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, 2023

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival! It’s April, which means two things. First, we’re done with ZineQuest for real; there are no more event stragglers (though an odd zine will pop up from time to time) and we’re back to “normal” campaigns. Second, April is my birthday month. Readers, I’m feeling old, I’m feeling it in my bones. Looking at campaigns this month has gotten me all crotchety. I will admit, I’m turning 36 and that’s not actually old; I’d still be ‘the kid’ in many gaming groups I’ve played with in the past. What has happened, though, is that in advance of my birthday a lot of the Kickstarter campaigns have got me complaining. Nothing makes you feel older than complaining about stuff you have no control over.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren’t that many interesting campaigns live right now in the wake of ZineQuest. There are plenty of 5e filler modules, which I don’t care about, and a lot of model files for semi-pornographic minis, which is weird and a bit disconcerting. In my usual market, though, new original RPGs, there are only a few of interest and weirdly a bumper crop of ones I can’t bring myself to be interested in or write about. It’s made me realize it may be another good time to go over the crowdfunding market, and ways that the crowdfunding market could be more useful for project backers.

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Articles, System Split

System Split: Campaign Managers

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Roleplaying games are an information-heavy endeavor. Before the game, you need to sketch out your setting and initial conceit. During the game you need to track what your characters do and who they encounter. Between sessions you need to prep and see what’s changed. How do you keep all that straight? For years, the standard answer was a spiral-bound notebook, maybe a binder if your notes got particularly voluminous. And while that answer still works, it’s 2023. We can use a little technology.

Somewhere between a completely analog down-in-the-basement experience and a session run entirely on a virtual tabletop is the use case of the campaign manager. Campaign managers don’t aim to run your game or change your environment, but instead serve to provide structure for both your game notes and the setting material you present to your players. What makes campaign managers different from simple note-taking software is that ability to share and collaborate with your players, which helps extend your table into the setting as you’re envisioning and creating it. If it sounds good, it’s because I think it is good; I’ve used the campaign manager Obsidian Portal in the past and it’s very likely that I will start using one of the sites reviewed in this article in the near future. That said, a campaign manager is another tool in the GM’s already bursting toolbox, and reviewing the campaign managers out there fairly starts with a question of need.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

“We Didn’t Touch Dice the Whole Session!”

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Role-playing games are games which involve role-playing, and that would only be a tautology if the category was consistently named. As it is, plenty of games termed RPGs can run just fine without any role-play to speak of, and plenty of role-play described in so-called RPGs lacks the structure which would allow it to fit the loosest definition of a game. Whether not an RPG is a game or involves role-play, it is certainly a product, and perceived experience sells a product as well as if not better than the actual experience that the product delivers. There is no other medium where the audience exclaims, quite positively, that they did not in any way engage with the experience as delivered to them.

When gamers state, often with happiness, that they went through a whole session without touching their dice, this is a tacit declaration that they did not engage with the game they were playing as intended; if the game did not intend for the players to roll many dice, or had no dice at all, such a declaration wouldn’t typically be made. This is not debatable, the experience of not engaging with the rules is special only insofar as the rules are there to be engaged. As much as it’s clear that the game isn’t being played as intended, what we cannot do in a blanket way is state this is a bad thing. RPGs are designed to deliver specific experiences and many of them, especially more rules-intensive games, deliver multiple specific experiences depending on the fraction of the game you’re engaging with. Looking at what players are or aren’t doing with a specific game requires which mechanics they are or are not engaging with, as well as what they’re doing in their game which isn’t in the rules and is done without touching any dice at all.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

How the Wonk GMs: Session Prep

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Welcome back to How the Wonk GMs! Last time we had a bit of an introduction, framing the GMing experience by talking about campaigns and how one sets up for a campaign. Today, the discussion will be more specific, talking about how one gets ready to run a session. Later, I’m going to go into what I actually do in the GM’s chair, and what running a session looks like.

The one comment I got on the last post in this series was that it was vague, and I concede that. Here’s the thing, though: After you frame up what kind of campaign you want to run, what conceits and systems would be fun for you, you want to keep it vague. An RPG campaign is not a novel, and when you’re setting everything up prior to play you want to leave as many doors open as possible. It is now, when you’re looking to set up an actual session that your players are going to show up to, that you can start closing the doors and settling on what you actually want the game to look like.

I call this session prep, but in the real world with schedule breakdowns, cliffhangers, and everything taking just a bit longer than you’d expect, this might be more of an ‘adventure prep’ given that some of these ‘sessions’ will last two or three. For the most part, then, we’re going to be talking in units of plot rather than units of time. For each of these units of plot, you’re going to be figuring out a problem statement, a problem space, and then a problem resolution. When you’re prepping, though, you start with the problem resolution from last time, use that to write your new problem statement, and then use the new problem statement and your existing prep to define a problem space.

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Articles, Editorial

Cyberpunk RED: Black Chrome Review

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We don’t review a lot of supplements here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. From a pragmatic standpoint, there’s a lot less that a review can tell you about a supplement that will affect your purchasing decision than with a full game. For today’s subject, Black Chrome for Cyberpunk Red, that’s certainly true. We all knew Black Chrome would be the ‘stuff’ supplement, and even if there hadn’t been some grumbling about the ‘stuff’ or lack thereof in the core rules the ‘stuff’ supplement in a Cyberpunk game is almost always a must-buy, if only due to the association of the cyberpunk genre with gear porn. On the other hand, in some cases there’s a bit more to say about supplements. Cyberpunk Red is slowly working up to being a full-on RPG ecosystem just like Cyberpunk 2020 was; the earlier game had supplements from gear catalogs to corporate profiles to location gazetteers to big plot books like the Firestorm series. One consequence of this, perhaps an unintended one, is that Cyberpunk 2020 played quite differently when all the supplements were in play than when it was just the core book. While that’s neither unique to Cyberpunk nor particularly unexpected, it had a significant role in the reception of Cyberpunk Red, where the game in its early single book state was being judged against a Cyberpunk 2020 which already had literally dozens of supplements released. It stands to reason, then, that Black Chrome would be the first full-sized rules supplement for Cyberpunk Red. Black Chrome is an homage to the supplements which changed Cyberpunk 2020 the most and the fastest, the Chromebooks.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2023

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for March! It’s a bit of a weird time, early March. ZineQuest is ‘finished’, but with campaigns starting as late as yesterday there’s still a bit of backlog to dig through. Meanwhile, the bigger, more traditional campaigns are starting to spin up, but they’re often lost in the shuffle.

The campaigns we’re covering this month reflect that reality. There are 25 Zine campaigns here, which I will do my best to sell to you in a sentence or two. I didn’t have to have a hard cutoff like in the middle of the month, but most of the Zines that didn’t make the cutoff were just material for 5e that I don’t have the energy to care about. Such is life.

Here at the beginning of March it’s also worthwhile to reflect on ZineQuest as it is now, here in 2023. Based on numbers, there’s no doubt in my mind that this year was a return to form compared to the misstep of moving the event to August. That said, there’s an enthusiasm gap that seems to have formed between 2021 and now, and it’s in large part due to what happened in 2022. The number of people tracking and providing data on ZineQuest has withered significantly, meaning I don’t have a project count, funding level, or success rate easily at hand to compare to last year or the year before. Based on our August 2022 coverage, this year was significantly better than last year’s Kickstarter’s outing, but I don’t know how it compares to the combined total of the 2022 events, and that’s important because of what happened to Zine Month.

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Articles, Meet the Campaign

Meet the Campaign: Bigger Bastionland

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If you’ve been around the site for a while, you may know that one of my favorite games in the old-school sphere is Electric Bastionland. Chris McDowall’s game of electropunk weird fantasy is a high watermark in the world of gameable settings, creating the city of Bastion as a thematically consistent setting which still has nearly endless ability to be interpreted, customized, and hacked by players of the game. A city existing right after the discovery of electricity, it is a huge, chaotic place filled with strange beings and objects, unmappable boroughs and streets, and numerous factions, councils, and unions constantly at odds with each other. If that’s not enough, the Underground below, Deep Country surrounding, and the Living Stars above all serve to create a weird world to get lost in.

Electric Bastionland as a game is designed to use as few rules as possible to get everything working, and therefore allow each gaming group flexibility when it comes to which elements of the setting they want to nail down. That said, the game also includes a very clever piece of worldbuilding tech in the form of Borough creation. For a Borough in the city, or an area of the Deep Country or section of the Underground, there are rules for mapping out the key transit routes through the area. These mechanics create a segment of Bastion with a great number of locations and hooks, and one Borough provides more than enough information to start the game.

What I find, though, is that if you want to use Electric Bastionland for a longer game, you’re going to want more than one Borough. It’s quite possible to prep one Borough at a time, let the map expand organically as the characters wander. That said, many people are going to want some form of larger map. While Bastion as a city naturally resists mapping, I think there’s still value in building out a higher level diagram, something that tells you where the bounds of the city are. That’s why I’ve been experimenting with a game creation framework that I call Bigger Bastionland.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: ZineQuest Check-In

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Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! ZineQuest is all the way back in full swing this year, and I have definitively lost track of everything going on so far. According to Kickstarter there are 158 ZineQuest projects live as of this writing (live, not total, live), and sorry, but I can’t summarize all of them. I can’t.

What I am going to do is show you fifty zines that I thought looked cool. We’ve got everything here: Llamas, procedural generation, ghost porn, bowling, and of course, pirates. This group also includes all of the zines I’ve personally backed so far from this ZineQuest, so you know there’s some good stuff in here. Like I did at the beginning of the month, I’ve divided the projects into three categories. There are full games, playable on their own, supplements of note, adventures and other materials for specific systems, and system agnostic gems, which should work with either any game or any game of a relevant genre. Without further ado, here are fifty more projects of note from ZineQuest 2023.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

How the Wonk GMs: Intro and Campaign Prep

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If there’s one thing I’ve been asked to write about over the years, it’s what my home games actually look like. Not an imagined campaign, not a system hack, just how I run when it’s my friends, my ideas, and my time. Needless to say that’s not something that can be condensed to 2000 words, so instead I’m welcoming you, albeit temporarily, to ‘How the Wonk GMs’.

I’ve recently come off of a literally five year stint of GMing for my primary gaming group, and I have run a lot of different games in that time. Spending all this time in the GM’s chair has reminded me that I’m extremely lucky to have as engaged and curious a gaming group as I do…as well as the fact that breaks are good. While taking this break, though, I’m going to be trying to distill down my methods and madness into something approximating fit for public consumption.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2023

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Welcome back to the Crowdfunding Carnival! Now, it’s Thursday, which is a little unusual. I did this, though, for you, dear readers. You see, yesterday was the first day of ZineQuest, and a veritable torrent of zines hit my inbox around the time this article would have otherwise gone to post. That just won’t do, so I held off to pick through the wreckage for you. So now we have over 40 zines, and it’s been just one day! There are some other games too, and of course our second installment of the Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk fifth anniversary retrospective. Onward!

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