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.

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 5/22/2021

1. Children of the Blood
2. Galder’s Gazetteer
3. Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
4. Worlds Without Number
5. Stars Without Number: Revised

Top News Stories

D&D had its best year ever: Wizards of the Coast has reflected on D&D’s 2020 performance, calling it the ‘best year ever’ for the brand. D&D sales grew 33% year-over-year, for the seventh consecutive year of growth. In addition to being impressive performance for any entertainment brand, 2020 in particular illustrates the strength of D&D (and to a lesser extent the hobby) in the face of the complications brought about by COVID-19.

Discussion of the Week

Twitter Main Character the First: Game Designers Age Out: Two designers best known for work they had done in the 1990s made, according to our crack analyst team, “really dumb” statements. Fortunately, they can be safely ignored, along with anything they post.

Twitter Main Character the Second: The Critical Role Brigade: Quote-tweeting someone exposes them to all of your followers. Now for me, with not even 200 followers on my main, that doesn’t matter, but when you have 170,000 followers and your most popular work is known for toxic fans? Don’t do that. Critical Role shouldn’t be considered above reproach anyway, but when those who have gained influence use that influence poorly, it doesn’t reflect well on the brand.

Alcohol and Networking in the Games Industry: Another topic that came up on Twitter this week was the role of alcohol in networking. Having business meetings while drinking is de rigueur across many industries (I have some tales about the energy industry from my day job life) but it has negative consequences, including edging out non-drinkers or those not comfortable in bar-type settings, as well as creating a degree of permission for bad behavior. At least in the energy industry few ‘real’ meetings happen at a bar, game designers and freelancers may not be so lucky when their local con is the only opportunity to get an in-person meeting with companies they want to work for. Cons should work on having more sober networking options, but game industry types should also reflect on the “bar-con” practice and consider stepping away.

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

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 5/8/2021

1. Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
2. Worlds Without Number
3. Yogg-Sothoth’s Children, a Korean Call of Cthulhu supplement
4. Hard Wired Island
5. Stargrave: Science Fiction Wargames in the Ravaged Galaxy

Top News Stories

Big Bad Con to be Held Online: With the pandemic nowhere near ‘over’, the announcement that Big Bad Con would be held online this year was not surprising, but potentially sad for those eagerly awaiting the return of in-person events. That said, kudos to the con organizers for making the health and safety of their attendees a priority.

Apple Lawyers call Itch games ‘Unspeakable Content’: The Epic Games/Apple Lawsuit, already arguably a farce, has now featured the lawyer for Apple calling some games on Itch, which is accessible through Epic Games, “both offensive and sexualized”. In response, Itch stated (possibly joking) on their Twitter account that the adult content tag would be renamed ‘unspeakable games’, in response to another particularly hyperbolic statement.

Discussions of the Week

The Slow Weird Return to In-Person Play: Speaking of pandemic, the Indie Game Reading Club has posted Paul Beakley’s meditation on all the things that make playing online great…and how odd it’s going to feel when we return to our normal tables. As someone who’s run an online group for over a decade…there’s nothing saying you can’t keep it going even after this is all over!

Fair Pay is Still a Debate Apparently: The discussion of freelancer pay bubbled back to the discourse surface after a Kickstarter campaign advertised a stretch goal for paying their freelancers five cents a word instead of the original three. While this was rightly met with condemnation, the broader discussion melted down in the face of, well, Twitter. None of the longer threads are really worth linking, but the Cannibal Halfling position is straightforward: Freelancers should be paid more, 10 cents per word is, while not necessarily ‘enough’, at least a starting point, and royalty and profit-sharing models, while not a panacea, should become more widely discussed and offered, especially in the small press world.

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