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, discussions from elsewhere online, and something From The Archives!
Tag Archives: Opinion
A Glimpse Into The Unplugged Vault: Self Careless
It’s your day off! Obviously you should be spending some time on Care for yourself, but then there are all these Chores to do that you won’t otherwise be able to take care of until who knows when. There are only so many hours of the day, so you’re going to have to plan things out – don’t do too many Chores so you actually get some rest, don’t spend so much time on self Care so that the Chores just pile up. Coffee will help! Now if only that darn cat would stop knocking over all the cups. This is Self Careless, the life balance game for 1-2 players from Jason Anarchy Games and Cassandra Calin!
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PAX Unplugged 2023 Notes and Shadow Scar Preview
I was prepared for a far greater in-depth dive into PAX Unplugged 2023. I had cleared as much of my schedule as I could, broken down priority events I wanted to join, built in backups and made my plans for getting in and out.
And then the Dice Gods laughed.
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A Glimpse into the Unplugged Vault: Retrograde
Ah, the soothing beeps and boops and flashing screens of blasting endless waves of pixelated bad guys from outer space. The realm of arcade shooters down through the ages like Galaga? Sure, absolutely, but you’re not likely to find an arcade machine while wandering the booths of a PAX Unplugged. You could, however, find a dice and card game that makes it feel like you did: Retrograde, the real time roll and write game of arcade blasting from Retronym!
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Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2023
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Well, folks, we made it. It’s nearly the end of 2023, and the holiday season is now upon us. It’s time to look back on the year, look forward to the next, and light lights to guard against the darkness of winter.
It’s also time for statistics! This year as part of Crowdfunding Carnival, I went into the archives and did retrospectives of the Kickstarter Wonk articles from 2018, the start of the series. With over 100 campaigns reviewed, I was able to collect some interesting data and reflect on the nature of RPG Kickstarters based both on trends within the sample as well as some reflection on what was included in my sample and what was not. While I don’t think anything I learned is particularly earth-shattering, it’s always nice to get a little quantitative nugget among the highly qualitative world of writing about games.
First, though, let’s talk about what’s campaigning now. The holiday season is when you want to finish, not start your campaigns, but there are at least a few that are worth highlighting.
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A Cup of Tea at the Many Worlds Tavern
Sometimes you need a pick me up, and some times you need something soothing, and depending on what you’ve steeped you can find both of those at in a nice cup of tea. Hey, not that I;m saying that some soda, or beers, or stars forbid even water can’t accompany your games just fine. Sometimes, however, it’s nice to have something a bit nicer, with a large variety of flavors and energy levels. So lets take a look at some Tea for the Tabletop from Many Worlds Tavern!
Paranoia The Core Book Review
It shocked me to learn that it has been six years since I last reviewed an edition of Paranoia; back in 2017 I did a System Split comparison between Paranoia Red Clearance Edition and Paranoia XP, two editions of the game which had significant mechanical departures from each other. At the time, my conclusion was that while Red Clearance Edition was a better game, XP was the better Paranoia. Apparently someone over at Mongoose read my review, because the new edition of Paranoia (called The Perfect Edition while on Kickstarter) takes my conclusions to an unsettling tee: the slicker rules are kept, the setting is rolled back to more reflect a throughline from the older editions, and the cards, which worked way better in theory than in practice, were removed. The result is remarkably close to a version using Red Clearance Edition rules with XP-style fluff, and (unsurprisingly) it turns out that yes, I really do like the version of the game made seemingly in direct response to my critiques. That all said, the new edition of Paranoia is still an edition of Paranoia made in 2023, and that alone has gotten me thinking about this. So let’s set aside the goofy clearance warnings, fake redactions, and admonishments to self-terminate, and talk about how Paranoia, any Paranoia, actually fits into the gaming landscape here in the roaring 2020s.
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PLANET FIST Review – Nano-Powered Narrative Wargaming
I toss down a disc of nanobots that quickly assembles itself into a squad beacon, sending its beam of light up from the balcony of the building I’m in and into the sky, before looking through the scope of my sniper rifle. A squadmate, Ultra Rare, is trying to 1v1 an assault trooper using only her knuckleblades, and I sigh wistfully; we used to be an item before I accidentally got her demoted. I fire a shot, miss terribly, and am immediately targeted by the assault trooper’s team and ripped to shreds by machine gun fire.
Reassembled in orbit, switching from a force recon loadout to that of an engineer, I crash onto the balcony in a drop pod next to the beacon and the nanodust that was the smear I left behind. I exchange greetings and a salute with another squadmate – “Butler.” “Setback.” – who walked into the room while I was dead, and I look down into the courtyard. An enemy mech is literally stomping all over an allied squad – what a bunch of blueberries. I raise my anti-materiel rifle and blast off one of its arms – and am splattered across the wall behind me by the weapons in its other one.
I’m considering another drop pod, when suddenly I schlorp back together, on the ground next to Goblin, who apparently got splattered as well at some point. Between us is a spent revive grenade, and standing over us is Butler. More salutes, more greetings. “Setback. Goblin.” “Butler.”
Just another day on PLANET FIST.
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Give us more devastating games
What do you do?
The call to action within a tabletop RPG implies freedom. When all is said and done, when the cards are down, the GM asks the players ‘what do you do?’ and they go forth as they see fit. Not bound by rules or procedures, only by their imagination of the game world; the rules are there to help explain what happens, not to limit what can be done. This is the siren’s song of the roleplaying game, the freedom to do, and to be, whatever and whoever you want. There are many roads to a roleplaying game, and most traditional games (and many popular non-traditional ones) are built around this question. There is another question, though, that a game can ask, and for me, games which ask this second question have been the ones providing the most affecting, engrossing experiences.
How do you feel?
While games don’t literally ask this question outright (with a few exceptions), it is the key to another layer of character development, of narrative, even of mere in-game consequences. Once a game makes you think about how your character is feeling, you’re inhabiting that character on a whole other level. The problem with this should essentially go without saying: Rules can’t make you feel things. Game procedures can’t make you feel things. If a game wants to make you feel things, and more specifically feel the things your character would feel, the designer has to be a lot more inventive in how they go about this task than they would be, say, determining the probability that you hit a target with an arrow. But there are designers who have succeeded in this, delivering gut punches, heart wrenching decisions, and a sprinkling of light trauma. To them, I have only one thing to say: I want more of it.
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Mystery Dice Goblins Review
Ah, yes, the shiny click-clack math rocks. While many games now do great things using playing cards, tarot, tokens, or sheer narrative oomph, there’s still something to be said about rolling the bones. Digital dice rollers may make forgetting your bag at home survivable, and enable playing above board across vast distances, and may even make resolving a roll much easier. The die-loving audience doesn’t take pride and joy in the different apps, discord bots, and VTTs, however. No, they enjoy the physical product, and often claim the moniker of dice goblins gladly. Here’s something a little different for us: a vendor that’s honest about what their clientele want, and who introduces a little mystery to it.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 