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 12/18/2021

1. Hostile Rules
2. Root: the Roleplaying Game (bundle)
3. The One Ring Core Rules
4. Ascendant
5. Shadowrun: Anarchy 2050

Top News Stories

Asmodee Acquired: As reported this past September, Asmodee owner/investor PAI Partners has been looking for a buyer for the board game company and found one in Embracer Group, which controls such studios as Gearbox and THQ Nordic. While it’s still unclear what exactly will become of Asmodee, arguably its future is brighter within a media conglomerate than it would be in the hands of a purely financial buyer.

Wizards of the Coast removes racial alignments and lore from nine D&D books: In the most recent attempt to right wrongs related to elements of D&D like racial alignment, Wizards of the Coast went back and, mostly via errata, removed mention of these elements from several core sourcebooks. Further investigation of the edits saw that they were somewhat shortsighted; one particularly galling change was changing the word ‘madness’ to ‘insanity’ in certain spell descriptions, doing nothing but indicating that WotC didn’t understand that both word choices were problematic in their own way. While Wizards deserves a half-nod for conceding the problems with D&D material, it would have been better if they hired someone who actually understood what the problem was instead of half-heartedly deleting a bunch of stuff.

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

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 12/11/2021

1. The One Ring Core Rules
2. The Third Imperium
3. Trinity Continuum: Assassins (Pre-Order)
4. WFRP: Empire in Ruins Companion
5. Sabbat: The Black Hand

Top News Stories

Kickstarter will ‘move its crowdfunding platform to blockchain’: In a confounding press release, Kickstarter announced that it is ‘hatching a standalone company to build a crowdfunding system’ built around blockchain tech provided by Celo, and then begin to employ the company’s tech ‘when it’s ready’. While RPG Twitter utterly blew up over this announcement, the announcement itself means little, and Kickstarter’s own, longer press release has almost as little information. Whatever venture Kickstarter is funding will be initially separate from the site, and the marketing language is already distancing the company from any commitment to use the tech (‘When it’s ready’). Beyond that, the claim that the change will take place ‘completely behind the scenes’ belies more apocalyptic projections like a Kickstarter token or that the site will start tokenizing projects (though the Kickstarter release and its talk of ‘rewarding’ creators and users is somewhat contradictory to this). Blockchain is a buzzword more than a viable data technology right now, so announcements such as this one are likely 50/50 between a move of substance and juicing the company’s valuation for an IPO (which would admittedly be worse for small projects than a blockchain). While we don’t think this announcement is as bad as some would say, and we would recommend not bailing on live projects (it’s really the small creators that would get hurt), it’s a real stretch to call something so information-free and so nakedly intended to appeal to investors ‘good’.

Discussion of the Week

Your Expectations Are Too High: In addition to being one of the top threads on /r/RPG this week, this thread also takes direct aim at us when we were GMing games in high school. The OP is talking mostly about railroading; when a novice GM sees the game going a way they don’t want, they often try to tighten the reins. The discussion, though, expands a bit more into expectations versus reality, how players actually prep for and behave at sessions, and what are actually fair expectations, like consistent attendance and learning the rules of the game being played.

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

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 12/4/2021

1. The One Ring Core Rules
2. Trinity Continuum: Assassins (Pre-Order)
3. WFRP: Empire in Ruins Companion
4. The Third Imperium
5. Minsc and Boo’s Journal of Villainy

Top News Stories

Mothership is the best-funded non-licensed RPG Kickstarter: In a Kickstarter update from December 3rd, Sean McCoy confirmed that with roughly $1.4m in funding, Mothership is the eighth-most funded RPG Kickstarter ever, and the best-funded non-licensed Kickstarter ever. The immense success of this indie darling shows, among other things, the power of engaged and enthusiastic fans, which the Mothership designers encouraged throughout the game’s design lifecycle.

Discussion of the Week

Cortex licensing agreement causes jeers, confusion: Fans of the generic RPG Cortex Prime reacted with confusion and dismay to the announcement of the game’s new licensing terms, which hand down onerous (and in some cases utterly unenforceable) terms to anyone who makes even free content with the system. Although it has not been confirmed outright the best-supported assumption is that the terms were written by someone in the game’s distributor, Fandom, which is already known for attempts to monetize other people’s intellectual property. Discussions (and shitposts) have flared across Twitter, but this thread by @POCGamer (and the retweet of @FrivYeti) does a solid job of laying out some facts, making some solid predictions about what Fandom may have been trying to do, and explaining why they failed.

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