Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 6/8/2024

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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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 6/8/2024

  1. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit Pre-Order
  2. Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
  3. Deathship One
  4. Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit
  5. 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.

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2024

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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.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

Remembering BrikWars

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I was looking at the Modiphius website recently and I saw something that surprised me; a print copy of BrikWars. It was something that, as a youngster, I never thought I would see, and now in 2024 it’s a startling reality. If you’re not familiar with BrikWars, it’s a miniatures wargame that uses Legos. Any kind of plastic construction toy can be used, but if we’re being realistic, everyone uses Legos for BrikWars.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

How do you become an RPG publisher?

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The RPG hobby is nearly 100% self-published. This makes sense on itch.io and when talking about the many solo designers with DBAs like ‘Sine Nomine Publishing’ or ‘Bastionland Press’, but it extends across the whole hobby. At no point did Mike Pondsmith submit Mekton to a publisher; he formed his own company, R. Talsorian Games (and had investors in his company, somewhat unusual then and much rarer now). Steve Jackson Games was formed, unsurprisingly, by Steve Jackson. Even TSR was just designers trying to get their games out into the world.

This dearth of publishers creates a problem for aspiring RPG designers: A complete lack of support services. You can hire an editor, artists, even a marketing consultant, but that’s money out of your pocket and a severe constraint for most designers who haven’t yet sold a game. That’s the reason the publisher model is so appealing: For a promise of future revenue, a publisher will provide a designer with all the resources they need to succeed. All the designer needs to do is bring them a game that all parties agree is good.

It works great for fiction, it’s been used much less often in the RPG world. Some designers who extend into publishing, companies like Evil Hat Productions, typically represent games by designers they’re already familiar with as a way to reduce downside risk. It’s a reasonable business strategy but it greatly diminishes the number of new games that can be elevated if fewer risks are taken to discover them. Others, like Indie Press Revolution, do a great service getting games into print and distributed but, once again, they’re curating existing games and designers more than discovering new ones. It all begs one question: Is there an effective business model to discover promising game designers and give them the resources they need to stand toe to toe with the big guys?

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Articles, Editorial

Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 2

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Here’s a link to Part ,1 in case you missed it. I originally was going to just go straight into talking about the games, but I decided I’d quickly talk about some of my favorite superhero comics here. I’m doing this partially so that you, as a reader, can know what I care about in superhero comics, what I would want to see emulated in a game . . . but it’s mostly so I can create a cool visual motif for this article. You can skip this if you don’t care.

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Articles, System Split

System Split: War Never Changes

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The Fallout show on Amazon Prime is actually good, the latest video game property to successfully push back a decades-old curse that has sent similar adaptations plummeting to the bottom of box office rankings and critics’ opinions. And, like any good mass media property, the Fallout TV show has inspired interest in other formats. The contemporary video games were already big hits; with the newest one being six years old the tail effect has been relatively modest (both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 did re-enter Steam’s top 10 most played games, but that impact has already abated). In the smaller TTRPG world the impact on the official licensed Fallout RPG has been a bit more pronounced, with both the game’s core rulebook and its most recent supplement staying in the DriveThruRPG top ten for weeks now. Much as happened for Cyberpunk Red in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout is seeing a wave of renewed TTRPG interest.

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