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.
Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 4

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Not everything goes according to plan in the dark future. Not every lie will be detected, not every trap will be disarmed. And when things don’t go an edgerunner’s way, there’s no time to get mad…only even.

When we last left our ragtag group of highway robbers, they had been fired upon with some pretty hefty hardware. The hitters responsible? Hired by Jayhawk, and sent home down two and with the remaining two lucky to be alive. Clearly, the information Olga had stumbled onto was not anything Jayhawk wanted getting out. The firepower, though, was an open question. The drone looked an awful lot like the one which was seen getting passed through an Arasaka loading dock. The hitters had the control rig in their van, and they said they rented the thing. …Rented? Bubbles was able to hack the control rig and put a backdoor in the drone. Not enough to control it remotely, but enough to gather some data and maybe tell where it called home.

Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 4 →
Articles, Editorial

Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Review

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RPG licensing. RPG licensing never changes. In some ways it’s amazing that it took until 2021 to get an honest Fallout tabletop RPG, given the original game’s mechanical dalliance with GURPS and other design elements borrowed heavily from pen and paper games of the time. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until Fallout 4 that the series turned back to its roots and, with the help of Modiphius, got an official licensed port. Fallout the Role-Playing Game leans heavily on the most recent iteration of the video game series; both the mechanics and the setting borrow heavily and almost exclusively from Bethesda’s Fallout 4 for source material. Comparing this game to a Bethesda game ends up being quite apt, though; like most of the modern software titles released by this game’s licensor, Fallout the Role-Playing Game shows a lot of promise and appears at first glance to be ported well into its new mechanics…but in reality it’s hampered by a raft of grave unforced errors in editing and product management. So is it endearingly buggy, or is it hopeless? Let’s take a look.

Continue reading Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Review →
Articles, Level One Wonk

Building Characters From Archetypes

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Everyone knows what a character class is. From D&D to Diablo and from Final Fantasy to Facebook personality tests, the notion of starting your RPG adventure with a Fighter, Thief, Mage, or Cleric has transcended D&D and TTRPGs in general to become a nerd pop culture staple. In the modern TTRPG hobby, though, classes are but one way to present a set of archetypes from which to build a character.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Kickstarter Wonk: August, 2021

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Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for August! Now, you might be looking down the headings and notice we only have seven games and an honorable mention. Well, that’s because, whether you know it or not, you got way more Kickstarter content this month than usual! Check out my preview of Dreampunk, which is still live for another ten days…really neat game using imagery cards to drive play through a dream world. Then you can read Seamus’s quickstart review of Avatar Legends, the new game from Magpie Games! That brings us up to nine, but you can count Avatar Legends twice if you also read the Meet the Party Seamus put together. Beyond those, though, all eight below are all worth checking out, and should help you ease the pain of missing this year’s superspreader event GenCon. 

Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: August, 2021 →
Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Generic RPGs: What’s Out There

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There’s a world of games out there, but they still just scratch the surface. Maybe your favorite book series or movie hasn’t caught the eye of anyone making RPG adaptations. Maybe you have your own spin on a popular genre that you just can’t pull off with an existing game. Or maybe you just want to run something wild and straight from your own head. No matter the reason, if a game off the shelf doesn’t quite do it for you, you’re looking for a generic RPG.

We’ve talked a bit about generic RPGs before, reviewing Cortex Prime and Everywhen, discussing Fate, and even using GURPS as an example text for looking at how to use generic games. This article is less about what to do with generic games, though, and more about how to find the right one for you. We’re going to discuss three broad types of generic games: Engines which are designed to model as many situations with as few rules as possible, Codexes which use a simple base ruleset and then expand it with a wide library of additional mechanics, and Chassis which take more traditional setting-driven RPGs, strip out the specific parts, and then (hopefully) build back up to something useful. The ‘Chassis’ generic RPG is the most common and popular, but the other two design modes may very well have more to offer the prospective game master.

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Articles, The Independents

The Independents: Dreampunk

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Role-playing games can be a perfect venue for the surreal. Exploring a strange world that has its own incomprehensible rules is often better done in games, where players have the opportunity to poke, prod, and learn, rather than being stuck in an author’s or director’s interpretation. That said, most games that embrace surreality these days embrace a designer’s vision, and are still one possible experience in a world that could be a whole lot weirder. Enter Dreampunk, a game currently being funded on Kickstarter. Dreampunk is a game that borrows heavily from the mechanics of Belonging Outside Belonging and, by extension, Powered by the Apocalypse. What makes Dreampunk unique, though, is the use of card drawing mechanics not only to pace the game, but to develop the very reality of the setting.

Continue reading The Independents: Dreampunk →
Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3

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The life of an edgerunner is a tough one. And when you’re slumming it in Hydropolis there isn’t nearly as much work to go around as in glamorous Night City. Sometimes you have to pursue every lead you’re given. And sometimes, if your name is Jacob Capone, those leads include your ex-girlfriend.

When we last saw our merry band of corporate sycophants, they had followed up two leads from Biotechnica which led to improperly disseminated Jayhawk Agritech…tech. Biotechnica was pleased with Mason’s work so far, and now all of CabbageCorp had some money to spend. It was time to follow some leads, take some downtime, and most importantly, go shopping.

Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3 →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/10/2021

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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 7/10/2021

  1. WFRP – The Horned Rat
  2. Trinity Continuum: Under Alien Skies
  3. Trails of Ash and Bone
  4. Soulbound: Steam and Steel
  5. SCP the Tabletop RPG

Top News Stories

A Tale of Two Cons: Essen Spiel, one of if not the largest board game trade show in the world, has officially announced they are mandating either proof of immunization or wearing a mask to attend the con. At nearly the same time, Gen Con, one of if not the largest role-playing game trade show in the world, has lifted their mask mandate. Although we in the US are celebrating easy access to vaccines and a drop in case numbers, the pandemic is not over, and the risk of Gen Con becoming a superspreader event is not overstated. Good on the Essen Spiel staff for putting the health and safety of their attendees first.

Discussion of the Week

Why Dungeons?: We know the RPG form has bloomed fractally into a million different genres, moods, and ways to play, but modern TTRPGs started with some dungeons, and some dragons. And out of the two of those, only one is guaranteed to show up. This Reddit thread has some interesting discussions on early RPG history, roots of the dungeon in Tolkien, and some later attempts to ‘explain’ dungeon ecology, like Earthdawn.

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

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Kickstarter Wonk: July, 2021

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Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for July! Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of games being campaigned out there this summer. You may be wondering why I don’t have ten this month, if there were more than ten to choose from. Well, I see two potential reasons. First, even with the delays from COVID, we’re entering GenCon season. GenCon season means people worried about *selling* games are running to Kickstarter, producing dozens of campaigns with that two-character automatic disqualification: 5E. Don’t get me wrong, these games might be perfectly fine, but they aren’t original games, so they fall outside my criteria. Beyond that, a number of the games out in the Kickstarter aether this month were… well, not great. I’m going to tend to not cover games which use some of their precious campaign wordcount to tell me they “use a dice-rolling mechanic”. Oh brother. Fear not, though! These eight campaigns are worth reading. Are they worth spending your hard-earned cash? You’ll only know if you read past the jump.

Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: July, 2021 →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/3/2021

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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 7/3/2021

  1. Trails of Ash and Bone
  2. Soulbound: Stars and Scales
  3. Soulbound: Steam and Steel
  4. SCP the Tabletop RPG
  5. Mythic Babylon

Discussion of the Week

Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: RPGs are a game of information asymmetry, and generally the GM knows when things might go bad. This comes through in a common refrain: Are you sure you want to do that? Over on Reddit there was a lively discussion about the worst (best?) occurrences that came from a player being faced with the dreaded question and still answering ‘yes’.

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