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: March, 2022

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Step right up, step right up! The Crowdfunding Carnival is continuing for March, and we’ve got a doozy of a month to look at. In the wake of Zine Month, where are all those dollars going? And how was Zine Month, anyway? Seamus hit the games but I’ll be hitting the numbers, comparing Zine Month with ZineQuests of years past and seeing if we can’t draw a few conclusions.

Like last month, the quantitative part of the Crowdfunding Carnival comes from a start-of-month snapshot done the Monday before the article goes live. While this can’t capture every campaign that goes down over the timeframe, it at least gives us an idea of where the funding needles are pointing for Kickstarter, Gamefound, and Indiegogo. And for March, the needles are pointing up. There is about $400,000 more funding in play at the start of March than there was at the start of February, and over twice as many projects. And while this snapshot doesn’t give us a whole story, both Zine Month and some general pickup coming out of the post-holiday slump can share the credit for this uplift.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

When The Game Blows Up

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You have a great idea for a new campaign. You explain it to your group, and everyone’s on board. Session Zero goes great, it seems like everyone has made interesting characters and is totally bought in to the premise. Then you start playing. For whatever reason, things just aren’t hitting the same way that everyone thought. Then comes the big inciting action. This will drive everyone to really dive in, right? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe everyone’s looking across the table awkwardly. Maybe someone gets upset, maybe not. Whatever happened, the game blew up, and now it’s time to pick up the pieces.

When most of the hobby assumes that you’ll pick one game and play it forever, there’s not a lot said about the risks of trying something new. Even among those inveterate RPG collectors with four dozen different systems in their bookshelf, there were never that many games that were really *out there* until recently…and even now, the vast majority of games sold hew to a common template. So, when the range of experiences and expectations is fairly narrow, you have to be prepared for what happens when you step outside of those experiences and expectations and something unpleasant happens.

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Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 9

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The big day had come, and Hydropolis was feeling the heat. With the Future of the Midwest conference in full swing, every edgerunner in the city was looking over their shoulder at the corporate operatives and East Coast tourists trying to scope out the action. For CabbageCorp, though, the Future of the Midwest was looking shaky. While local agricorps like Biotechnica, Continental Brands, and Petrochem had been snubbed from the agenda, Jayhawk Agritech got the keynote slot with Dr. William Squires. Or at least that’s what the team thought.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Pacing Problems

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How fast do you burn through a storyline? If you’re like me, sometimes that core conflict is approaching a climax halfway through what you thought was your campaign. Or, if you’re like me at a different point in time, you find your players have cracked the advancement mechanics on the cool new system you wanted to try and now the power curve is shooting upwards, taking the storyline in places you weren’t ready for it to go. Whether it’s from game mechanics or your own writing, it’s easy for a GM to find themselves with a pacing problem.

There are a few issues with figuring out how to pace a role-playing campaign that don’t appear in other media. The first one is simply that other media have it way easier. It might be challenging to write a novel or direct a movie, but that author or director has complete control over how fast or slow events progress. When you’re GMing a game, with players staring back at you and wondering what’s going to happen next, that control is illusory. The second is that many of the tricks we’re taught in interactive media, like video games, either don’t translate or translate poorly back to the tabletop. Once again, a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s more than one person playing and setting the clock.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: The Kickoff

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Step right up, step right up! We’re changing the focus of Kickstarter Wonk and needed an equally dorky name! That’s right, Crowdfunding Carnival is the new, improved, and expanded version of Kickstarter Wonk, looking further across the crowdfunding world to bring you the latest and greatest in homegrown and original TTRPGs. For this kickoff article, though, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the TTRPG crowdfunding landscape and why it looks the way it looks.

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Articles, Editorial

The One Ring Review

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So here it is. After a whole bunch of hubbub and more angry Tweeting than you can shake a stick at, The One Ring has been released. And what does that get us? The One Ring, Second Edition, is the official licensed roleplaying game of The Lord of the Rings, and is the jewel of the crown of Sophisticated Games, a company you’ve likely never heard of because all they do is hold intellectual property. Sophisticated Games is the root cause of every kerfluffle about this particular game, because they decided to hang Cubicle 7 out to dry back in 2019.

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Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 8

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Nothing gets you in a productive mood like being in the crosshairs. Thanks in no small part to an insider trading scheme that was very ‘player character’ in its execution, Hydropolis is getting attention across the continent, attention that it may very well not want. For the employees of CabbageCorp, that means that it’s time to tie up loose ends…preferably before the tourists have bigger guns than they do.

When we last left our meddlesome mercs, they had placated Vlad’s boss with a promise of insider trading. The deal went wrong in the Russian Mob’s favor, and soon the whole world was wondering what was going on in this little corner of Kansas. The team also followed up on scientist/pervert Michael Forsythe, and in addition to helping ban him from the con scene they found themselves wondering what was going on in the upper floors of Jayhawk Agritech.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse Into The Vault: Wildermyth

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Role-playing games and video games came of age around the same time. While D&D was published in 1974, the very first attempts to emulate D&D with a computer came in 1975; Dungeon and DND were written for mainframe systems like the PDP-10 and PLATO, though they were unlicensed and never saw commercial sales. The first licensed D&D video game came in 1982, and it paved the way not only for later licensed games like the SSI ‘Gold Box’ titles and Baldur’s Gate but also virtually the entire video game RPG genre, from Final Fantasy to The Elder Scrolls to Diablo. 

Role-playing video games were fairly direct emulations of rulesets like D&D early on, but as the software became more sophisticated they played more to their strengths. Current titles have gorgeous graphics and complex storylines, but narratively are mostly static affairs. Meanwhile, tabletop roleplaying games have always had the flexibility of a human GM to give them more breadth and a personal touch that video games couldn’t match. So what happens when a digital game designer tries to make their video game feel more like a tabletop RPG? You get Wildermyth.

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Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 1/8/2022

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 4/8/2022

  1. Ascendant
  2. The One Ring
  3. Commercial Fantasy Art Subscription 2022
  4. Root: The Roleplaying Game [Bundle]
  5. Twilight:2000 Core Set

Top News Stories

Zinequest 4 moved to August: After a confusing tweet from a third party, Kickstarter Game Director Anya Combs made the (mostly) official announcement that Zinequest 2022 would be moving to August to coincide with GenCon. As a note, if you ever wonder why companies and their representatives refuse to make official comments on things like this prior to an announcement, this shows exactly why.

Discussion of the Week

So, What To Do About ZineQuest?: Following on the heels of Kickstarter’s blockchain announcement last month, the news that ZineQuest would be moved – barely weeks before it traditionally begins, throwing off plans, and now coinciding with GenCon which many fear will cut down on the number of eyeballs small creators will be able to draw – has creators redoubling their conversations on what their future with Kickstarter will be. It’s a complicated issue, but in the immediate future there are efforts to rally the community to take ZineQuest’s February slot. ZINE MONTH helmed by Feral Indie Studio seems promising; we’re already lurking in its Discord (with more than 400 members as of this writing) to see how things progress. 

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Editorial

The Trouble With Kickstarter

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In December of 2021, Kickstarter made an announcement that it was going to develop a new platform for crowdfunding, using blockchain technology. The announcement received a significant negative response, given the negative environmental impacts of current blockchain applications and the widespread use of blockchain tech, through both cryptocurrencies and non-fungible token (NFT) schemes, to commit fraud. It’s a fair response, though given how little the Kickstarter announcement said, perhaps not entirely warranted.

That all said, the end state of Kickstarter’s blockchain plans don’t particularly matter. Whether or not the new platform comes to fruition, whether or not it uses less energy-intensive proof-of-stake software, whether or not people leave the platform, these are in the long run irrelevant. What the announcement should have revealed to anyone who felt strongly enough to leave the platform over it is that the TTRPG hobby has let Kickstarter become infrastructure. Leaving Kickstarter sounds great in a tweet, but ultimately doing so is going to be tough for many of the creators who, without the company, would have never gotten off the ground.

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