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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Crowdfunding Carnival: November, 2024
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for November! We’re heading into the end of the year, and for multiple reasons it’s a great time to put the real world to the side and check out some games! November was a pretty big month; nearly 20 campaigns passed my deck and needed to be narrowed down to make this article. So though I say it every month, it’s certainly true this month: While every campaign I cover here is solid and interesting, many of the ones I didn’t have space for are too. We’ve also seen another big month for Backerkit, with a bumper crop of intriguing games making the upstart crowdfunding platform an equally (if not perhaps more) intriguing place to look for new games as Kickstarter.
We’re ready to start, though! We’re going to cover a few major campaigns by some of the big guys, though we really only have one (maybe two) standalone games to talk about. Then, we have a good number of indies. Cross-collabs, solo games and tarot mechanics await you below.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: November, 2024
So You Want To Slay The NaGaDeMon
Welcome to November! Welcome to National Game Design Month!
A ‘NaNo Rebel’ that was spun off from NaNoWriMo* by Nathan Russell in 2010, National Game Design month is almost exactly what it says on the tin: a month dedicated to designing games of all kinds by creating, talking about, and playing them! It’s only inaccurate in terms of the first word, since people from all over the world now participate, but ‘slaying the InGaDeMon; doesn’t quite roll off the tongue or conjure images of a defeated serpentine foe.
But how, asks the neophyte game design adventurer, can I slay such a beast? Especially considering such a time limit, and the month has already started? Well, I’m no wizened elder in this regard, but I have fought against several NaGaDeMons and experienced both victory and defeat, so here are my own tips and tricks!
Weekend Update: 11/2/2024
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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Zombie World Review
Apocalypse World won accolades due to its design, but Powered by the Apocalypse won sales thanks to its handling of genre. The minute that someone took a stylized post-apocalyptic soap opera and ran D&D with it, everyone wanted to see what they could do with the framework. Horror is no different; PbtA has proven adept as a basis for monster hunting, urban fantasy, and Victorian Penny Dreadful, among others. Naturally, someone turned to zombies.
Zombie World is a Magpie Games production, primarily designed by Brendan Conway (of Masks fame). Given coverage of their current licensed games, one could easily surmise I have a chip on my shoulder regarding Magpie’s output. Luckily, Zombie World is a great example to show that this is not the case; the game is both intensely innovative and intense to play. There are some problems with the game but the biggest one affects how well the game has sold, not the quality of the play experience. What is that problem? The game is card-based, and for all of the (positive) impacts it has on the play and packaging, it has made the game difficult to translate into a digital counterpart, affecting sales and availability.
As a card-based game, Zombie World threads the needle of using tried and true PbtA mechanics while making the best use of its unique form factor. In my opinion this is accomplished well; the game reads and plays fast and the 32 page rulebook included really is all you need. To really test how this all worked, I picked up a copy of Zombie World and took it to my online gaming group’s in-person gaming weekend for a one-shot. While the players were going harder than normal given the vibe of the weekend, I was still surprised at how quickly and easily Zombie World devolved into Walking Dead-like drama; our game involved backstabbings, double-dealing factions, and, of course, overrunning both the harbor and city hall of a large city with zombies.
Continue reading Zombie World ReviewWeekend Update: 10/26/2024
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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 10/26/2024
- Traveller: Traders and Gunboats
- Tales from the RED: Hope Reborn
- WH40k Imperium Maledictum: Inquisition Player’s Guide
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Dwarf Player’s Guide
- The Mutant Epoch RPG Expansion Rules
Top News Stories
Dire Wolf Digital closes books on Cortex Prime Kickstarter: Perhaps a niche bit of news, but Dire Wolf Digital put out a statement on the long-running Cortex Prime Kickstarter. Cortex Prime funded on Kickstarter seven years ago, and over that time the system has changed owners twice; Dire Wolf Digital acquired the game from Fandom. Here in 2024 there was one outstanding element of the Kickstarter rewards, print copies of the Cortex Spotlights, and Dire Wolf decided to officially not pursue printing the spotlights given the costs. For the several hundred people who backed at that level, they’re out a potential reward. On the other hand, thanks to the game changing ownership, Dire Wolf never received any money from the Kickstarter campaign.
I think this is worth discussing because it shows the third outcome of a Kickstarter, one that (unlike failing outright) is more common in large, corporate-backed games. The core product of the Kickstarter is released, but due to the post-campaign sales lagging, the money to get the rest of the goals over the finish line never materializes, and the campaign drags on 90% fulfilled. With Cortex, unfortunately, you can see this happen: A very late campaign, for a system with enough promise that not one but two different media companies see it as worth buying, that for multiple reasons is not really selling.
I am a big fan of Cortex Prime. I also think it’s been saddled with some terrible business decisions, including the decision to try and sell the game in a closed ecosystem (which not even Marvel is truly getting away with). While Dire Wolf will likely at least break even continuing to support Tales of Xadia, the real way for them to make a return on this investment and get Cortex Prime the attention it deserves is to nut up, kill their dead storefront, and get PDFs on DriveThruRPG. 30% of nothing is nothing, and that’s how much the Cortex Prime distribution strategy is earning them.
From the Archives
Cortex Prime suffered and may die at the hands of boneheaded distribution, but the game is a truly fascinating set of mechanics that, with some good supplements, could outperform GURPS as a generic system for a lot of gamers. From the archives we’re looking at Aaron’s review of Cortex Prime.
Discussion of the Week
One of my biggest weaknesses is struggling to improv: While you’re not going to learn how to improv solely from a Reddit thread, this discussion does set down some good ways to think about improv, and things you can do to improve your skills.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.
The Digital Divide
There was in fact a great split between roleplaying games at a table and those on a computer, but it happened years ago. The first digital version of D&D came about in 1975, merely a year after the game was released; it was called Dungeon and was originally developed for the PDP-10 mainframe. Although Dungeon was an unlicensed emulation of the D&D ruleset, the primary thing that prevented it from taking off in university computer labs was its exceptionally steep memory requirement…36 kilobytes. Needless to say, the reality of the RPG video game has changed.
Dungeon, and its successors like DND (Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain, but we all know the intent of the acronym) helped to kick off the RPG video game in the mid 1970s, but by the 1990s it was a completely different world. While TSR was failing and getting acquired by Wizards of the Coast, games like Baldur’s Gate and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall were both imminently successful and also almost nothing like their tabletop forbears. Video games were already doing things that no tabletop GM could have dreamed of, while also casting aside the elements of RPGs that computers weren’t really capable of doing at the time. Baldur’s Gate has faster and flashier combat than any game table you can imagine, but no matter how many times you play it, the basic story will be the same each time.
Let’s gather back here in 2024. Video games, aided by unimaginable computing hardware and multi-million dollar budgets, have become something that the average nerd in the 1990s (let alone the 1970s) could only have dreamed of. At the same time, though, tabletop games have continued to capture imaginations and, over the last ten years have also exploded in popularity. The RPG has also headed back to the digital realm, just like it did in 1975. This time, though, there’s recognition. The massive, high fidelity world of video games exists, and it’s big business. Tabletop RPGs, though, are wandering back to the digital realm with virtual tabletops, digital assistants, and soon, AI game masters. With the continued re-integration of software into the hobby, it seems like a prudent time to ask: Where is the line? And, perhaps more importantly, how is this time different than it was in 1975?
Continue reading The Digital DivideWeekend Update: 10/19/2024
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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/19/2024
Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review
A world, and a mirror of worlds. Atop four giant elephants atop a giant turtle rests Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – where the most dangerous barbarian is an old barbarian, where fleeing your destiny is the surest way to run into it, where a million-to-one chance always works out, where a single humble hero will always win while outnumbered, and where you have to practice believing in the little lies (stories) in order to make the big ones become true (justice, mercy, etc.. It’s been the subject of Roundworld-made roleplaying games before, but sometimes stories like to repeat themselves with a new twist, and this time there’s something of a primer. This is the Discworld Quickstart Guide from Modiphius Entertainment!
Continue reading Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review
On Escapism
I think I’m getting tired of cyberpunk.
I’ve been deep into the cyberpunk genre since at least high school, reading, watching, and playing everything I could find. It was science fiction that actually resonated with me; computers and body modification and AI all seemed much more pressing, more real than space travel and distant planets, let alone magic and wizards and vampires. When I played Cyberpunk 2020, something I started doing at about 16 years old, I embraced the dystopia of the setting and leaned into the idea that a better way to play the game was a grittier, grimier way to play the game. Even as I lightened up a bit about black market modifiers and blunt trauma damage, the game was an inherently grim one. One of my gaming friends in college reflected on a Cyberpunk game we played where his character was killed at the hands of another PC, the second of a series of exchanges that killed half the party in the span of two sessions. It was actually a great ending for how much intrigue had built up between the characters, but it could still be summed up in three words:
“The future sucks.”
Those are the watchwords of not just Cyberpunk 2020, but arguably the entire genre. Neuromancer is not a book about a hero who changes the world, it’s about a character who, through acting in his own self-interest, releases one of the biggest existential threats the world has yet seen and then nothing happens. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, George Alec Effinger and other preeminent cyberpunk authors were at their best when writing characters who accepted the worlds around them even as the readers were drawn in to how alien yet upsettingly familiar they were. Good cyberpunk made you think because, like all good science fiction, it was the issues of the present cast upon a vision of the future. The problem is that those visions of the future are here, and yeah, the future sucks.
Continue reading On Escapism
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 