Seamus and Aaron talk about settings for your roleplaying game: making a setting functional vs. ‘worldbuilding’, playing in settings with canon and ones written for games in the first place, and what a setting of your own creation will need – and what it can do for you.
Continue reading Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 14: Setting A Dispute
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.
World of Darkness coming to TV: The World of Darkness has been optioned for TV. Again. IP Owners Paradox Interactive have pulled in some impressive names to develop a series which would be based on the World of Darkness setting as a whole, as opposed to any one game like Vampire, Werewolf or Mage. Many details of this sound promising, but with no distribution deal yet inked it’s worth noting that the TV world has produced plenty of vaporware with more. As a historical note, the last attempt to use World of Darkness IP in a TV series, Kindred: The Embraced, aired in 1996. Eight episodes were aired and the most common word used in reviews was ‘confusing’. In a post-Sopranos world one would imagine this next attempt will do better, but only time will tell.
The Adventure Zone and Games That Aren’t D&D: Popular Actual Play podcast The Adventure Zone is using Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year for setting generation in its upcoming campaign. That’s cool! They got the name wrong in the first episode it appeared, and failed to mention the name of the designer on-air. That’s not great! While the story took off on Twitter without confirmation (like such stories often do), the true version where the game was cited in the show notes is still illustrative of the sort of blinders many popular content creators have on. Yes, you’re correctly citing your sources, but not even bothering to get the name right on-air is still emblematic of the attitude too many creators have towards games in the hobby not published by Hasbro. An apology was issued, but this isn’t the first time this has happened and I doubt it’ll be the last.
Bundle of Holding adds permanent sales: Popular RPG sale site Bundle of Holding has expanded their normal time-limited fare with eight starter bundles which will be available on the site indefinitely. This slate will be expanded in the future but for now there are some solid options including Old School Essentials, Night’s Black Agents, Shadow of the Demon Lord, and Classic Traveller, all offering 3-6 books (and sometimes more) for less than the price of a single Hasbro supplement.
Apparently we’re talking about pricing RPGs again: Whiny fans have again taken to criticizing designers for…(checks notes)…pricing their work such that they can pay all the people who made it. The discourse is all over, but restarted with the release of Hard Wired Island, a roughly 400 page book that costs roughly thirty dollars. As a reminder, if the Hard Wired Island crew wanted to adjust their prices to be in line with the industry standard, D&D, they would need to *increase* their prices by at least 25%. Chris Bissette says it better than we can in this thread.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
PARIS GONDO read heroic stories from the age of 5, and loved the order and beauty of equipment described in them. From the age of 15, they studied inventorying. Paris started tidying in their own cell and moved onto those of fellow anchorites. Now, Paris lives in the Monastery of St. Eyvān, helping adventurers transform encumbered loads into packs of beauty, peace, and inspiration. Using the six steps of the play-based GonParis Method you too, oh over-encumbered and despondent adventurer, may finally find your equipment sparking joy instead of weighing you down. This is the roleplaying game where encumbrance is everything, Kalum’s Paris Gondo: The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying!
Continue reading Paris Gondo Review – The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying
About five hundred years ago the galactic community of alien species known as the Myriad had known harmony for 80,000 years, and had no use for violence and no concept of capitalism. Then the humans showed up, and it turned out everyone liked the taste of both. Now that galactic society is more of a chaotic, disparate sprawl the only thing anyone can agree on is a love for humankind’s third gift: the anti-gravity RIP Drive, and the ability to stuff these interstellar engines into much smaller craft for use in planet-bound, high speed death races. This isn’t a sport, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a deathstyle, baby: it’s Luke Westaway’s sci-fi racing RPG, Gravity RIP!
Continue reading Gravity RIP Review: Pro-Racing, Anti-Gravity
There are certain things one takes for granted in a role-playing game. I’m not talking about anything as concrete as attributes or skills or levels, I’m talking about exogenous conflict, which is so omnipresent in traditional RPGs (and most non-traditional RPGs as well) that it’s invisible. Well of course there are monsters to fight. Well of course you need to define a ‘need’ in Fiasco. Well of course there’s scarcity in your apocalypse. Like many people I took this for granted until I saw a game that completely stepped away from it. No, the war is over, no one fights. No, people are inherently good, there are no monsters. No, you will have hospitality in every place you visit. When I first read Wanderhome, this twisted my mind a little. How does one play a game with so little conflict? And then I created a character. And then I immediately got it.
Continue reading Wanderhome ReviewI’ve previously written about the The Pirates of Drinax, and I believe that it’s for good reason. It is one of my favorite published campaigns, and I would argue that it is the best I have ever seen in terms of being a true sandbox. It begins with a promise that the players are being brought in to take a miniscule star nation operating between two behemoths, and to make it an Empire in its own right and not only is it possible, it offers a chance to have the players take an active stance in the government that is formed. The campaign is not only flexible enough that it offers the ideas that players might want to spurn their patron and carve out a kingdom of their own, but it actively sets rules for how to go about it. There is a story seed for virtually every planet, for which there are multiple populating each of dozens of subsectors. You could likely make an entire campaign about dealing with the Pirate Lords of Theev, a group of politically insulated pirates that operate out of a planet is a surprisingly open secret. All of this is on top of a ten module progression of the campaign as players take a single ship and try to form a pirate flotilla.
And as much as I love it, I do not think I will ever run another session using the rules as written. So, it was with a bit of hesitation that I picked up the Drinaxian Companion. Yet, as a result, I have found my interest rekindled.
Sometimes a tank or a fighter jet just won’t do the trick. Sometimes, the best way to deal with a problem is a big, stompy mecha. However, while life is finally returning to Genesys proper with EDGE Studios announcing their upcoming Twilight Imperium supplement, if you want to be jumping in the cockpit with the Narrative Dice System running the show you’ve been dealing with homegrown material. Now, though, there’s an offering on the Foundry itself which just might turn the tide of your own personal giant robot war. From mecha creation to pilot recruitment, lets head to the hangar to check out Mechasys from Studio 404 Games!
Continue reading Mechasys Review: Mecha-sized Adventures in Genesys
Every so often, I look at a game, and make an impulse purchase sight unseen. Sometimes it’s a follow up to a campaign that I have previously waxed eloquent about, others it is a supplement to a system that opens up rules for something I had envisioned, or has a high concept that is so unique that I can’t help but look. Other times, it is because it promises the ability to play in fictional works I love so much that I can’t help but churn out a cry of “Shut Up and Take My Money!” It’s the last of these that triggered an irresistible pull to Rookie Jet’s Over Arms.
Welcome back to Kickstarter Wonk! Oh it’s an exciting month, this month. Maybe it’s because of holdouts from ZineQuest, or maybe it’s because there’s a vaccine, but there’s actually a full, healthy crop of Kickstarter campaigns out there! We couldn’t even stop at 10; if you haven’t already, check out Seamus’s review of Tyler Crumrine’s Possible Worlds Kickstarter. And after you’re done with that, scroll through these 10 handpicked campaigns. The world is healing!
Continue reading Kickstarter Wonk: April, 2021A light-hearted romance emulating dating sim video games/visual novels. Letter writing inspired by Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing. A bond between a pilot and their AI-linked mech. A theatre performance covering up a heist. Building super-powered characters and settings. Trying to find unused wishes in a world where everyone gets three, and you’ve already used yours. Sounds like an RPG anthology, right? Not quite. These are the six games, the six Possible Worlds, featured in Tyler Crumrine’s RPG subscription box.
Continue reading Possible Worlds Kickstarter Review: An RPG Subscription Box
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