.
In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.
Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.
Economics is the study of resource allocation and management; behavioral economics is the study of how theoretical economics meets practical, human reality. The split between theory and practice is an entire subfield of economics, and arguably other disciplines benefit from the same thing. The broader study of the alignment of human decision making is called decision science, and it takes the P-Q charts of economics and amplifies them with psychology and game theory.
Tabletop roleplaying games are no strangers to decision science, both within and outside the context of playing the game itself. This week I was inspired to look back at one of the most influential recent schools of RPG theory thanks to the Taskerland review of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012by William J. White. The review starts with a reread of Ron Edwards’ essay System Does Matter in the context of the book, and restates the thesis of the essay more clearly than most commentators do nowadays: While good games come from good GMs and good players, better games come when those two are aligned with the right game mechanics and systems. This dovetails with notions of GNS and accusations of gameplay ‘incoherence’, but the issue, as the Taskerland review points out, is less with Edwards’ description than his prescription: Aim to play more narrowly aligned games with players who share your priorities.
Hobby games is a pretty broad field, with both upstarts like TTRPGs and trading card games as well as board and miniatures games which go back decades further. The whole field is brimming with designers taking their ideas about set, setting, and mechanics and committing them to cardboard and plastic, creating new and weird accessories or just sticking with humble dice and meeples. When you combine the recent renaissance in hobby board games (driven, like TTRPGs, by Kickstarter and the internet) with a few decades of family board games that everyone seems to have kicking around, there’s a lot of potential just sitting there.
TTRPGs are just as able to use weird, custom accessories as any board game, and in some cases all it takes is one designer with a weird idea to make something new. Where I think is the most fertile ground is the RPG mashup: taking accessories you may already have in your game cabinet and making new games with them. The hobby has figured out this works great with Jenga, and as you’ll read about in a moment, someone is trying it with the classic family (dis)favorite Monopoly. As far as other games, the sky’s the limit…but there is an extra layer of challenge involved with taking an existing game and both changing the experience while preserving the original bones.
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.
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