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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 9/4/2021
Solitaire Storytelling: A Visit to San Sibilia
My Visit to San Sibilia – A Cartographer’s Journal by Campbell McNevin – Day One
What surprisingly good fortune! The last thing I remember from last night, having had perhaps one libation too many, was staggering home in a foul mood after a series of less-than-civil conversations at the Cartographers Guild biennial convention in Paris. Yet here I stand in the light of day, only slightly under the weather, in the strange city of San Sibilia!
Continue reading Solitaire Storytelling: A Visit to San Sibilia
Kickstarter Wonk: September, 2021
Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for September! We’re nearly ¾ of the way through this weird-ass year, and the desire for more escapism hasn’t abated. While we might *still* be gaming on Zoom, designers from all over the world are ready to serve up new twists. Whether it’s magical realist convenience stores, fantasy adventure insects, or just a nice blimp, Kickstarter (and a new upstart) have what you need to keep your mind off (waving hands) all of this.
Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: September, 2021Weekend Update: 8/28/2021
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 8/28/2021
- Legend of the Five Rings: Fields of Victory
- 2300AD
- Alien RPG Colonial Marines Operations Manual
- Fallout the RPG Core Rulebook
- Esper Genesis 5E Master Technician’s Guide
Top News Stories
Not much going on on the RPG front! Stay healthy everyone, mask up in crowds, and play some games.
Discussion of the Week
GM Experience should not be quantified simply by length of time: An interesting discussion about how to compare and assess GMing ability. No conclusion is reached, but a lot of intriguing questions are asked. Does it matter how many games you run? Should you consider the trends in the hobby when you started? Does depth or breadth make for a better GM? Worth a read.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Adventure Log: Masks: High Impact Heroics Pt. 8
All things considered, the Night Nurse had been pretty kind. There really shouldn’t be anyone in the waiting room at this hour of the morning, but CryptoHertz – Gil – found himself there, a forgotten cup of coffee on the table next to him, just… staring. For a while he’d been staring at the wall, but at some point he’d noticed that there was still some blood between his fingers. Gil shuddered, trying to shake the memory of how it had felt when Plague Hack had forced him to run Arasaka Saburo through, and in doing so looked up at the television that had been droning on in the background. The twenty-four-hour news channel had a breaking news update:
High Impact BioMedical and Arasaka Corp were signing a new contract agreement to work together.
Continue reading Adventure Log: Masks: High Impact Heroics Pt. 8
Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 4
Not everything goes according to plan in the dark future. Not every lie will be detected, not every trap will be disarmed. And when things don’t go an edgerunner’s way, there’s no time to get mad…only even.
When we last left our ragtag group of highway robbers, they had been fired upon with some pretty hefty hardware. The hitters responsible? Hired by Jayhawk, and sent home down two and with the remaining two lucky to be alive. Clearly, the information Olga had stumbled onto was not anything Jayhawk wanted getting out. The firepower, though, was an open question. The drone looked an awful lot like the one which was seen getting passed through an Arasaka loading dock. The hitters had the control rig in their van, and they said they rented the thing. …Rented? Bubbles was able to hack the control rig and put a backdoor in the drone. Not enough to control it remotely, but enough to gather some data and maybe tell where it called home.
Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 4Weekend Update: 8/21/2021
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 8/21/2021
- Aliens RPG Colonial Marines Operations
- Fallout the RPG Core Rules
- Wrath and Glory – Redacted Records
- A Book of Tales
- Battletech: ilClan
Top News Stories
ENnies voting is live: Nominations are out and it’s time to vote for your favorites in the 2021 ENnies. The process has been rife with technical issues (votes have reset at least once) so it may be good to return to the site and check that your votes have in fact been counted.
Discussion of the Week
Beautiful Books, Great Settings, Terrible Games: On Reddit this week there was a discussion of games which hold tremendous value as pieces of media, or as static worldbuilding exercises…and then crumble to dust the minute you try to *play* them. As continued discussion around what makes a game and what makes a game good is centered within the discourse, we need to keep in mind that some things we just love to hate.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Review
RPG licensing. RPG licensing never changes. In some ways it’s amazing that it took until 2021 to get an honest Fallout tabletop RPG, given the original game’s mechanical dalliance with GURPS and other design elements borrowed heavily from pen and paper games of the time. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until Fallout 4 that the series turned back to its roots and, with the help of Modiphius, got an official licensed port. Fallout the Role-Playing Game leans heavily on the most recent iteration of the video game series; both the mechanics and the setting borrow heavily and almost exclusively from Bethesda’s Fallout 4 for source material. Comparing this game to a Bethesda game ends up being quite apt, though; like most of the modern software titles released by this game’s licensor, Fallout the Role-Playing Game shows a lot of promise and appears at first glance to be ported well into its new mechanics…but in reality it’s hampered by a raft of grave unforced errors in editing and product management. So is it endearingly buggy, or is it hopeless? Let’s take a look.
Continue reading Fallout: The Roleplaying Game ReviewWeekend Update: 8/14/2021
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 8/14/2021
- Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Core Rules
- A Book of Tales
- Battletech: ilClan
- Wrath & Glory – Redacted Records
- BLASTER: Volume 3
Top News Stories
2021 ENNIE Awards Nominees and Judges’ Spotlight Winners Announced: The header says it all, the list of this year’s batch of Nominees and Spotlight Winners has been released. There are a number of creations we’ve looked at in the mix: Cortex Prime, Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, and Alice is Missing are all nominated for more than one category, and SLA Industries 2nd Edition got a Judge’s Spotlight!
Discussion of the Week
An Apology: A needed piece of meta-discourse. A Redditor concedes that he snarked about the game Ten Candles because designer Stephen Dewey was “a dick” to him…over a decade ago. The resulting post makes you feel good for knowing it happened, and reminds us all to take a step back from all the heated discussions we can so easily be sucked into, online and elsewhere. Also, you should probably check out Ten Candles.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Building Characters From Archetypes
Everyone knows what a character class is. From D&D to Diablo and from Final Fantasy to Facebook personality tests, the notion of starting your RPG adventure with a Fighter, Thief, Mage, or Cleric has transcended D&D and TTRPGs in general to become a nerd pop culture staple. In the modern TTRPG hobby, though, classes are but one way to present a set of archetypes from which to build a character.
Continue reading Building Characters From Archetypes
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