Tag Archives: Review

Articles, The Independents

Alice is Missing – A Silent Roleplaying Game Review

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Silent Falls is a small coastal town in the heart of Northern California. It’s quiet here, and since the recession a few years ago, people are not as friendly as they used to be. It’s been a rough few years for everyone. Alice Briarwood is a junior at Franklin Academy – the local high school – with a pretty decent number of acquaintances and friends, but as dawn rises on the first morning of winter break, nobody has seen or heard from Alice in three days. A friend returns to Silent Falls and reaches out, wondering at Alice’s silence, sparking off an effort by her loved ones to find her.  However, this is no normal storytelling game; during play, you won’t say a word. Instead, as characters scatter across Silent Falls to find Alice, a text group chat will be the only way to tell your tale. This is Alice is Missing – A Silent Roleplaying Game.

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Articles, Editorial

Exploring Eberron Review

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Raat shi anaa. The story begins. Rising from the Last War brought Keith Baker’s dungeon punk setting of Eberron back to 5th Edition in hardcover form, but it was the earlier Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron that first brought a world of pulp, noir, and wide magic to the latest version of Dungeons and Dragons – and it also opened up the door for anyone to create Eberron content on the DM’s Guild. When I talked with Baker at PAX Unplugged 2019, the curious implications of that came up. Since it made it to the final three of the Setting Search in 2002 Wizards of the Coast has owned Eberron; while Baker was often brought back to work on supplements and novels, the final creative control didn’t belong to him. He could talk about ‘his’ Eberron, and thankfully did so quite often and at length, building a great rapport with the community, but plenty of material he came up with would never see the pages of a hardcover book. The Wayfinder’s Guide changed that, and now we have Exploring Eberron, Rising’s “perfect companion” straight from the man himself. So let’s go through chapter by chapter and section by section to see how an already big world had even more in its uncharted depths!

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Articles, Editorial

Genesys In-Depth

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Back in November of 2017, Fantasy Flight Games released Genesys. Both Seamus and I wanted a fair shake at reviewing it, and in the process we learned why not to do two-part reviews. Still, a lot of people read it and we continued being excited for the generic version of the Star Wars RPG that many of us at Cannibal Halfing had spent a fair amount of time playing. Now, nearly three years later, it’s a perfect time to revisit the system. Asmodee, Fantasy Flight’s parent company, has reorganized their RPG development resources. In the near future new Asmodee-owned RPGs will be released from the new Edge Studio imprint, and based on a panel at GenCon 2020 this will include new Genesys material (the IP referenced there was Twilight Imperium). For now, though, the Asmodee RPG pipeline is on pause, at least until the last couple Legend of the Five Rings supplements enter distribution. On my personal end, I have finally both played and GMed games in Genesys, which means it’s a good time to give Genesys the In-Depth treatment.

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Articles, Editorial

Eldritch Foundry – Custom Miniatures Review

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The struggle of searching for that one perfect miniature for your tabletop roleplaying game character, or making do with the next best thing, is not nearly the problem it used to be. 3D printing means you can make your own if you have the right tech, and several options have popped up over the years for doing the design and printing work for you. Rising from the tentacled depths is Eldritch Foundry, a relative newcomer in the field, to share some of their arcane secrets with us – so let’s make some minis and see what prints out!

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Kickstarter Wonk: September, 2020

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Welcome to Kickstarter Wonk for September! Back to school, post-GenCon rush, none of these events make sense this year, at least not in the normal way we usually understand them. Some of the pent-up demand for Kickstarters is starting to appear in the marketplace again, but everything remains muted, and likely will for some time. The five project article is going to be the norm for the foreseeable future, though luckily we’ve gotten past the point where getting five projects together took effort. Nonetheless, it’ll be a few months before we get back up to the quantity (of quality) that I was used to back when this series started. Even so, fear not! These five projects are worth a look; I even backed a few myself.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse into the Vault: Infomocracy

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A Glimpse into the Vault is one of the oldest features on Cannibal Halfling, giving us opportunities to look into our respective “vaults” at other media we consume. These articles have covered a range of different items, but tended to stay in the gaming space…until now. You see, my personal vault doesn’t have many board games in it, but I do live surrounded by books. And recently, I finished a book that is not only a great read, but has some pointed lessons that gamers can learn about worldbuilding.

Infomocracy is written by Malka Older and was first published in 2016. It tells the story of a world in the near future where most of the world is ruled over by a unified micro-democratic government. The population that participates is divided into “cententals” of 100,000 people, who each vote on a government to represent them. Each government has power based on the centenals which elect them, but there is special influence (and statistical benefits) afforded to a government able to win a “Supermajority” of these centenals. The story, which I’ll summarize soon, focuses on the lead-up to an election where such a Supermajority is in play.

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Articles, The Independents

Kids On Brooms Review

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We all know the series. The one with the boy who had a scar upon his forehead. The great tale of a chosen one and their band of friends going off to challenge the far too powerful evil and bring them to reckoning. It’s a story that spawned millions of fanfictions and fanart. Millions more in profits off spin-offs and merchandise. Oh! It’s also responsible for slingshotting a violent and disgusting transphobe to having her hateful opinions validated and listened to by wide audiences and those in power.

Yes, the Harry Potter series cannot be detached from the many actions of harm done by its creator. Death of the Author is an act of cowardice when used to simply continue liking something without ever fearing being criticized for it. There’s also the fact the books themselves are far from free of her problematic ideals. Be it the depictions of Goblins and the valid issues the Jewish community brought up in how they are portrayed in relation to harmful stereotypes of them. The oppression tourism and mishandling of the topic of slavery with relation to house elves. And many, MANY more that could fill up the brim of this article.

All in all, JK Rowling is not someone anyone should try to emulate. But that leaves the question of what should be done with the books that had such an impact on so many throughout the world. Harry Potter is something we can’t simply do away with. People will have the idea of it, of how it can be done better, on their mind quite often. So, what do we do?

Well, I don’t have the answer. I’m not a smart or genius woman. The fact I just used two words that mean the same thing separately should show that. But when it comes to RPGs, we may have the answer for how to quell that Harry Potter craving without having to whip up your own homebrew. And most importantly, how you can do it better than that shoddy TERF ever could.

Let’s step into the magical world, shall we?

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Articles, Editorial

Burning Wheel In-Depth

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Some RPGs are demanding. While you can’t homebrew D&D into anything, it is still flexible and doesn’t demand that you play it a specific way. Some games do. There is no end of teeth-gnashing about this; for some reason people take more issue with RPGs having set procedures than, say, board games. But, as the entire indie RPG community knows very well, making a game for a specific purpose and experience often nets you a better version of that experience than trying to simulate it with a ruleset designed with breadth in mind. I’ve been having some revelatory experiences with such a targeted game recently; I will say though that when I say “targeted game” and “specific experience”, most are imagining a zine, something small, not a 600 page hardback with red and gold filigree. Yeah, I’m talking about Burning Wheel.

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Articles, The Independents

The Independents: Free From the Yoke

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I miss the old days. Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. Things are better now, without a doubt. The Empire took everything from us that made us who we are. It ripped apart our most sacred monuments, it dismantled every part of our government that we prided ourselves in. It took our children away to be “reeducated”, they even took the spirit of the land itself away from us. But while they were directly in front of our faces, we hated them with unfettered ferocity. Before, in our old lives, you would have had a scion of a rival family that  you would have been obligated to feud with for tradition’s sake. Now, they were in the work camp right next to you, swinging the same pickaxe. At the end of the day you both were literally too tired to care. The Arbiter saw that and knew what he could do with it. We were able to unite, to ignore generations of contempt for each other because our contempt for the Empire was so much greater. After bitter struggle we have at least some measure of ourselves back, but we bear scars: monuments defiled, power structures crippled, refugees who barely remember their old lives pouring back. Even the magic of the land itself has begun to forget us. But as those things are far from normal, our old rivalries have begun anew as every old faction, necessary in our struggle, now wants their voice heard. While we’re Free from the Yoke, we risk forgetting a grave truth: the Empire is still out there. It has not forgotten.

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Articles, Editorial

Quest Review

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Dungeons and Dragons is the 800 pound gorilla of the role-playing game world. For what is arguably such a small slice of the space (swords and sorcery fantasy), D&D is utterly dominant, commanding a plurality of the hobby’s mind and market share (and that’s a majority if you count all games which are direct derivatives, like Pathfinder and many OSR games). For this reason, when someone lists “overtake D&D” as one of their design goals, even if it’s just part of a Twitter thread, your ears perk up. Indeed, TC Sottek did post those words, in that order, on Twitter. But people are listening. TC Sottek is the designer of Quest.

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