Welcome to June! 2021 is heating up, at least if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, but in the RPG space it’s heating up all over! I had way more than 10 games to read this month, and several I had to check out less than 24 hours before this went live! Designers are wild out here! These ten games represent a potent intersection of design, marketing, and yes, hype, on Kickstarter, and there’s no better way to start your hot nerd summer than by checking them out.
Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: June, 2021
Weekend Update: 5/29/2021
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 5/29/2021
- Five Parsecs from Home
- WFRP: The Horned Rat
- Galder’s Gazetteer
- Children of the Blood
- Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
Top News Stories
Risus is for Sale: S. John Ross is seeking offers for the entirety of Risus, the “Anything RPG” which has served as a delightful entry in the annals of rules-light gaming for many people, including myself. Ross includes a number of buyer-friendly stipulations in the sale, including permission to use the references to works he’s not selling that are made in Risus materials in perpetuity, and up to a year of forwarding service on the Risus website to give the buyer time to establish their own webspace. There is a small catch, in that the purchase will include accepting existing liabilities from a successfully funded Kickstarter that has only been partially delivered. Even so, if you’re looking for a rules-light platform to launch your gaming company dreams, it might be time to crack your piggy bank open.
Discussion of the Week
Unloved Games: A discussion on r/RPG centers around two pages worth of Unloved Games that are actually off the radar. As the Reddit discussion illuminates, people are too used to “unloved” suggestions that are altogether too popular for the title.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
What Does The Game Bring To The Table?
Over the last week or so there appeared the most recent incarnation of a frequent discourse, one about the quality of games correlating with their likelihood of success. Now, that’s bluntly and hilariously untrue, which is clear to anyone who has ever enjoyed a niche of anything in their life. In tabletop RPGs, though, it appears, from certain lenses, to even be anti-true. Games which make choices actively hostile to such simple traits as being able to play them still become sales successes, often becoming more successful than the indie games which old guard designers seem to snark at between requests for employment. Ultimately that’s not because TTRPG purchasers are irrational (I mean, they are, but not for the reasons we’re talking about here), but rather because they’re buying games for different reasons.
Continue reading What Does The Game Bring To The Table?
Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage: Warden One
“Mayday, mayday, this is Warden One. My mecha has taken damage, and I am adrift. Systems are failing. Anyone on this frequency, please respond.
Is anyone else alive out there?”
Continue reading Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage: Warden One
Weekend Update: 5/22/2021
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 5/22/2021
- Children of the Blood
- Galder’s Gazetteer
- Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
- Worlds Without Number
- Stars Without Number: Revised
Top News Stories
D&D had its best year ever: Wizards of the Coast has reflected on D&D’s 2020 performance, calling it the ‘best year ever’ for the brand. D&D sales grew 33% year-over-year, for the seventh consecutive year of growth. In addition to being impressive performance for any entertainment brand, 2020 in particular illustrates the strength of D&D (and to a lesser extent the hobby) in the face of the complications brought about by COVID-19.
Discussion of the Week
Twitter Main Character the First: Game Designers Age Out: Two designers best known for work they had done in the 1990s made, according to our crack analyst team, “really dumb” statements. Fortunately, they can be safely ignored, along with anything they post.
Twitter Main Character the Second: The Critical Role Brigade: Quote-tweeting someone exposes them to all of your followers. Now for me, with not even 200 followers on my main, that doesn’t matter, but when you have 170,000 followers and your most popular work is known for toxic fans? Don’t do that. Critical Role shouldn’t be considered above reproach anyway, but when those who have gained influence use that influence poorly, it doesn’t reflect well on the brand.
Alcohol and Networking in the Games Industry: Another topic that came up on Twitter this week was the role of alcohol in networking. Having business meetings while drinking is de rigueur across many industries (I have some tales about the energy industry from my day job life) but it has negative consequences, including edging out non-drinkers or those not comfortable in bar-type settings, as well as creating a degree of permission for bad behavior. At least in the energy industry few ‘real’ meetings happen at a bar, game designers and freelancers may not be so lucky when their local con is the only opportunity to get an in-person meeting with companies they want to work for. Cons should work on having more sober networking options, but game industry types should also reflect on the “bar-con” practice and consider stepping away.
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: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 1
Fleeing the city in a vegetable truck? It’s going to be a weird night. Having two mercs shoot out the tires of the truck and drag the most obnoxious passenger into the trunk of a waiting car? Very weird night. Getting picked up by two bodybuilders in a box truck converted into a mobile clinic? Now you know you’ll be talking about this night for a good while.
As noted in our prologue, the misfit group of edgerunners known as CabbageCorp met coincidentally in the back of a truck while seeking new homes, new friends, and also maybe running for their lives. A somewhat hasty decision to accept a ride from Tyrone King and Doctor Kong would form the party in earnest; while they don’t need each other yet, they certainly can’t back out.
Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp Part 1
Everywhen Review
Generic RPGs are written for GMs. A game with a setting or a conceit can speak to anyone who sees it on the shelf or reads through its Kickstarter campaign, but a game with no setting has a tougher time marketing itself. Those of us who run games, though, see them for what they are: toolkits. A good generic RPG is the toolbox that lets you build a game, and every generic RPG is a different set of tools. GURPS is the five hundred pound box of every wrench and screwdriver imaginable. Cortex Prime is a massive array of dials and knobs, ready to be toggled for your campaign. Fate is a smart everyday carry pack, providing the fewest tools to cover the most situations. What about others? Where do other approaches fit in between these?
Everywhen is a genericized version of the popular swords and sorcery RPG Barbarians of Lemuria, and it would have escaped my notice had I not seen a well-known GURPShead on Reddit give it an unequivocal recommendation. Intrigued but skeptical, I checked it out. What I found was a game that hit the right medium crunch sweet spot but also had some design choices that made it easy for any GM, novice or experienced, to write exactly what they want with it.
Continue reading Everywhen ReviewWeekend Update: 5/8/2021
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 5/8/2021
- Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
- Worlds Without Number
- Yogg-Sothoth’s Children, a Korean Call of Cthulhu supplement
- Hard Wired Island
- Stargrave: Science Fiction Wargames in the Ravaged Galaxy
Top News Stories
Big Bad Con to be Held Online: With the pandemic nowhere near ‘over’, the announcement that Big Bad Con would be held online this year was not surprising, but potentially sad for those eagerly awaiting the return of in-person events. That said, kudos to the con organizers for making the health and safety of their attendees a priority.
Apple Lawyers call Itch games ‘Unspeakable Content’: The Epic Games/Apple Lawsuit, already arguably a farce, has now featured the lawyer for Apple calling some games on Itch, which is accessible through Epic Games, “both offensive and sexualized”. In response, Itch stated (possibly joking) on their Twitter account that the adult content tag would be renamed ‘unspeakable games’, in response to another particularly hyperbolic statement.
Discussions of the Week
The Slow Weird Return to In-Person Play: Speaking of pandemic, the Indie Game Reading Club has posted Paul Beakley’s meditation on all the things that make playing online great…and how odd it’s going to feel when we return to our normal tables. As someone who’s run an online group for over a decade…there’s nothing saying you can’t keep it going even after this is all over!
Fair Pay is Still a Debate Apparently: The discussion of freelancer pay bubbled back to the discourse surface after a Kickstarter campaign advertised a stretch goal for paying their freelancers five cents a word instead of the original three. While this was rightly met with condemnation, the broader discussion melted down in the face of, well, Twitter. None of the longer threads are really worth linking, but the Cannibal Halfling position is straightforward: Freelancers should be paid more, 10 cents per word is, while not necessarily ‘enough’, at least a starting point, and royalty and profit-sharing models, while not a panacea, should become more widely discussed and offered, especially in the small press world.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Kickstarter Wonk: May, 2021
Welcome back to Kickstarter Wonk! We’re all getting ready for vaccine summer, and it looks like the designers are too! We have another full ten-pack of Kickstarter campaigns here, including a number of first-timers who are putting forth really solid stuff. I’ve already put forth more money than I was planning to on several of the campaigns below, and I have a feeling after you read you may do the same. Keep a tight hold on your wallet, and let’s dive in.
Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: May, 2021
Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 14: Setting A Dispute
Seamus and Aaron talk about settings for your roleplaying game: making a setting functional vs. ‘worldbuilding’, playing in settings with canon and ones written for games in the first place, and what a setting of your own creation will need – and what it can do for you.
Continue reading Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 14: Setting A Dispute
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 