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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/19/2024Tag Archives: RPG
Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review
A world, and a mirror of worlds. Atop four giant elephants atop a giant turtle rests Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – where the most dangerous barbarian is an old barbarian, where fleeing your destiny is the surest way to run into it, where a million-to-one chance always works out, where a single humble hero will always win while outnumbered, and where you have to practice believing in the little lies (stories) in order to make the big ones become true (justice, mercy, etc.. It’s been the subject of Roundworld-made roleplaying games before, but sometimes stories like to repeat themselves with a new twist, and this time there’s something of a primer. This is the Discworld Quickstart Guide from Modiphius Entertainment!
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On Escapism
I think I’m getting tired of cyberpunk.
I’ve been deep into the cyberpunk genre since at least high school, reading, watching, and playing everything I could find. It was science fiction that actually resonated with me; computers and body modification and AI all seemed much more pressing, more real than space travel and distant planets, let alone magic and wizards and vampires. When I played Cyberpunk 2020, something I started doing at about 16 years old, I embraced the dystopia of the setting and leaned into the idea that a better way to play the game was a grittier, grimier way to play the game. Even as I lightened up a bit about black market modifiers and blunt trauma damage, the game was an inherently grim one. One of my gaming friends in college reflected on a Cyberpunk game we played where his character was killed at the hands of another PC, the second of a series of exchanges that killed half the party in the span of two sessions. It was actually a great ending for how much intrigue had built up between the characters, but it could still be summed up in three words:
“The future sucks.”
Those are the watchwords of not just Cyberpunk 2020, but arguably the entire genre. Neuromancer is not a book about a hero who changes the world, it’s about a character who, through acting in his own self-interest, releases one of the biggest existential threats the world has yet seen and then nothing happens. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, George Alec Effinger and other preeminent cyberpunk authors were at their best when writing characters who accepted the worlds around them even as the readers were drawn in to how alien yet upsettingly familiar they were. Good cyberpunk made you think because, like all good science fiction, it was the issues of the present cast upon a vision of the future. The problem is that those visions of the future are here, and yeah, the future sucks.
Continue reading On EscapismWeekend Update: 10/12/2024
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.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 10/12/2024
- Cyberpunk RED: Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Dwarf Player’s Guide
- Lands of RuneQuest: Dragon Pass
- BattleTech Universe
- Aether Nexus: Fantasy Mecha Roleplaying Game
Top News Stories
Hurricane Helene’s (and Milton’s) Impact on Tabletop: Rascal’s Rowan Zeoli writes:
“In the last two weeks, a pair of catastrophic storms have made landfall in the southeastern United States. Helene and Milton, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes respectively, have caused immense amounts of damage across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; both from their direct impact and the subsequent infrastructure destruction of these climate change-induced catastrophes. While Rascal is a publication about games, it is also a publication about people who love them—their lives, their passions, their hopes, their fears—and to go without acknowledging the effect of these storms would be a disservice to them, to you—our community of readers—and to anyone who believes there is a possibility for a better world. We must know what we are up against and how we can come together to keep each other safe.”
It’s a damn solid article with first hand accounts, community efforts, justified alarm, calls to action, and genuine hope.
From the Archives
As discussed in the Crowdfunding Carnival this month, Onyx Path is campaigning Curseborne, a different twist on the urban fantasy that typifies the World of Darkness…which is also (at least in part) published by Onyx Path. From the archives today we’ll look at another design house which double-dipped into Urban Fantasy, albeit in the opposite direction. While Magpie Games is well known for releasing Urban Shadows, a fantastic PbtA take on World of Darkness style urban fantasy, they also released Undying, focusing more specifically on vampires and taking a different (diceless) approach to PbtA mechanics. Check out Aki’s review.
Discussion of the Week
Is this hobby just wildly inaccessible to dyslexics and non-readers?: This week’s OP is working with teenagers with different learning disabilities, and even in spite of these disabilities they’re still using RPGs as a core activity in their program. It may not come up with all (or even most) of our gaming groups, but it is important to remember that delivering a game experience as a big book or multiple big books does lock out potential players; potential players who would be perfectly capable of the actual act of roleplay itself. It’s hardly just RPGs where accessibility is overlooked, but it’s one place that we as hobbyists can give some hard thoughts to.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.
Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 24 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2
3, 2, 1…
Forte, Ichigo, and Matias have collected some winnings at the House of Dice casino, but someone is tipping the scales – and it’s not in favor of the bounty hunters’ employer. As the chips and whiskey fly, cybernetic eyeballs are put through their paces, and oddly similar figures move through the crowd, will the crew of the Progressive figure out who’s rigging the game?
Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2!
Continue reading Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 24 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 2
Guide for the Perplexed: Scandinavian Game Stores
As some of you may have noticed, I took two weeks off at the end of September. During that time I was traveling, walking and taking trains in Scandinavia with my parents, my brother, and my partner Emily. We started in Stockholm, then visited Göteborg and Malmö before crossing the Øresund to go to Copenhagen. We also took a day trip to Uppsala in there; my parents were impressed at my initiative in planning to visit the city, but in all honesty 85% of my reasoning was that Vaesen is set there. Nevertheless. We visited some incredible cities, ate some incredible food, saw fantastic bicycle infrastructure, and spent two weeks doing something very different.
Not entirely different, though. Sweden is the home of Free League and Denmark is the origin country of LARP camp, so of course I couldn’t take a trip like this one without visiting some gaming stores. What I experienced was quite a bit different than the norm in the US…and to be honest, better in a lot of ways. Given that I had just gone over the landscape of RPG retail maybe a month before, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring the Guide for the Perplexed series to Scandinavia for a little bonus.
Continue reading Guide for the Perplexed: Scandinavian Game StoresWeekend Update: 10/5/2024
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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/5/2024
Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2024
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re firmly out of con season and we’re out from under the shadow of Wizards of the Coast trying to release a book. More broadly it seems that the rush to be the next d20 has also abated, which has meant more and more interesting campaigns this month! This was a very full crop with new campaigns shooting in almost by the hour as I was trying to write this thing. That also means there are a few solid campaigns out there I wasn’t able to get to; I’m both sorry I’m not able to cover everything but also glad I didn’t have much dross to read through to get up to ten campaigns this month. We’ll start with a dizzying four different major campaigns, representing The Gauntlet, Renegade Game Studios, Onyx Path, and a Youtube channel.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2024Weekend Update: 9/21/2024
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.
Rom Com Drama Bomb Review – Explosive Three Player Romantic Comedy
Love is strange. Sometimes it finds you at the office. Sometimes it finds you over a cup of coffee.
Sometimes it finds you with a bomb strapped to your heart and an evil maniac forcing you to perform in a fucked-up romantic comedy.
This is that third kind of love. This is Rom Com Drama Bomb, the explosive romantic comedy roleplaying game for three players by Elliot Davis!
Continue reading Rom Com Drama Bomb Review – Explosive Three Player Romantic Comedy
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