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.
Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4
Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you missed them. Anyways, this week’s post is going to be a lot shorter than usual.
After finishing 90% of an entry on Prowlers & Paragons I discovered Sean Patrick Fannon, co-author of the “Ultimate Edition”, has an extensive history of sexual harassment. The original version of the game that Fannon did not work on is still available on DriveThruRPG, but I cannot personally comment on its quality.
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4Weekend Update: 6/15/2024
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.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Few tabletop roleplaying games have leveraged other forms of licensed media into improved sales of the original material better than R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk. No game has popped back into our weekendly noting of bestsellers more times long after initial release than Cyberpunk RED, and while they’re not the only factor the biggest noticeable spikes were in the wake of first Cyberpunk 2077 and then Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. For those who played as V and watched David Martinez chrome up and went looking for more, though, RED could be a bit jarring: it’s still Night City, but a very different one, not 1:1 the setting the players and viewers would have been hooked by. Clearly the bait was good enough, but a certain Fixer got us a look at something that will pull them in ever better ahead of its release: the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit. Wake up, samurai. We’ve got a beginner’s game to review.
Continue reading Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Game Changer and the ‘Twist’ campaign
Our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning, so without further ado, let’s begin!
Kicking off in 2019, Game Changer has been a big hit for Dropout, the streaming service which subsumed the CollegeHumor brand after the site was dropped by IAC in 2020. The show consists of host Sam Reich running a game show for a rotating cast of contestants, but the actual ‘game’ of the game show changes every episode. One episode may be a particularly twisted variant of Simon Says, while another calls on contestants to make sounds imitating the onscreen prompts, while yet another locks three contestants in their green room only then to explain that escaping the green room is actually the game.
What makes Game Changer so funny is the combination of new and odd gameplay that the contestants are exposed to and the contestants themselves, all comedians who are part of the broader Dropout cast.The way the contestants react to their circumstances (and to Reich himself, who is as much a ringmaster as a host) generates some great laughs, even when facing the real discomfort of handing over their phones, being hooked up to heart rate monitors as a game mechanic, or even having an entire segment set up where the express purpose is to make you (‘you’ in this case being Brennan Lee Mulligan) lose.
Continue reading Game Changer and the ‘Twist’ campaign
DOGS Review
Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard occupies a strange place in TTRPG history. The game’s thematic content relating to Mormonism in the wild west was unusual in itself, and it was the reason the game ultimately was removed from circulation by Baker. Games disappear all the time, but because Vincent Baker was an acclaimed designer even before he created Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard has gained a certain level of mystique. Of course, we live in the age of the internet. If you really want to find a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard, you can. But there’s a newer option that divorces the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard from its setting.
Continue reading DOGS ReviewWeekend Update: 6/8/2024
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 6/8/2024
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit Pre-Order
- Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
- Deathship One
- Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit
- Warhammer 40k: Imperium Maledictum Starter Set
Top News Stories
Roll20 acquires Demiplane: Roll20 has announced they’ve acquired Demiplane, a character-building software-as-a-service platform which seeks to compete with D&D Beyond in the broader RPG space. For now the services remain separate, although Roll20’s FAQ notes they’ve already received permission for cross-platform unlocks, which will likely entice Roll20 users to check out the Demiplane platform if they haven’t already. Roll20 notes a broader integration strategy, which is now less clear as the parent company will control no fewer than three completely separate platforms (Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and now Demiplane).
Mike Mearls in at Chaosium: Mike Mearls, a designer best known for mishandling contributions by known bad actors in the space (and some work on 5e), is now in at Chaosium. Hopefully they keep him far away from community management and contributor vetting roles.
From the Archives
This week my Facebook memories featured pictures of a gaggle of college friends from back in 2014, digging a hole on the beach and showing off a brace of bottles of limited edition beer. This is the gaming group that, back in 2010, arguably was the genesis of Cannibal Halfling as it provided the platform for a large number of contributors here (Seamus, Aaron, Aki, Geni) to play games together for the first time. From the archives this week we’re talking about the Long-term Gaming Group, and how and why to have one as a social mainstay both in and out of gaming.
Discussion of the Week
Learning RPGs really isn’t that hard: Sure, it’s easy to pick out threads that profess opinions that I personally agree with, but the discussion here is valuable too. A breadth of opinions on why RPGs are easy to learn, harder to learn, and the perceptions that encourage and discourage players from picking up new games.
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.
Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2024
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for June! We’re just starting to creep into con season here in the US, and there is an attendant slowdown in major campaigns as a result. That said, there’s still a lot of energy in crowdfunding, and this month it felt pretty easy to come up with at least ten to cover. More of an issue were some of the campaigns themselves. Did you know I actually opened a campaign, started to write about it, and then had to actually Google the name of the game to find out that the campaign was for a fourth edition of the game, because that hadn’t been written anywhere in the campaign’s text? Don’t do that! Don’t assume we know anything about your game, because the fact is that unless your name is Mike Pondsmith or Mr. Paizo (or Gary Gygax, I suppose), we don’t! No one knows anything about your game! Anyways. There are some solidly interesting campaigns here, both from your larger studios and some completely new outfits. Let’s check them out.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2024
Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 3
Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 in case you missed them. To open this part, I’d like to talk about hallmarks of the superhero RPG genre; there are some things I’ve noticed across all of these games that I think are worth highlighting.
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 3Weekend Update: 6/1/2024
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.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 