I returned, once again, to the halls of PAX East this weekend! When I wasn’t just wandering around, reading RPG books, or running sessions at Games on Demand (two sessions each of A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase and Fabula Ultima this time) I was sitting down to try games out. In case you’re attending PAX East 2026 Sunday Edition, I’ve provided the booth numbers you can find these games at to peruse them, but by and large I expect this will be something for folks to follow up on afterwards – so please peruse the many fine and elegantly crafted links to these fine and elegantly crafted games!
Tag Archives: TTRPG
System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2
Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.
RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.
Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2
Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing
There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.
Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.
Continue reading Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing
Weekend Update: 3/14/2026
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 3/14/2026
- Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
- Traveller: The Core Expeditions
- Outgunned Superheroes
- Public Access
- Traveller: Vehicle Handbook Update 2026
From the Archives
About this week seven years ago, we started taking a look at stories very closely, a thread that would wind its way across many articles and musings from then to now. From the archives this week is Level One Wonk: Narrative, a discussion of prescriptive and emergent narrative and likely the first time we reference simulation video games like RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress.
Discussion of the Week
Apologia for plain paragraphs: Sam Sorensen wrote a blogpost comparing heavily broken up, bulleted game text with minimally formatted prose, and based on the quote replies (linked above) it perhaps did not go the way that was intended. Reading through the post there’s two intermingled arguments: That RPG designers do bullets and secondary formatting poorly (likely true, requires bringing receipts) and that minimally formatted prose is better than highly structured bullets (non-falsifiable, controversial). As usual, the real answer is almost certainly to use both, and to learn the underlying layout skills that allow you to make both prose and lists as usable as possible.
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.
Breaking Down Random Generation
Random character generation is an artifact of older editions of D&D, with the OSR and other throwback movements embracing it wholeheartedly. In the present day both old-school D&D derivatives as well as the range of games derived from WFRP’s take on d100 mechanics are still locked in with random generation, with the classic ‘roll 3d6 six times in order’ being both common mechanic and a meme. The problem with random generation in this way is that putting characters arbitrarily at different places on a probability distribution, in effect making characters better or worse based on nothing but luck, is a pretty poor way to accomplish the ultimate goal of random character generation, which is to introduce variability to the type of characters that players ultimately play.
In reviewing how a number of different games handle random character generation, specifically random attribute generation, I can’t help but think that these designers know that players don’t like random generation and don’t actually like rolling bad characters. It’s widely known what the most common response to early D&D’s attribute requirements for certain character classes was: Cheat! It therefore stands to reason that games which still commit to random generation either create a system that employs randomness more deliberately, or create a system which softens the blow of the dice.
Continue reading Breaking Down Random GenerationWeekend Update: 3/7/2026
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 3/27/2026
- Traveller: The Core Expeditions
- Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
- BattleTech: Force Manual: Mercenaries
- Traveller: Vehicle Handbook Update 2026
- Storypath Ultra Core Manual
Top News Stories
D&D 2024 is now officially called ‘5.5e’: I suppose this is news.
From the Archives
At this time in 2018, designer Fraser Simons was kickstarting his follow-up to The Veil, Cyberpunk FitD game Hack the Planet. While perhaps not the most ambitious extension of the mechanics from Blades in the Dark, the game took the setting building and storytelling present in The Veil and expanded it, envisioning a dystopian future city where the residents were only protected from the ravages of climate change by mitigations from massive corporations. The PCs, of course, are out to change that. From the archives this week is The Independents: Hack the Planet.
Discussion of the Week
I wish it was easier to go broad in this hobby: It’s good to occasionally remind people, as I like to say, that there’s a wide world of games out there, and at a wide range of price points. Fate, one of the cornerstones of 2010s indie, is Pay-What-You-Want. All of the ‘Without Number’ games have free versions. Many, many more expensive trad games have starter sets, which we are big proponents of here. And this isn’t even getting into things like Bundle of Holding, massive itch.io bundles, and other (completely legal) secondary markets. When accounting for inflation, AD&D 1e cost $180…we don’t have to accept “sticker shock” as a reason to devalue game designers’ work.
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.
Weekend Update: 2/21/2026
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 2/21/2026
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite
- Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
- Outgunned Superheroes
- Legend in the Mist – Hearts of Ravensdale
- ICRPG Power Tools: Game Mastery Book
Top News Stories
IEEPA tariffs struck down as illegal: In big news for American consumers as well as gamers, the US Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision that President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to levy tariffs was unlawful. Trump immediately lashed out with an executive order using Section 122 of the Trade Act to impose 10% tariffs worldwide, but 10% is lower than essentially all of the tariff rates from IEEPA and is also capped at 150 days. The dust is still settling (and refunds are, while legally entitled, going to be hard to get), but this is a win for anyone faced with importing goods from abroad.
From the Archives
On this day eight years ago, we were talking about the end of the world in an, er, more fun context than national news. From the archives this week is Level One Wonk: Post-Apocalypse, a whirlwind tour around themes and useful mechanics for the genre.
Discussion of the Week
Two of my players just broke up: While extreme, the OP here reminds us that scheduling continues to be the beast with the highest challenge rating of them all. There is among the responses the secret I’ve used to keep a group going for over two decades: “Play with whoever shows up. All the time, every time.”
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.
System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 1
It’s time to move from theory to practice. As we move on to the next stage of this System Hack, I’m going to start taking the elements we discussed in the first set of articles and make them into actual game elements. For today, that means character creation. When we discussed characters for this System Hack, we landed on some pretty straightforward prime sets: Attributes, Skills, and Distinctions. As such, we’re going to lock in our Attributes and Skills. For Distinctions, the number I’d want to write is perhaps a bit high to cover comprehensively in one article, but I am going to lock in what the three Distinctions each character has are, what they do mechanically, and how they’ll be roughly categorized.
Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 1
Legend of the Five Rings: Imperials Histories Volume I & II
We tend to look at new things here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Our mission of putting games and gamers together often takes the form of introducing something that might be unknown in front of someone who may be interested. But what about sharing new things to love about something you already love, something that provides ideas for play that had not been considered before? I didn’t know it when I first encountered it but these two volumes, Imperial Histories I & II, had been powerful influences on games I played and still remember fondly.
Continue reading Legend of the Five Rings: Imperials Histories Volume I & IIWeekend Update: 1/24/2026
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: 1/24/2026
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