Articles, Editorial

Cowboy Bebop RPG Review

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Adaptations are dangerous business, and that’s true no matter what medium you’re working in. Licensed RPG adaptations fall all over the map; for every The One Ring you get rules for Power Rangers contracting tetanus, and for every Star Wars there’s a Fallout. Reimagining old properties stays risky even if you’re staying in the same medium; the live-action reboot of Cowboy Bebop was a cautionary tale, albeit not quite as badly panned as live-action Death Note or live-action Ghost in the Shell. But what happens if you take Cowboy Bebop, the celebrated anime, and make it into an RPG? Well, in this case, something kind of magical.

The Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game was developed by designers from Italian company Fumble GDR and published by (also Italian) Mana Project Studio. While Mana Project is mostly known for publishing 5e settings, Fumble has a fairly impressive list of original games, including Not the End, a heroic game using an original ruleset called HexSys. A variant of HexSys powers Cowboy Bebop and, while it employs elements from games you likely know, it is completely original. The result is a game that feels like jazz; there is structure, rules, and even system mastery, but the mechanics create a loose, free environment to tell stories. And, because this is Cowboy Bebop, the stories center around bounty hunters, the bounties they’re chasing, and the memories from their past that haunt them.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 7/8/2023

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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, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/8/2023

  1. Traveller: World Builder’s Handbook
  2. Exalted: Essence
  3. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Forest of Hate
  4. Shadowrun: Body Shop
  5. Traveller: The Imperial Navy

Top News Stories

Nominations for the 2023 ENNIE Awards Announced: There are a few familiar names among this year’s nominees: supplements for Vaesen, Avatar Legends, Trophy, the second edition for Improv for Gamers, the special edition of DIE, Blade Runner, the quickstart for Root, and Linda Codega for their OGL-related journalism (on top of the Diana Jones nomination for same). An interesting and welcome change is that for several categories (such as Best Writing and Best Game) the artists, editors, and sensitivity readers are credited alongside the authors. Credit where it is due!

Oh, right, and Cannibal Halfling Gaming has gotten its second nomination ever for Best Online Content! Aaaaahhhhh!!!!! Thank you to all of our contributors, readers, and supporters for helping us get this far!

Discussion of the Week

Inside jokes/quotes/quips that only old-timers will get: Social media fragmentation continued this week with Instagram’s new Twitter competitor Threads, which has some very serious problems as it pertains to linking to your Instagram account (among other things). It is getting to the point where I’m just going back to the old ways, and reactivating my old forum accounts. In honor of that, check out this RPGnet thread and take a trip down memory lane, recalling such classics as “It’s a gazebo” and “the Head of Vecna”.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2023

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for July! When the majors are away, the indies shall play, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The Free Leagues and Kobolds of the world are toiling over their GenCon booths, but we still have some fabulous campaigns going on just under the con circuit radar. For those collectors out there fear not, there’s one big league campaign going on and it includes five alternate covers for the main book. And if you want to take a look back, this month’s retrospective includes a great underdog story and a less-great story of a five year old campaign that was fulfilled only a couple of months ago. For all that and more, read on; your wallet will not thank you.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The Trouble with Licensed RPGs

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The RPG hobby is in the midst of a significant supply-demand mismatch. With high switching costs and higher still depth of play, most hobbyists stick with one or a couple games and tend to funnel their dollars towards known quantities with existing fanbases and deeper supplement libraries. Meanwhile, there is the appearance that designing a game takes only incrementally more effort than simply running an existing one, something reinforced by the over 130,000 products on DriveThruRPG (most of them selling fewer than 50 copies). Designers struggle to differentiate in this environment, which makes the strategy of hitching your proverbial wagon to an existing property as popular as it ever has been.

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Articles, Editorial

Adventures in Rokugan Review

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This review is delayed, far from the “hot off the press” take that I had intended back some time ago. Instead this has been an article I have stewed on for some time. In 2020 there came an announcement that Edge Studios would be taking over RPG properties that had been held by Fantasy Flight, which includes two that I have written about extensively in the past: Star Wars and Legend of the Five Rings. Since the acquisition, the publishing has mainly been constrained to reprints of books in use and published already developed supplements that had been in the pipeline before the acquisition. It was a bit of a surprise to me that the first new material from this new studio was to take the setting of Rokugan and put it into the mechanics of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

My reaction to reading it at first was, to put it politely, visceral.

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Articles, The Independents

To Change Review – Transformative Tarot

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Stories of transformation are both very old and very common. From Tiresias and Circe to The Emperor’s New Groove and Turning Red, people have been changing gender, species, state of matter, and all sorts of other things up and down the stories we tell through the ages. Heck, on a personal note one of the first stories I was ever told was about the Children of Lir. To Change seeks to put that kind of story in the spotlight through the medium of a roleplaying game, using short sessions and Tarot cards to explore dramatic transformations and the consequences of becoming something new. 

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