For years I have served my Master faithfully. A loyal companion, I accompanied my Master through the difficult times, and the good times. Now, I am called in a moment of dire need: a Stranger has challenged my Master to a duel, alluding to time before me. My Master rises to the challenge, calling me forth. This is my moment. I have trained for this. It is time to do my Master proud.
My Master gives me the command:
I will, of course, obey. After all, I am a Good Dog.
There’s ice on the tracks, Tourists keep getting tangled up with regular Commuters, and two trains are Out of Service. That other subway line is going to have a much better reputation at this rate. Well, you can try some overnight repairs, see if you can funnel some riders into a tourist trap, and hope against hope the other line catches fire or something, but no matter what you can probably Expect Delays.
“After the locusts and pits and boiling seas. After the war in heaven and feasting on earth. After the seven years of blood and forty years of night.
There is magic. Magic and bone.
Where streets grow weeds and skyscrapers stand hollow. Where old gods wake and new gods form in the hearts of the wayward. Where cult and banner flourish. Where the dead, they walk. Where the stars disregard their course and Jupiter’s children are born under powerful new signs.
Mages. Mages like you.”
With rings on your fingers, tattoos on your knuckles, and scars on the back of your hand, you’ll delve into the cursed ruins of a post-fall city and walk the Two-Hand Path.
Continue reading Two-Hand Path Review: Getting a Grip on Luck and Magic
You and Granma were, frankly, on the worst terms. That’s what made it such a surprise when you got a package from your cousin, who had wound up being the executor of her estate. Maybe, your cousin writes, Granma was able to overlook your differences since you had become a fellow academic? Either way, the actual package is a copy from her rare books collection, willed to you. You can’t help yourself, so you start to read the book. It’s a weird one, an anthology of works all talking about books and stories and death and living forever and… rituals? Hold on. You really can’t help yourself. You consider just not turning the page, but you turn it all the same. The notes you’re writing in the margins stop being the words you intended to write. You can feel the book pulling you in…
The book is Siderius Plug’s SPINE – Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes.
Continue reading SPINE Review: Making A Game Of Getting Lost In A Book
Cyberpunk Red has been going strong for around five years now. The game came out around the same time as the tie-in video game Cyberpunk 2077, and represented a return to form after 2005’s Cyberpunk v3 (and 2020 being over 30 years old). Now, R. Talsorian Games has kept the party going with continual Cyberpunk support both free (in the form of Monthly DLC) and for pay (in the form of the Interface Red collections as well as standalone supplements like Black Chrome). Single-Player Mode is the most recent standalone supplement, and your take on it will depend entirely on what you think a solo RPG is (or should be).
If you’re older than a certain age, when you think solo RPG you think something like Mythic GM Emulator, a set of rules that can act as a GM and let you play through modules or combats on your own. If you’re younger than a certain age (let’s say younger than me at least), your first thought of a solo RPG is probably more like a journaling game, or a hybrid narrative game like The Wretched. It’s important to state this because despite its 2025 release date Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is firmly the first of those two. There are no campaign framing tools, no narrative generation, and no character supplements. Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is built firmly on using an ‘oracle’ to answer questions which allow you to progress forward through your imagined narrative, and also provides tools to let you play out investigations, social interactions, combats, and neutrons all on your lonesome. What it’s truly best at, though, is having a library of random tables which enable you to set up all sorts of premises, missions, and random encounters to make your Cyberpunk solo game more interesting. You may realize as I say this that random tables aren’t just for solo gaming. Not only is that true, it means that while I think Single Player Mode makes for an excellent GM aid and has some good rules additions…it just doesn’t work as an effective solo game.
Continue reading It shouldn’t have been called Single Player ModeThey came less than a year ago. The war was swift – and brutal.
Humans and aliens bombed each other to smithereens, and now both sides are licking their wounds. Mysterious new factions rise to join the struggle of the fallen titans. In this landscape of shifting allegiances, we may have to choose sides. Debris from the explosion of the aliens’ mothership has clouded the atmosphere, lowering the temperature and creating the coldest winter in a thousand years.
We find ourselves in a melancholy, wintry landscape — quiet, until it’s not. Egg-shaped alien structures thirty stories tall now squat, humming, over the cities they crushed. Xenofauna and lost invaders stalk the woods and highways. A war is brewing in the aching silence.
We are navigating the waking remnants of human and alien empires — and all we’ve got is a car, our fellow travelers, and the road.
It’s time to head west with The Last Caravan.
Continue reading The Last Caravan – Con-Apocalyptic Road Trip
One small step for the Year Zero Engine, one giant leap for Coriolis…
Free League has been shepherding the Coriolis series for nearly a decade now. Originally published by Jarnringen, the original designers of Symbaroum, Coriolis was released in 2008 to much acclaim in Sweden. Free League first got on board creating additional material for the game, but ended up the stewards of the series, releasing their first version in 2016. Now, we get the newest edition, a ‘standalone sequel’ set 200 years after the events of Coriolis: The Third Horizon.
Coriolis won accolades for being a solidly original sci-fi setting, and The Great Dark carries on that legacy by managing to be different even from the version of the game that came before it. At the same time, Free League didn’t mess with the formula of the YZE mechanics too much; we’re staying closer to home with the version of the mechanics established in Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands than many other recent YZE games have. While I don’t think that The Great Dark is going to win over all existing Coriolis fans, I do think that its combination of strong premise and continued originality is going to help it make a case for itself, either on its own or sitting on the shelf next to all of your Third Horizon books.
Continue reading Coriolis: The Great Dark Review“One year ago the Rift opened and the Kaiju attacked. It tore our cities apart, rampaging for days until we finally dropped the bomb. We killed the beast but lost so much in the process. We knew this was only the beginning so we built the Mechs: giant war machines, the pinnacle of human engineering, and our only hope for survival. The Rift is reponing. More Kaiju are coming, but this time will be different. Your Home depends on you. Are you ready, Pilot?”
This is HOME, the Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking RPG for 1-4 players from Deep Dark Games!
Continue reading HOME Review – Mechs, Monsters, and Mapmaking
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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 