In theory we all know what worldbuilding is. The process of creating a fictional world isn’t technically related to role-playing games, but it has become inextricably intertwined with the hobby, given the preponderance of science fiction and fantasy settings in the most popular games. In considering and examining worldbuilding, I’m not going to spend a lot of word count talking about what it is, or even how to do it well. Instead, I’m going to talk about how worldbuilding affects RPGs specifically, which boils down to a lot of mistakes, missed opportunities, and general poor form.
Tag Archives: Game Design
Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 5 – Delayed Secrets
Welcome to the Dark Future of Cannibal Halfling Radio! Now that we’re in (Cyberpunk) 2020, and we survived the chaos of the holidays and some cyberpsycho-halfling-induced technical difficulties, we have some gently-aged Resolutions for the new year with regards to game design, playing games, and right here at CHG. After we look to the future, we pull aside the curtain for a discussion on secrets in roleplaying games: what kinds there are, when they go well and when they go awry, and how to make sure yours go the former way.
Things We Talk About:
Resolutions: Kickstarter: Zinequest 2, Our Queen Crumbles, Cyberpunk Chimera, Transit: The Spaceship RPG, G.E.N.E.S.Y.S. Mecha, The Mad Adventurers, PbtA: How a Rule-System Nurtured A Queer Fanbase, Masks: A New Generation and the Possibilities of Trans Narratives, Trophy
Secrets: Eberron, Dark Heresy, Star Wars, Eclipse Phase, Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS, Consent in Gaming, Tales from the Loop, The Veil, “It’s What My Character Would Do!”, Masks: High Impact Heroics
You can find us on Twitter
Editor Aaron: @LevelOneWonk Aki: @WHalfling
Editor Jason: @Blooperly_ Seamus: @RGM79Ace
And the CHG account @HungryHalfling for article and show updates! You can also drop by the Tavern of our Discord to chat with us.
If you like what we’re doing with CHR, give us a hand and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify! You can also support us on Patreon.
Music by Tristan Lohengrin, art by Khairul Hisham! Thanks for listening!
System Hack: Cyberpunk Chimera Gear and Resources
It is time once again for System Hack! Last time we took a look at the Cyberpunk Chimera, we thought about character creation and saw a lot of things come together. Now, we’re examining one of the more emblematic elements of a near-future or modern RPG: the gear. Cyberpunk 2020 was more than fine with giving players access to all sorts of goodies, like gatling shotguns, net guns, and various high-caliber borg droppers with recoil so powerful you needed cyberarms just to wield them. There was also plenty of other equipment detailed, from electronics to vehicles to cosmetics, not to mention the cyberware. Most of this equipment was either finely detailed (weapons, vehicles) or not detailed at all (pretty much anything that wasn’t implantable, driveable, or could kill people). So when building out a new system and looking at equipment, we need to ask the question: What actually matters?
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“You can Homebrew D&D into Anything!”
The strong increase in popularity of Dungeons and Dragons brought about both by the increased accessibility of D&D’s Fifth Edition as well as the growth of the nascent streaming and actual play communities has meant that there are a whole lot of people getting introduced to D&D. Now that this growth has been going on for a few years, there is burgeoning realization that role-playing games as a medium are capable of a lot more than dungeon crawls and Tolkien derivatives. This is great news for everyone, right? We all know there’s a whole world of RPGs out there, from the big glossy traditional games to indie zines and everything in between. Well, something’s getting lost in translation for some, and in the #dnd world on Twitter you’ve likely seen questions like this:
“How can I make John Wick in D&D?”
“What can you do to run Star Trek in D&D?”
“It would be really cool if I could run Harry Potter in D&D!”
Fortunately, these all have easy answers: Don’t, please don’t, and I don’t think it would.
System Hack: Cyberpunk Chimera Character Creation
Welcome back to System Hack! Now that the real timeline has caught up with Cyberpunk 2020, it’s time to start pinning the Cyberpunk Chimera down. We have attributes and skills, we have ideas about a combat system, and there’s some hacking, some cyberware, and even some meta-mechanics. What don’t we have yet? Oh. Right. Characters.
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Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 4: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Lunar Exalt
If you’re looking for a holiday tabletop roleplaying one-shot we have some ideas for you in the latest round of Pitch Me, from Jewish knights to Christmas changelings to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Lunar Exalt! Then we get a little more serious, talking about corporate commercialization making its way into the hobby, in this episode of Cannibal Halfling Radio!
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System Hack: Cyberpunk Chimera Meta-Game
Welcome back to System Hack! Over the last few months I’ve been slowly but surely building out elements of a Cyberpunk game, inspired by but not really based on Cyberpunk 2020. At this point, we get into the weeds. Until now, the articles published so far have all dealt with simulationist aspects of the game. That is to say, when a character in the game wants to do something, what happens? At this point, we’re going to pivot away from the characters and focus instead on the players.
Indie Frontiers #2: Big Bad Blitz Part 1
As I’ve wandered into the Indie Frontiers this past year, I’ve heard tales of a fabled place where indie RPG designers gather from across the land: Big Bad Con. This yearly tabletop and LARP convention is hosted in Walnut Creek, CA, a short seven hour drive from my home in Los Angeles. I had never been to an RPG convention before, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. I left LA with a backpack full of dice and a mission—a mission to interview as many up-and-coming indie RPG designers as I could find.
Today’s interviewees: JR Goldberg, Viditya Voleti, Riley Rethal, Dee Pennyway, and Kurt Potts.
System Hack: Putting the Cyber into Cyberpunk Chimera
Cyberpunk as a literary genre has many touchstones, like the role of corporations in society and humanity’s relationship with technology. These have trickled down to tabletop games in different ways, but certain tropes keep coming up. Cybernetic enhancement is *the* subsystem for cyberpunk games, and has generally succeeded in early cyberpunk games where hacking, a complementary subsystem, often failed. Cyberware stands in for magic in most cyberpunk games, giving the characters access to superhuman power, though at a cost. In addition to cyberware, there is usually a digital world aspect of cyberpunk games, adjacent to but not always overlapping with the hacking rules. In early works this was a completely separate virtual world, while in modern games, there is much more focus on augmented reality, and the digital commingling with the real.
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What Are Rules?
Role-playing games are perceived as complex due to their volume of rules. What really makes RPGs complicated, though, is the relative dynamism of these rules and the degree to which they sit in the text. In other words, the rules of a game you must know in order to play an RPG are not limited to those which are printed in the rulebook.
While this of course varies from game to game, it can be generally stated that a board game will contain all the rules necessary to play inside the box. This is not always true with an RPG. Given the significant breadth of concepts that a game could potentially cover, RPGs have usually needed a GM to establish a more concrete set of boundaries which make up a campaign. The key here is that what the GM is doing, from writing the world to tweaking the mechanics to actually running the game, involves making and enforcing rules which are supplemental to those actually written in a book.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 