Tag Archives: chaosium

Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

QuestWorlds: Who wants a generic game?

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Generic RPGs are designed to accomplish a goal that many say they want. The ability to write anything, make any genre fit together, and theoretically never have to learn another system again all sound great. The reality usually ends up being something different, though. The entire reasoning behind generic RPGs even being possible has forever been couched in very narrow assumptions about what an RPG actually is. Once you expand those assumptions a little bit, a generic game starts to look impossible.

QuestWorlds, originally called Hero Wars (and HeroQuest in between those two), is a game that came out of a post-TSR, pre-Forge era of the early 2000s much like the first edition of Fate. Both of these games have the same essential objective: build out a set of mechanics that can take any character on one side, any challenge on the other, and adjudicate that character standing up to that challenge regardless of the specifics. Add in some balancing rules for character creation and advancement, and you’ve got a game that’s ready for anything. Kind of. Both QuestWorlds and Fate make very similar disclaimers about only working with genres with capable and proactive heroes prevailing over larger-than-life challenges. The disempowerment of horror doesn’t really work, nor do the continuous drags of hunger, thirst, or wound management found in survival games. These generic games, and many generic games, quickly reveal themselves to be “roughly the way we think people play RPGs” games.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 6/8/2024

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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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 6/8/2024

  1. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit Pre-Order
  2. Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
  3. Deathship One
  4. Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit
  5. Warhammer 40k: Imperium Maledictum Starter Set

Top News Stories

Roll20 acquires Demiplane: Roll20 has announced they’ve acquired Demiplane, a character-building software-as-a-service platform which seeks to compete with D&D Beyond in the broader RPG space. For now the services remain separate, although Roll20’s FAQ notes they’ve already received permission for cross-platform unlocks, which will likely entice Roll20 users to check out the Demiplane platform if they haven’t already. Roll20 notes a broader integration strategy, which is now less clear as the parent company will control no fewer than three completely separate platforms (Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and now Demiplane).

Mike Mearls in at Chaosium: Mike Mearls, a designer best known for mishandling contributions by known bad actors in the space (and some work on 5e), is now in at Chaosium. Hopefully they keep him far away from community management and contributor vetting roles.

From the Archives

This week my Facebook memories featured pictures of a gaggle of college friends from back in 2014, digging a hole on the beach and showing off a brace of bottles of limited edition beer. This is the gaming group that, back in 2010, arguably was the genesis of Cannibal Halfling as it provided the platform for a large number of contributors here (Seamus, Aaron, Aki, Geni) to play games together for the first time. From the archives this week we’re talking about the Long-term Gaming Group, and how and why to have one as a social mainstay both in and out of gaming.

Discussion of the Week

Learning RPGs really isn’t that hard: Sure, it’s easy to pick out threads that profess opinions that I personally agree with, but the discussion here is valuable too. A breadth of opinions on why RPGs are easy to learn, harder to learn, and the perceptions that encourage and discourage players from picking up new games.

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.

Articles, Editorial

Basic Roleplaying Review

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Back in the 1970s, a new role-playing game built a foundation that would stand for years to come, a foundation of accessibility, hackability, and ease of use. Am I talking about D&D? Absolutely not! I’m talking about RuneQuest, a game which, in 1978, not only became a quick second place finisher to D&D in the fantasy genre but also established many RPG conventions we still see today. In 1980, the RuneQuest second edition box included a little 16-page booklet titled Basic Role-Playing, and from there it was off to the races. Basic Role-Playing (later Basic Roleplaying, also called BRP) would form the basis of every game released by RuneQuest’s publisher, Chaosium. As that esteemed publication history includes none other than Call of Cthulhu, BRP is likely the bestselling house system in the history of role-playing games.

Thanks to RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, BRP forms the cornerstone of how gamers expect d100 systems to work. In short, your attributes and skills give you percentile values which are equal to the probability of rolling under them on a d100 roll. Look at your sheet, you know how likely you are to succeed at a baseline roll. In addition to BRP itself, this mode of d100 mechanics saw widespread adoption in games as varied as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Eclipse Phase. Now, Chaosium is staking the future of BRP on its utility as a platform. The new edition of Basic Roleplaying is here, and it’s being marketed to game designers as much if not more than game masters.

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