Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Editorial

DOGS Review

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Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard occupies a strange place in TTRPG history. The game’s thematic content relating to Mormonism in the wild west was unusual in itself, and it was the reason the game ultimately was removed from circulation by Baker. Games disappear all the time, but because Vincent Baker was an acclaimed designer even before he created Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard has gained a certain level of mystique. Of course, we live in the age of the internet. If you really want to find a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard, you can. But there’s a newer option that divorces the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard from its setting.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 6/8/2024

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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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 6/8/2024

  1. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit Pre-Order
  2. Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy
  3. Deathship One
  4. Fabula Ultima Game Master’s Toolkit
  5. Warhammer 40k: Imperium Maledictum Starter Set

Top News Stories

Roll20 acquires Demiplane: Roll20 has announced they’ve acquired Demiplane, a character-building software-as-a-service platform which seeks to compete with D&D Beyond in the broader RPG space. For now the services remain separate, although Roll20’s FAQ notes they’ve already received permission for cross-platform unlocks, which will likely entice Roll20 users to check out the Demiplane platform if they haven’t already. Roll20 notes a broader integration strategy, which is now less clear as the parent company will control no fewer than three completely separate platforms (Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and now Demiplane).

Mike Mearls in at Chaosium: Mike Mearls, a designer best known for mishandling contributions by known bad actors in the space (and some work on 5e), is now in at Chaosium. Hopefully they keep him far away from community management and contributor vetting roles.

From the Archives

This week my Facebook memories featured pictures of a gaggle of college friends from back in 2014, digging a hole on the beach and showing off a brace of bottles of limited edition beer. This is the gaming group that, back in 2010, arguably was the genesis of Cannibal Halfling as it provided the platform for a large number of contributors here (Seamus, Aaron, Aki, Geni) to play games together for the first time. From the archives this week we’re talking about the Long-term Gaming Group, and how and why to have one as a social mainstay both in and out of gaming.

Discussion of the Week

Learning RPGs really isn’t that hard: Sure, it’s easy to pick out threads that profess opinions that I personally agree with, but the discussion here is valuable too. A breadth of opinions on why RPGs are easy to learn, harder to learn, and the perceptions that encourage and discourage players from picking up new games.

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.

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2024

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for June! We’re just starting to creep into con season here in the US, and there is an attendant slowdown in major campaigns as a result. That said, there’s still a lot of energy in crowdfunding, and this month it felt pretty easy to come up with at least ten to cover. More of an issue were some of the campaigns themselves. Did you know I actually opened a campaign, started to write about it, and then had to actually Google the name of the game to find out that the campaign was for a fourth edition of the game, because that hadn’t been written anywhere in the campaign’s text? Don’t do that! Don’t assume we know anything about your game, because the fact is that unless your name is Mike Pondsmith or Mr. Paizo (or Gary Gygax, I suppose), we don’t! No one knows anything about your game! Anyways. There are some solidly interesting campaigns here, both from your larger studios and some completely new outfits. Let’s check them out.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

How do you become an RPG publisher?

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The RPG hobby is nearly 100% self-published. This makes sense on itch.io and when talking about the many solo designers with DBAs like ‘Sine Nomine Publishing’ or ‘Bastionland Press’, but it extends across the whole hobby. At no point did Mike Pondsmith submit Mekton to a publisher; he formed his own company, R. Talsorian Games (and had investors in his company, somewhat unusual then and much rarer now). Steve Jackson Games was formed, unsurprisingly, by Steve Jackson. Even TSR was just designers trying to get their games out into the world.

This dearth of publishers creates a problem for aspiring RPG designers: A complete lack of support services. You can hire an editor, artists, even a marketing consultant, but that’s money out of your pocket and a severe constraint for most designers who haven’t yet sold a game. That’s the reason the publisher model is so appealing: For a promise of future revenue, a publisher will provide a designer with all the resources they need to succeed. All the designer needs to do is bring them a game that all parties agree is good.

It works great for fiction, it’s been used much less often in the RPG world. Some designers who extend into publishing, companies like Evil Hat Productions, typically represent games by designers they’re already familiar with as a way to reduce downside risk. It’s a reasonable business strategy but it greatly diminishes the number of new games that can be elevated if fewer risks are taken to discover them. Others, like Indie Press Revolution, do a great service getting games into print and distributed but, once again, they’re curating existing games and designers more than discovering new ones. It all begs one question: Is there an effective business model to discover promising game designers and give them the resources they need to stand toe to toe with the big guys?

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Articles, System Split

System Split: War Never Changes

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The Fallout show on Amazon Prime is actually good, the latest video game property to successfully push back a decades-old curse that has sent similar adaptations plummeting to the bottom of box office rankings and critics’ opinions. And, like any good mass media property, the Fallout TV show has inspired interest in other formats. The contemporary video games were already big hits; with the newest one being six years old the tail effect has been relatively modest (both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 did re-enter Steam’s top 10 most played games, but that impact has already abated). In the smaller TTRPG world the impact on the official licensed Fallout RPG has been a bit more pronounced, with both the game’s core rulebook and its most recent supplement staying in the DriveThruRPG top ten for weeks now. Much as happened for Cyberpunk Red in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout is seeing a wave of renewed TTRPG interest.

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Articles, Editorial

Deathmatch Island Review

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Back in 2020 I reviewed the newest edition of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Agon. Agon is a fascinating game, taking the characters on an Odyssey-like journey of myth through a number of islands. Like Greek myth, though, the game has a strict structure and, barring a small chance of premature retirement, usually ends in the same way. It’s great for generating stories, but not what I’m typically looking for.

Deathmatch Island is based on Agon’s mechanics, but casts the strict structure differently. The structure of each island is because the characters are contestants in a game show, a twisted game show where physical challenges and loot boxes give way to a literal battle to the death. Survivors make their way from one island to another until they reach the end game with Production, the shadowy administrators of the whole thing, shaping the game based on how many social media followers each contestant gets. The last surviving contestant may win a big prize…or wake up on yet another island with a job offer they never could have imagined.

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