Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tech Tree

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In RimWorld, the tech tree is the conceit which allows the game to work with its ‘societal drift’ conceit. Tribes of nearly cavemen, “modern” colonies, and ultra-tech feudal lords all coexist thanks to a set of technological ‘research projects’ which separate each colony by level of development. In our System Hack, we’re going to need the same tech tree conceit, but the underlying mechanics are going to be quite a bit different.

Before we go any further, I want to make sure you know that Cortex Prime is now available on DriveThruRPG. While digital versions of the game have been available before, you can now finally own a PDF version unfettered by a walled garden app which made the game significantly less accessible. With Cortex Prime finally available in the broader ecosystem, my hope is that there’s much more interest in this and a whole host of other projects using the system.

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Articles, Editorial

Extra! Five years of Weekend Update

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In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.

Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.

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Articles, Editorial

Critical Role for All of Us: Finding Practical Tools in the Monolith

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Well, it happened: I got hooked into arguably the most gaming table in the community. And…it’s kind of hard to write about.

Let’s be honest: at this point, Critical Role has long since left behind the status of “home game” and is more a monolithic cultural force. We here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming have a let’s-call-it complicated relationship to both D&D (and Hasbro). I won’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoy D&D but have never actually seen anyone play it “out of the box” with no alterations. Every iteration of it I have seen has changed the rules to some extent, and there are systems that do the parts that I enjoy a better way. But I really can’t ignore the cultural significance that it holds and Critical Role timed itself well, riding the then newly-released 5th edition and captured the zeitgeist. And yet, for all that I couldn’t ignore the memes and an animated series being released I never actually sat down to watch it. There was just so much both with lore and a sheer crushing number of hours that made sitting down to catch up on a campaign seemed an insurmountable wall. 

And then, the team decided to do something completely different: they reset the lore, brought in a new GM, fleshed out the cast to double its original size and adopted a West Marches inspired campaign design. And credit to them for making that choice. I can imagine the temptation to stick with the winning formula until the golden goose was dead (although they did stick with D&D instead of, say, Daggerheart, but that’s another topic altogether). 

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Satisficing and RPG Design

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Economics is the study of resource allocation and management; behavioral economics is the study of how theoretical economics meets practical, human reality. The split between theory and practice is an entire subfield of economics, and arguably other disciplines benefit from the same thing. The broader study of the alignment of human decision making is called decision science, and it takes the P-Q charts of economics and amplifies them with psychology and game theory.

Tabletop roleplaying games are no strangers to decision science, both within and outside the context of playing the game itself. This week I was inspired to look back at one of the most influential recent schools of RPG theory thanks to the Taskerland review of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012 by William J. White. The review starts with a reread of Ron Edwards’ essay System Does Matter in the context of the book, and restates the thesis of the essay more clearly than most commentators do nowadays: While good games come from good GMs and good players, better games come when those two are aligned with the right game mechanics and systems. This dovetails with notions of GNS and accusations of gameplay ‘incoherence’, but the issue, as the Taskerland review points out, is less with Edwards’ description than his prescription: Aim to play more narrowly aligned games with players who share your priorities.

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