Tag Archives: Opinion

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 8/7/2021

Leave a comment

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 8/7/2021

  1. Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Core Rules
  2. Battletech: ilClan
  3. BLASTER: Volume 3
  4. M20: Technocracy Reloaded
  5. Trails of Ash and Bone

Top News Stories

DM’s Guild Releases Print-On-Demand Guidelines: Announced in the DriveThruRPG Discord on Wednesday, the DM’s Guild has established guidelines for community content getting to Print-On-Demand. First, it has to be said that this does make PoD on the Guild more accessible than it was – we checked with DM’s Guild staff, and prior to this the only way to have a printed product on the Guild was on a very limited case-by-case basis – Exploring Eberron is the only one to have crossed our desk. That doesn’t mean it’s now actually easy. 

In addition to all of the usual guidelines familiar to DTRPG’s PoD market, all print files need to be completed by a Guild-approved layout designer, of which there are currently only four. Only products that are already Platinum Best Sellers or higher, or new products from a creator who has another product that is Platinum or higher, can be submitted. In terms of actual numbers that means more than a thousand copies sold – only 889 products (3.47% of everything on the guild) meet that specification as of this writing, and it’s likely that that does not translate to 889 individual creators. Finally, a product has to have 100 or more pages, meaning even many of those Platinum or higher products still don’t qualify – a quick count seems to show that only 20 of the 72 Adamantine products, the bestsellers, would make the cut.

Some of these restrictions make internal sense, particularly the layout requirement – you’re playing in the Guild’s sandbox, it tracks that you’d be held to a certain standard of quality. Still, while undeniably more attainable than it was, actually calling the Guild’s Print-on-Demand program ‘accessible’ doesn’t quite fit either. It’s early days yet, though; hopefully this is the first step towards a greater number of creators getting to see their work on the printed page.

Discussion of the Week

The Avatar Kickstarter and TTRPG Cross-Pollination: The Kickstarter for Avatar Legends from Magpie Games has shattered records for TTRPG projects by raising $2,502,090 as this is written, a number that will be hilariously outdated by the time we add a period to the end of this sentence. It has also, predictably, kicked off discussions ranging from the right of licensed games to use kickstarter at all to how much, if at all, Magpie’s success will either help or harm everything from other individual projects to the entire TTRPG industry/crowdfunding mechanism. In all the fervor, though, we’ve found one thread by @JazzElves to be particularly worth a look, talking about entry points for the hobby and the best ways, Avatar or otherwise, to actually get people playing new games.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, The Independents

Lands of Legends Review – A Thousand Options For Your Game

2 Comments

Adventuring through an old-school-style sandbox setting, or mapping your way through a sprawling hexcrawl? The biggest challenge of playing a game where the characters can go any direction they want is making sure there’s something worth finding in every direction they can possibly go – even more so if the world is functionally boundless. From vast ancient cities consumed by the forest to a monastery of living mummies, from a desert falling into a black hole serving as the hourglass for the world’s life to a barge-bound casino-temple to the god of luck and gambling, there are plenty of options to be found in the Lands of Legends from Axian Spice!

Continue reading Lands of Legends Review – A Thousand Options For Your Game →

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Kickstarter Wonk: August, 2021

Leave a comment

Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for August! Now, you might be looking down the headings and notice we only have seven games and an honorable mention. Well, that’s because, whether you know it or not, you got way more Kickstarter content this month than usual! Check out my preview of Dreampunk, which is still live for another ten days…really neat game using imagery cards to drive play through a dream world. Then you can read Seamus’s quickstart review of Avatar Legends, the new game from Magpie Games! That brings us up to nine, but you can count Avatar Legends twice if you also read the Meet the Party Seamus put together. Beyond those, though, all eight below are all worth checking out, and should help you ease the pain of missing this year’s superspreader event GenCon. 

Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: August, 2021 →
Articles, Meet the Party

Meet the Party: Avatar Legends Quickstart

2 Comments

A waterbender of the North who refuses to hide behind walls. A firebender who suffered a great tragedy but knows who is really to blame. A scion of great shipbuilders who would much rather create things that helped instead of harm. An outlaw earthbender who has carved a line in the stone and refuses to let any cross it to hurt those behind her. Can they save their part of the world? What stories will they tell? Let’s Meet the Party for the Avatar Legends Quickstart from Magpie Games!

Continue reading Meet the Party: Avatar Legends Quickstart →

Articles, Editorial

Avatar Legends Quickstart Review

10 Comments

Water… Earth… Fire… Air. Long ago, Avatar: The Last Airbender told the story of a nascent master of all four elements and the group of young heroes that helped him save the world. Then everything changed when the Legend of Korra brought us the tale of his successor and her many trials and tribulations. But then, as these things go, that journey ended and that world vanished from the screen. Seven years passed, with the story continuing in novels and comics, but now we’ve discovered a new window into the Avatar world. Magpie Games is telling the story this time, and the prologue is the Quickstart for their newest roleplaying game: Avatar Legends!

Continue reading Avatar Legends Quickstart Review →

Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: Grimoire

1 Comment

If you are reading this, there is a good chance you already know who I am, but just in case: Hello there! My name is Cory Deepwood, and I am a witch. I have been practicing for many years, now, learning the ways of the earth and the sky and quite a bit in between. At first it was tradition, passed down from my mother to me . Eventually, though, I began to think of myself as something of a steward, taking care of the lands I have worked on and the people within them. Within these pages are the spells and appurtenances I have used in my craft. Whether I have now passed it to you or you have found it in a dusty library somewhere, I hope you use my Grimoire well.

Continue reading Solitaire Storytelling: Grimoire →

Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3

4 Comments

The life of an edgerunner is a tough one. And when you’re slumming it in Hydropolis there isn’t nearly as much work to go around as in glamorous Night City. Sometimes you have to pursue every lead you’re given. And sometimes, if your name is Jacob Capone, those leads include your ex-girlfriend.

When we last saw our merry band of corporate sycophants, they had followed up two leads from Biotechnica which led to improperly disseminated Jayhawk Agritech…tech. Biotechnica was pleased with Mason’s work so far, and now all of CabbageCorp had some money to spend. It was time to follow some leads, take some downtime, and most importantly, go shopping.

Continue reading Adventure Log: Cyberpunk Red: CabbageCorp, Part 3 →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Kickstarter Wonk: July, 2021

5 Comments

Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for July! Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of games being campaigned out there this summer. You may be wondering why I don’t have ten this month, if there were more than ten to choose from. Well, I see two potential reasons. First, even with the delays from COVID, we’re entering GenCon season. GenCon season means people worried about *selling* games are running to Kickstarter, producing dozens of campaigns with that two-character automatic disqualification: 5E. Don’t get me wrong, these games might be perfectly fine, but they aren’t original games, so they fall outside my criteria. Beyond that, a number of the games out in the Kickstarter aether this month were… well, not great. I’m going to tend to not cover games which use some of their precious campaign wordcount to tell me they “use a dice-rolling mechanic”. Oh brother. Fear not, though! These eight campaigns are worth reading. Are they worth spending your hard-earned cash? You’ll only know if you read past the jump.

Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: July, 2021 →
Articles, Editorial

The Long-Term Gaming Group

4 Comments

Plot Grenades. Immanuel Moments. “Hiyo, Tom here!” Most readers won’t exactly understand the meaning of any of these, but for a small group of people each one elicits its own strong reaction. That group is my gaming group, who I’ve been playing with in one incarnation or another for 16 years. Over that period of time we’ve developed our own lore, traditions, and yes, a thick haze of inside jokes.

In some ways, a gaming group is no different than any other group of friends who share a hobby. You could develop inside jokes, stories, and catchphrases about board games, or hiking, or motorcycles. The thing that’s different, though, is that role-playing games come with an immediate emotional engagement. That’s exactly why people’s preferences are so specific, and why people are so defensive about them.

If we assume you’ve done everything right, found a group of likeminded players and opened the lines of communication to help hone your shared experience, then you’re in a good place to have your fellow players become close friends through the experiences you share. But the reason this is an article is because I strongly believe that gaming with friends is an elevated experience, and that your core gaming experience should be with people who are your friends. So let’s talk about gaming with friends, and about the things that can make a ‘gaming group’ an entity stronger than any one session or campaign.

Continue reading The Long-Term Gaming Group →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 6/26/2021

Leave a comment

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 6/26/2021

  1. Trails of Ash and Bone
  2. Mythic Babylon
  3. SCP the Tabletop RPG
  4. Pathfinder for Savage Worlds Core Rules
  5. Galder’s Gazetteer

Top News Stories

Queer Games Bundle 2021 on Itch.io Nearing Its End: The QGB “is a direct action that you can take right now to support queer people in a life changing way”, a games bundle specifically for supporting actual queer creators. There are 195 creators behind the bundle’s 236 items, each of whom will get a share of the profits. While the majority of the items in question are video games and are thus usually beyond our purview here at CHG, there are still 40+ tabletop offerings between the physical games, books, and misc. categories. At the $60 price tag, that’s at most $1.50 a game – and then you get a bunch of free video games! There is also a Pay What You Can version of the Bundle for $10-20 for those who want to support creators but can’t afford the full price themselves. The Bundle runs for about another week.

Premium Color Books Sale at DriveThruRPG: As we previously reported, the costs to print premium color books from DriveThruRPG are going to be going up starting on July 1st, in some cases significantly. In an effort to drive sales before the price increases have a chance to discourage buyers, DTRPG is having a sale through June 30th wherein participating products are marked down 25% from their current price. Included offerings that we have taken a look at include Aberrant 2e, Comrades, and Five Torches Deep.

Dark Alliance lands with a thud: The new Dungeons and Dragons digital title, Dark Alliance, has premiered to mixed reviews and disappointment. One Youtube review called it “truly, truly awful”, while the linked article calls it an “Icewind Fail”. While there’s a smattering of at least somewhat positive reviews out there (PCGamer liked it), the overall consensus is that it failed to live up to expectations; those who were able to get past the underlying gameplay issues were still disappointed to discover that it doesn’t particularly resemble Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, which many fans of the earlier game were looking forward to.

PAX West Returns To In-Person: East didn’t make it, being converted to an online event on July 15th-18th, but this week ReedPop announced that PAX West 2021 will officially be a convention in realspace, September 3rd – 6th. Tickets go on sale within the next two weeks. How successful the con will be will depend on a lot of factors, as the pandemic and vaccination efforts are still ongoing and comfort levels vary, but of particular interest to our readers is that this probably means PAX Unplugged (scheduled for December 10th-12th) is a go. Fingers crossed. Get vaccinated.

Discussion of the Week

Ernie Gygax interviewed about the New TSR: If you wanted to know if the venture is worthwhile, the answer is no (and as the link may imply, it’s getting no more oxygen than that). Spencer, though, the author of the link, has a Kickstarter live, called Nova. Instead of wasting any energy on Ernie Gygax, check it out (and check out our review for his systems reference document LUMEN, which Nova uses for rules).

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.