Diving into a sea of dreams to pluck secrets from memories. Goblins going grocery shopping and making a mess of it. Horrible abominations made by scientists who say ‘who’s playing?’ when accused of playing god. A mirror-themed adventure that would have Link and Samus feeling right at home. Death metal Viking cats. Zine Month continues. and so does our coverage! Given the contents of this particular round up and a bit more time to ruminate on things, I’ve got some Thoughts about Zine Month itself and its relationship to Kickstarter… but we can talk about those later! You’re here for the zines, so let’s see what we’ve got!
Tag Archives: Opinion
Crowdfunding Carnival: The Kickoff
Step right up, step right up! We’re changing the focus of Kickstarter Wonk and needed an equally dorky name! That’s right, Crowdfunding Carnival is the new, improved, and expanded version of Kickstarter Wonk, looking further across the crowdfunding world to bring you the latest and greatest in homegrown and original TTRPGs. For this kickoff article, though, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the TTRPG crowdfunding landscape and why it looks the way it looks.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: The KickoffZine Month Round Up #1
A John Carpenter-flavored horror adventure that moves from the Antarctic to a 90s mall. Climbing a holy mountain to beg for mercy from the gods. Dark age peasants stumbling upon sci-fi tunnels, and the change that discovery brings. Dark metal fantasy with most of the metal used to build giant robots. A slumber party pillow fight where letting yourself be vulnerable is more important than winning. It’s Zine Month 2022, so let’s start seeing what tabletop roleplaying zines are making their crowdfunding run!
The One Ring Review
So here it is. After a whole bunch of hubbub and more angry Tweeting than you can shake a stick at, The One Ring has been released. And what does that get us? The One Ring, Second Edition, is the official licensed roleplaying game of The Lord of the Rings, and is the jewel of the crown of Sophisticated Games, a company you’ve likely never heard of because all they do is hold intellectual property. Sophisticated Games is the root cause of every kerfluffle about this particular game, because they decided to hang Cubicle 7 out to dry back in 2019.
Continue reading The One Ring Review
Solitaire Storytelling: Last Tea Shop
I run a tea shop on the border of the living and the dead. The recently deceased visit for one last hot drink before their long journey to the Great Beyond. Time is strange here. Days and memories blur. Nobody visited yesterday – I am sure of that. Someone passed last week, but I am unable to picture their face.
The fog thins. A figure approaches. I stoke the fire. “Welcome to the last tea shop,” I say. “You are welcome here, To The Dregs.”
A Glimpse Into The Vault: Wildermyth
Role-playing games and video games came of age around the same time. While D&D was published in 1974, the very first attempts to emulate D&D with a computer came in 1975; Dungeon and DND were written for mainframe systems like the PDP-10 and PLATO, though they were unlicensed and never saw commercial sales. The first licensed D&D video game came in 1982, and it paved the way not only for later licensed games like the SSI ‘Gold Box’ titles and Baldur’s Gate but also virtually the entire video game RPG genre, from Final Fantasy to The Elder Scrolls to Diablo.
Role-playing video games were fairly direct emulations of rulesets like D&D early on, but as the software became more sophisticated they played more to their strengths. Current titles have gorgeous graphics and complex storylines, but narratively are mostly static affairs. Meanwhile, tabletop roleplaying games have always had the flexibility of a human GM to give them more breadth and a personal touch that video games couldn’t match. So what happens when a digital game designer tries to make their video game feel more like a tabletop RPG? You get Wildermyth.
Continue reading A Glimpse Into The Vault: Wildermyth
The Trouble With Kickstarter
In December of 2021, Kickstarter made an announcement that it was going to develop a new platform for crowdfunding, using blockchain technology. The announcement received a significant negative response, given the negative environmental impacts of current blockchain applications and the widespread use of blockchain tech, through both cryptocurrencies and non-fungible token (NFT) schemes, to commit fraud. It’s a fair response, though given how little the Kickstarter announcement said, perhaps not entirely warranted.
That all said, the end state of Kickstarter’s blockchain plans don’t particularly matter. Whether or not the new platform comes to fruition, whether or not it uses less energy-intensive proof-of-stake software, whether or not people leave the platform, these are in the long run irrelevant. What the announcement should have revealed to anyone who felt strongly enough to leave the platform over it is that the TTRPG hobby has let Kickstarter become infrastructure. Leaving Kickstarter sounds great in a tweet, but ultimately doing so is going to be tough for many of the creators who, without the company, would have never gotten off the ground.
Continue reading The Trouble With Kickstarter
Solitaire Storytelling: Paranoid Android
The war with the androids has made everyone paranoid. Including me, and including my interrogators. See, Asimov Landing Station is on the far edge of the galaxy, manned by only a skeleton crew, most of them scientists doing research. Nothing ever happens here. But after the government discovered that androids have the capacity of perfectly mimicking human beings the atmosphere in the Station has started changing. Several things had gone wrong or malfunctioned in non-critical but totally avoidable ways before, but now things are getting more severe: research has been delayed, the station’s systems have broken down at critical moments, and people have disappeared. Station security has singled me out as a suspicious person and they’ve taken me in for questioning. I’m starting to wonder… am I really human, or a sleeper agent with programming? Could I be one of them?
Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2021
Welcome to the Level One Wonk Holiday Special for 2021! My traditional retrospective for the year in gaming, this Holiday Special has some extra meaning for me because of the time. Cannibal Halfling Gaming kicked off in December of 2016, making this my fifth year here out in the internet. Five years of ups and downs have seen this site go from me and Seamus writing about whatever RPG topics came off the tops of our heads to…well, me and Seamus writing about whatever RPG topics come off the tops of our heads. Though now there’s a podcast. And people send us review copies. And some even pay us!
Though we’ve been having a wild ride behind the scenes of the site, most everyone has been having a wild ride with world events as well. While we had a bit of the ‘hot pandemic summer’ I alluded to in one of our podcast episodes, much of the hope did not last, and we’re now back again in our houses and apartments, hoping more of our fellow humans get the message. But while we can’t control human nature and we certainly can’t control COVID, we can at least get some writing and gaming done.
Continue reading Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2021
Weekend Update: 12/18/2021
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 12/18/2021
- Hostile Rules
- Root: the Roleplaying Game (bundle)
- The One Ring Core Rules
- Ascendant
- Shadowrun: Anarchy 2050
Top News Stories
Asmodee Acquired: As reported this past September, Asmodee owner/investor PAI Partners has been looking for a buyer for the board game company and found one in Embracer Group, which controls such studios as Gearbox and THQ Nordic. While it’s still unclear what exactly will become of Asmodee, arguably its future is brighter within a media conglomerate than it would be in the hands of a purely financial buyer.
Wizards of the Coast removes racial alignments and lore from nine D&D books: In the most recent attempt to right wrongs related to elements of D&D like racial alignment, Wizards of the Coast went back and, mostly via errata, removed mention of these elements from several core sourcebooks. Further investigation of the edits saw that they were somewhat shortsighted; one particularly galling change was changing the word ‘madness’ to ‘insanity’ in certain spell descriptions, doing nothing but indicating that WotC didn’t understand that both word choices were problematic in their own way. While Wizards deserves a half-nod for conceding the problems with D&D material, it would have been better if they hired someone who actually understood what the problem was instead of half-heartedly deleting a bunch of stuff.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
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