Tag Archives: rpg discourse

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 5/1/2021

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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 5/1/21

  1. Dune: Adventures in the Imperium Core Rulebook
  2. Stargrave: Science Fiction Wargames in the Ravaged Galaxy
  3. Worlds Without Number
  4. Hard Wired Island
  5. Cyberpunk Red

Top News Stories

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.

Discussion of the Week

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.

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 4/17/21

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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 4/17/2021

  1. Dune – Adventures in the Imperium Core Rulebook
  2. Worlds Without Number
  3. Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Bestiary
  4. Cyberpunk Red
  5. Sentinel Comics Core Rulebook

Top News Stories

The Orr Report is here: Roll20 released the Orr Report, their report of internal play statistics, for Q1 2021. With the uncategorized numbers still north of 13% for both campaigns and players, we have a consistent reminder that this data tells us pretty much nothing other than literally what’s going on on Roll20. D&D 5e is still above 50% in both the campaign and account rates, and interestingly Pathfinder is beating Pathfinder 2e to a measly 1/20th of 5e. The growth numbers are slightly more indicative, though oddly Burning Wheel tops that list with a staggering 300% growth rate quarter-over-quarter. In the full list you can get juicy but completely meaningless tidbits like how Degenesis is tied with Eclipse Phase, and that Electric Bastionland has the same player count as Feast of Legends, better known as the licensed Wendy’s RPG.

Discussions of the Week

Matt Colville of MCDM Productions has some thoughts about the term ‘homebrew’ and where it fits into the range of creations available in the RPG sphere right now. Justin Alexander of Atlas Games has a response. Both threads are worth reading.

We talk a lot about the biggest Kickstarter campaigns in the RPG world, but ENWorld compiled the biggest RPG Kickstarter creators, including 19 creators whose total take between all their campaigns was over $1 million. Lots of 5e content creators here, but Free League, Monte Cook Games, and Onyx Path take the 1, 2, and 3 spots. In an interesting twist, only one creator on this entire list has a single PbtA project, and that’s Evil Hat with Thirsty Sword Lesbians. When you look into Magpie Games, though, and their rather unfortunate decision to unify their Kickstarter marketing so late in the company’s lifecycle, you might note that they could easily be a missing 20th creator (even just adding Bluebeard’s Bride and Masks, technically ‘created’ by Marissa Kelly and Brendan Conway respectively, would be enough to push Magpie onto the list).

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

Articles, Editorial

The Trouble With Discourse

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For as long as tabletop RPGs have existed, people have wanted to talk about them. At the very very beginning we had amateur press associations (APAs), zines, and good old mailing lists; today we have forums, Discord, and Twitter. As our media have changed, so too has how we talk about games and what ends up coming to the forefront of any day’s given discussion. Discussing RPGs is very much like discussing anything else, except the number of people involved is often much smaller. Combine this with the excessive bandwidth of our platforms, and…well, let’s say I could cause way more of an uproar on Twitter with the right mention than anyone ever could have writing an inflammatory letter to Dragon Magazine.

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