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 11/18/2023

1. D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
2. Delta Green: God’s Teeth
3. Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Settler’s Guide Book
4. The One Ring™ – Tales from the Lone-lands
5. Cyberpunk RED

Top News Stories

Dicebreaker announces Tabletop Awards finalists: Dicebreaker has announced the finalists in their Tabletop Awards, with the winners to be announced at PAX Unplugged later this year. Dicebreaker’s entrant in the tabletop awards space has been somewhat controversial, both due to who the winners have been and the somewhat loose standards of their ‘Rising Star’ categories. Nonetheless, the ‘Best Roleplaying Game’ category has some solid picks in it, including larger games Fabula Ultima and Blade Runner, and indies like Women Are Werewolves and This Discord Has Ghosts In It. Speaking of the last title, Will Jobst is also in the running for Designer of the Year.

Winners for The Awards 2023 announced: In contrast to the rather mainstream Dicebreaker award picks, The Awards, an indie RPG award whose two directives are ‘make weird shit’ (to designers) and ‘recognize twenty things’ (to the judges) have announced their winners for 2023. The whole list is fascinating, and includes higher profile work like FIST, Wildsea, and CBR+PNK. Check out the whole list in one easier to read format on Reddit. Let’s hope The Awards gets themselves a bit more organized off Twitter; their website is linked on Reddit but hasn’t been updated since June.

Discussion of the Week

You absolutely CAN play long campaigns with less crunchy systems, and you should: This is a canard I hear even from my own group, none of whom have less than fifteen years of gaming experience. There’s this belief that for a game to continue to be interesting after months or years of play, there needs to continue to be a stream of mechanical widgets you can engage with. As long as the group still has stories to tell the campaign can keep going; you don’t even necessarily need much or any advancement to keep things interesting!

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