Articles, Editorial

Dragonbane Review

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Fantasy is the most popular genre of role-playing game. Even if you don’t count the sheer volume of Dungeons and Dragons players, there are more titles that slot into the fantasy genre than any other. When reading and playing games, one could be excused for beginning to think that many of these fantasy titles are little different from each other; thanks to the early days of Dungeons and Dragons, many of the genre’s tropes are filtered through RPGs in frankly wild ways and that does mean we see a lot of the same basic structures in our fantasy games. Doesn’t seem to bother anyone at Free League Publishing, though. Apparently to them, the ideal number of fantasy games a single company should put out is a half dozen.

Needless to say, Free League’s reasoning for each fantasy game they release is different, and they also reap the benefit of a more stratified European gaming audience where the appetite for different, specific experiences is greater. In many cases, it’s also not hard to see that the genre has a lot of room for variety. Mork Borg and Forbidden Lands have very little to do with each other. That does make it a little interesting, though, when Free League acquires the IP for the grand-daddy of Swedish RPGs. As of 2021 they did make such an acquisition, and the result is out now in the form of Dragonbane.

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Articles, Meet the Campaign

Meet the Campaign: Forbidden Stairs

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I love mashups. Whether in music, film, or elsewhere, a good mashup takes the best parts of its two (or more) constituent works and makes them even better by putting them in a different context. Mashups work just as well in RPGs. Shadowrun, a mashup of fantasy and cyberpunk, has been drawing players in for 35 years. Rifts, arguably an attempt to mash up everything the designer could think of, has created many more fond memories than its ruleset would suggest. For today, though, I’m going to dig into a more literal mashup, a setting where two worlds collide: an RPGnet thought experiment and proto-setting called The Long Stair.

As recorded in a long thread started over fifteen years ago, The Long Stair was intended to be a combination of ‘spec ops dungeon crawls’, Cold War shenanigans, and a little sprinkling of cosmic horror as D&D creatures made it ‘up the stair’ into the real world. While it’s certainly not the only way to do it, this setting illustrates a very well realized example of worldbuilding from a thought experiment, in this case the idea of sending modern-day operatives into a D&D dungeon.

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Articles, Editorial

What can we say about RPGs?

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This is my eighth year of writing for Cannibal Halfling Gaming. On one hand, everything I’ve done here has blown up beyond my wildest expectations; the quantity, quality, and audience of my writing are all better than I could have imagined back in 2016 when I asked Seamus to join his project. At the same time, though, the journey often comes with the feeling that we still aren’t doing anything of the scale or ambition to be worthwhile. Some of this is just imposter syndrome, to be clear. Some of it, though, is borne from frustrations that come with being a content creator for a niche hobby and insisting on using the written word to do it.

As Seamus spoke about recently in The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs, there are limits to what we can do on our budget of approximately nothing; we both have full-time jobs and writing for a site like this must be fun and/or fulfilling even before it is useful if we’re to continue doing it. At the same time, there are things we have to say, and having no budget also means we aren’t beholden to anyone. Things are changing, though; we’re changing. When I wrote that very first article about PbtA I was 29 years old; I’m 36 now. That is a huge step away from the core audience of tabletop RPGs, and as our entire millennial generation now sits above the first standard deviation of age for a gamer we need to think long and hard about our continued relevance (or inevitable descent into grognardism).

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: January, 2024

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Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2024! We’re just out of the weird, liminal part of December, so excuse me if I’m still a little longwinded and full of cheese. Nonetheless, we have a number of campaigns to talk about, including one very large one.

It is a new year, and Shannon Appelcline released his annual Year in Review over at the Designers and Dragons website (a move from the article’s usual home on RPGnet). While the article covers much of the past year’s news very concisely, I want to call your attention to the top Kickstarters segment about ¾ of the way through the article. The top three campaigns of 2023 were all third party supplements for 5e. Since Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk began six years ago, there were only two years where the majority of the top 5 best funded campaigns weren’t 5e supplements, 2018 and 2022. Even more damning, the only supplements in these lists which I still hear people discuss in social media in any fashion were all authored by the company which is currently running the largest campaign in this article. At least this new one isn’t (technically) D&D.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Cyberpunk RED Minions

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Two of the roads with the most traffic to Cyberpunk RED are, naturally, players of Cyberpunk 2077 and players of older tabletop editions like Cyberpunk 2020. However, once arriving at their new carmine destination there are naturally going to be a few disconnects, and one of the biggest is in the nature of combat. The smart Cyberpunk 2020 party wanted to blast their opponents to chunky salsa as fast as possible and often could, and V eventually becomes a cybergod capable of mowing through entire gangs on their own. Cyberpunk RED characters are themselves tougher in turn than their 2020 counterparts, but they simply can’t go through their enemies that fast. Aaron pondered changes to the combat rules but found that, as with anything else, fiddling with the wiring that already exists can pose a lot of challenges. I’m not fiddling with the wires, so much as I’m adding an attachment (much like the Cyberpunk RED Luck Deck from that same article) – and I’m stealing from a galaxy far, far away to do it. 

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 12/30/23

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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, discussions from elsewhere online, and something From the Archives.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 12/30/2023

  1. Scion Second Edition: Once and Future
  2. Candela Obscura Core Rulebook
  3. Traveller: Wrath of the Ancients
  4. D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
  5. Old Pavis (II): The Good, the Bad & the Rowdy (RuneQuest)

Top News Stories

Here in the last hours of 2023, the newsroom is quiet. From all of us at Cannibal Halfling, have a happy new year! Stay safe, play some games, we’ll be back next week.

From the Archives

The Mistborn Adventure Game from Crafty Games is coming to an end – the digital versions will no longer be available to purchase after tomorrow, December 31st, so they’re all at a pretty steep discount. Relevance to the CHG Archives? The review of the core game was the first article posted here at the same time as on the Mad Adventurers Society, as opposed to being ported over from the MAS Archive for preservation.

Discussion of the Week

Ending a 15 year Game Group: Keeping up any social group is tough; how many of your friends from high school have you called recently? Arguably a gaming group is even tougher, what with constantly trying to balance everyone’s schedules and play preferences for the months or years it takes to run a good campaign. While this discussion has some good subthreads about maintaining groups and getting back on the horse, as another member of a long running group I’m here to empathize with the OP, and pour one out for their group.

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.

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