Category Archives: Articles

Action 12 Cinema Kickstarter Review

The d12 is the best polyhedral die around, no contest. It has a pleasing shape, it rolls well, it can sub in for a d4 and a d6 as needed, Yet the noble dodecahedron is also tragically underutilized. Barbarians and their greataxes, the best/worst dice in FFG/EDGE Narrative Dice games, the odd spell here or there. A random table if it’s lucky. Well, no more! One game has burst onto the scene to give the d12 its due at long last, its starring roll… and what better role to star in than in a good-bad action movie? A good movie, those are easy. But a ‘bad’ action movie that’s still so good? Those stand up to the test of time. Get ready to write your script and delve into your favorite cliches with Action 12 Cinema from The RPG Academy’s Michael K. Ross!

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How the Wonk GMs: Session Prep

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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Meet the Party: The Mecha Hack

A mercenary band of mecha pilots stands prepared to fight another day in the Lodestar Alpha system, all for the credits its various factions are willing to provide for their services. Wing Crusader, Onyx Edge, Jester Epoch, Dagger Alpha, Iron Glory, and Chimera Sunset are the weapons of war that will see their pilots make their fortune and maybe decide the fate of the system altogether. All pilots, get in your giant robots and get ready to launch. Let’s do a quick little review of, and then Meet the Party for, The Mecha Hack from Absolute Tabletop!

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Cyberpunk RED: Black Chrome Review

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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Zine Month 2023 Round Up #2

A ride or die Filipino adventure where the indigenous magic and monsters still dominate the archipelago. A seaside vacation meant to both help your health and help you find love, provided you can solve the murder. Living a version of your life affected by ADHD. It’s down to the wire, but there’s still time to check out another batch of Zine Month creations!

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Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2023

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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