Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Meet the Campaign

Meet the Campaign: Forbidden Stairs

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I love mashups. Whether in music, film, or elsewhere, a good mashup takes the best parts of its two (or more) constituent works and makes them even better by putting them in a different context. Mashups work just as well in RPGs. Shadowrun, a mashup of fantasy and cyberpunk, has been drawing players in for 35 years. Rifts, arguably an attempt to mash up everything the designer could think of, has created many more fond memories than its ruleset would suggest. For today, though, I’m going to dig into a more literal mashup, a setting where two worlds collide: an RPGnet thought experiment and proto-setting called The Long Stair.

As recorded in a long thread started over fifteen years ago, The Long Stair was intended to be a combination of ‘spec ops dungeon crawls’, Cold War shenanigans, and a little sprinkling of cosmic horror as D&D creatures made it ‘up the stair’ into the real world. While it’s certainly not the only way to do it, this setting illustrates a very well realized example of worldbuilding from a thought experiment, in this case the idea of sending modern-day operatives into a D&D dungeon.

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Articles, Editorial

What can we say about RPGs?

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This is my eighth year of writing for Cannibal Halfling Gaming. On one hand, everything I’ve done here has blown up beyond my wildest expectations; the quantity, quality, and audience of my writing are all better than I could have imagined back in 2016 when I asked Seamus to join his project. At the same time, though, the journey often comes with the feeling that we still aren’t doing anything of the scale or ambition to be worthwhile. Some of this is just imposter syndrome, to be clear. Some of it, though, is borne from frustrations that come with being a content creator for a niche hobby and insisting on using the written word to do it.

As Seamus spoke about recently in The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs, there are limits to what we can do on our budget of approximately nothing; we both have full-time jobs and writing for a site like this must be fun and/or fulfilling even before it is useful if we’re to continue doing it. At the same time, there are things we have to say, and having no budget also means we aren’t beholden to anyone. Things are changing, though; we’re changing. When I wrote that very first article about PbtA I was 29 years old; I’m 36 now. That is a huge step away from the core audience of tabletop RPGs, and as our entire millennial generation now sits above the first standard deviation of age for a gamer we need to think long and hard about our continued relevance (or inevitable descent into grognardism).

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: January, 2024

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Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2024! We’re just out of the weird, liminal part of December, so excuse me if I’m still a little longwinded and full of cheese. Nonetheless, we have a number of campaigns to talk about, including one very large one.

It is a new year, and Shannon Appelcline released his annual Year in Review over at the Designers and Dragons website (a move from the article’s usual home on RPGnet). While the article covers much of the past year’s news very concisely, I want to call your attention to the top Kickstarters segment about ¾ of the way through the article. The top three campaigns of 2023 were all third party supplements for 5e. Since Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk began six years ago, there were only two years where the majority of the top 5 best funded campaigns weren’t 5e supplements, 2018 and 2022. Even more damning, the only supplements in these lists which I still hear people discuss in social media in any fashion were all authored by the company which is currently running the largest campaign in this article. At least this new one isn’t (technically) D&D.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 12/30/23

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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, discussions from elsewhere online, and something From the Archives.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 12/30/2023

  1. Scion Second Edition: Once and Future
  2. Candela Obscura Core Rulebook
  3. Traveller: Wrath of the Ancients
  4. D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
  5. Old Pavis (II): The Good, the Bad & the Rowdy (RuneQuest)

Top News Stories

Here in the last hours of 2023, the newsroom is quiet. From all of us at Cannibal Halfling, have a happy new year! Stay safe, play some games, we’ll be back next week.

From the Archives

The Mistborn Adventure Game from Crafty Games is coming to an end – the digital versions will no longer be available to purchase after tomorrow, December 31st, so they’re all at a pretty steep discount. Relevance to the CHG Archives? The review of the core game was the first article posted here at the same time as on the Mad Adventurers Society, as opposed to being ported over from the MAS Archive for preservation.

Discussion of the Week

Ending a 15 year Game Group: Keeping up any social group is tough; how many of your friends from high school have you called recently? Arguably a gaming group is even tougher, what with constantly trying to balance everyone’s schedules and play preferences for the months or years it takes to run a good campaign. While this discussion has some good subthreads about maintaining groups and getting back on the horse, as another member of a long running group I’m here to empathize with the OP, and pour one out for their group.

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, Level One Wonk

Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2023

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Happy holidays! 2023 is ending, and what a year it’s been. In a lot of ways, 2023 has been a bit quieter here than previous years; while COVID refuses to go away we’ve all lurched back towards normalization, and most of the upheaval in games came from picking up the pieces of events that happened in 2022. Twitter is dead, essentially; anyone who’s attempted to use the site knows that any attempt to see through the haze of algorithmic mud only results in, at best, the absence of continued conversation. Of course, RPG discussion continues, you just need to look a little harder to find it.

Casting a longer shadow over RPG news of the year was Wizards of the Coast. Starting with the OGL debacle and ending with a swathe of layoffs, things were rough this year for everyone’s favorite RPG monopolist. It does mean, though, that my prediction made last year about major players and rent-seeking were correct; MCDM, Kobold Press, Darrington Press and others are all fielding fantasy RPGs intended to be an alternative to D&D. This does mean that whatever happens with the revised D&D rulebooks coming out in 2024 is anyone’s guess; even the home run of Baldur’s Gate 3 has effectively been squandered on the tabletop side.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles

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Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Advancement for GURPS

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As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.

That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.

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