Weekend Update: 10/21/2023

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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 10/21/2023

  1. Delta Green: God’s Teeth
  2. Cities Without Number
  3. Traveller: Adventure Class Ships
  4. Cyberpunk Red
  5. Fabula Ultima Atlas: High Fantasy
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/21/2023

DIE the RPG: In-Depth Review

You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape – but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to? You might very well have heard our first experience with DIE the RPG, based on the comic of the same name, when we featured it on Cannibal Halfling Radio: Now Playing! Jay, Evelyn, Fitz, and Max came back together to play one more roleplaying game and found themselves in the Fields of the Lost, facing down their own troubles. Well, last weekend I grabbed the d20 of the Master myself and ran a marathon session, ten hours long, and it was just as much of an emotional rollercoaster. With the book in hand and experience on both sides of the screen, let’s dive in for a proper review!

Continue reading DIE the RPG: In-Depth Review

Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 1

This past weekend, Seamus treated our shared gaming group to a full run of the ‘Reunited’ scenario for the DIE RPG. While you may have heard me run DIE on Cannibal Halfling Radio, the scenario I ran was an adaptation of both Reunited and the one-shot rules, and was significantly shorter than Reunited. When all was said and done, we played for roughly ten hours of some of the most exhausting, emotionally draining, and rewarding gaming I’ve ever done. As often occurs with emotionally involved games, several of us had gnawing itches to engage more with our characters; this included me. My character, Donnie, became the Fear Knight, and had to engage with the fear he had for the future and how it was shaped by his past. Although the character creation in DIE takes some time to let you build the high school version of your character, I needed more. Less than a week after the game concluded, I started writing, and the resulting short story is the product of my post-game rumination. This is Lenny’s Halloween Party, and it stars all of our player characters as they navigate the opportunity to throw a real high school party on Halloween night of their senior year.

Continue reading Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 1

Weekend Update: 10/15/2023

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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 10/15/2023

  1. Delta Green: God’s Teeth
  2. Cities Without Number
  3. Call of Cthulhu: 종말설화집
  4. Traveller: Adventure Class Ships
  5. Call of Cthulhu: 창세설화집

Cannibal Halfling Con X

Not really, but we’re all congregated in the meatspace for a weekend of gaming. Games on the menu include:

Suffice to say we’re a little busy rolling dice, telling stories, exchanging trauma, making eddies, falling into the cockpit, and deciding that some games don’t demand a second playthrough (guess which one)! See you next weekend!

 

On Modules

My gaming group consists of roughly 10 adults, each able to commit to any given gaming session only when the vagaries of their schedule allows. We run two campaigns at a time, taking into account the availability of two GMs and whichever player has a character who is a ‘hinge’ to the upcoming session. Sometimes, we cannot get a session of either campaign together but still have 3 or 4 players. In the last year or so, I’ve finally acknowledged that the only effective way to pull out some quick gaming when such an attendance squeeze arises is to pick a backup system and pull out a module.

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Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2023

Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for October! We’ve got some horror games this month, appropriate for Halloween. We also have Tarot, Cryptids, and badgers and coyotes! The magic of RPGs only gets more magical with every new and offbeat game I see. As usual, we’ll check in with those major publishers, see what the indies are bringing forth, and then finally take a look back at the Kickstarters from five years ago.

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System Split: Death in Space and Mothership

Most big science fiction properties today err on the side of science fantasy. Star Wars is basically swords and sorcery in space, and Star Trek’s post-scarcity antimatter economy is built to support its storylines, not the laws of physics. In the tabletop RPG world, though, there are a few options for somewhat harder space sci-fi, especially if your definition of hard sci-fi includes horrors man wasn’t meant to know as well as the strong possibility of explosive decompression or straight up getting sucked out an airlock.

Today we’re going to look at two gritty space horror games which, through relatively light rules and strong emphasis on random outcomes, are easy for players but very tough on characters. Death in Space is created by Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus, members of the Stockholm Kartell alongside the creators of Mork Borg and CY_Borg. Mothership is created by Sean McCoy and distributed and developed by Tuesday Knight Games, who are in the process of bringing the new Mothership box set into distribution as of this writing. Both games are about freelancers trying to survive deep in space, and quite often failing to survive deep in space. Despite similar rules and character survivability, each game has a degree of nuance with how it approaches the gameplay loop.

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