Tag Archives: TTRPG

Stewpot: Tales from A Fantasy Tavern Backerkit Review

The tavern is the fulcrum point of the adventuring lifestyle. It’s where wandering heroes can find food and shelter after weeks out in the wilderness, it’s where quests can often begin… and it’s where quite a few stories find their happy ending. After all, being an adventurer is a tough life. Many adventurers, whether they retire after a successful career or call it quits early, get the idea to be the ones running the tavern, providing the same things they needed back when to a younger generation. It can take some doing, however, integrating back into settled society after a life living on the road and by sword and spell. How do you let go of who you were, and who will you become? Let’s have a taste of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern from Takuma Okada, now on Backerkit with Evil Hat Productions!

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Ewen Cluney Interview

Ewen Cluney [pronounced Aaron Cluney] has worked on many notable games; he translated Maid RPG and Golden Sky Stories, wrote the Ghostbusters retroclone Spooktacular, and has created original games such as Kagegami High, Angel Project, and Pix. Cannibal Halfling contributor Sabrina TVBand sat down with Cluney after writing about Maid RPG and Spooktacular to ask him about his work.

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Spooktacular Adventure Writing: Part 2

Adventure Design

Before we get started, here’s a link to Part 1 in case you missed it. There is an idea that rules-lite games don’t require adventures and scenarios the way crunchier games do. I think this is an idea shared mostly by younger gamers, because modern games that use Powered by the Apocalypse designs generally encourage the GM to build things improvisationally with players.

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The Facility – A Breathless Choose Your Own Mad Science Adventure

You awaken, cold and in the dark. Fumbling around by low blue lights in a coffin shaped pod. You pull yourself out of the box, and in the dark see the faces of others. You are all wearing loose fitting white clothing and laceless shoes. Hospital patients? You peer into the dark, seeing little but hearing the sound of dripping, running water and distant machinery. You gather what you can, knowing that something is hunting you. It will be here soon.

Wait.

Can you remember who you are?

Welcome to The Facility by Galen Pejeau!

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Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 23 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 1

I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together… On a ship named Progressive, three bounty hunters down on their luck jump at the chance to score big at the House of Dice casino, in orbit over the Jovian moon Europa. Rather than rolling the dice at the tables, though, they’ll be gambling on whether or not they can track down a culprit who is already in the system…

Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 1!

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World Ending Game – Saying Goodbye With Style

“Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.” Longtime readers might recall I’ve written about saying goodbye to characters before, but that was largely in a ‘how to remember and treasure them’ way. The reasoning behind that article is, however, the same one that drew me to check out the subject of this one: the attachment to characters that we’ve created and a desire for closure as we leave them, and the snapshot of their lives that we played out, behind. This is a look at World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin.

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Spooktacular Adventure Writing: Part 1

This is a vague sequel to the Maid RPG post published here recently. Spooktacular is a retroclone of the 80s Ghostbusters role-playing game written by Ewen Cluney, who not only translated Maid RPG but also wrote an original game, Kagegami High, that mixes Maid RPG‘s mechanics with the ones found in Ghostbusters.

I decided to write an original adventure for when I would eventually run Spooktacular for my players. This was a problem for me, because I live by the Mythbusters credo; if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

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A Survey of Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs

I recently felt the urge to find a rules-lite system for playing superhero games. Like most nerds I love superheroes; it’s a very unique genre bursting with its own weird tropes and traditions. It’s not surprising that superhero games are popular in the TTRPG space.

What did surprise me as I began to search for a game is that there are a lot of superhero RPGs out there. I found over 25 games that seemed compelling, at least at a glance, and that’s just rules-lite games; there are even more games if you include crunchier systems. But crunchy games aren’t the focus of this piece.

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Zine Month 2024 Round-Up

Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling sounds), but as has been tradition I’m taking a look beyond the white-green halls of the original ZQ to see what other excellent projects can be found in the wider Zine Month 2024.

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The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs

Usually we keep any mention of the Wider TTRPG Discourse to the Discussions section of the Weekend Update, but there’s an exception to everything. Supposedly Matt Colville said some things on a stream earlier this week? I’m sure he did, the man’s got a lot to talk about, he’s got a Kickstarter going on that I’m sure Aaron will talk more about in January’s Crowdfunding Carnival. Of course then the topic got sucked into the ouroboros of social media, starting with Twitter’s rotting alive husk, and do you think anyone is providing any links to said stream? No, of course not. Doesn’t matter, though, because The Discourse spins on, and its latest incarnation is, broadly, this:

Reviewing a game after reading it versus reviewing a game after playing it.

Oh. Oh wow. Are… are we The Discourse?

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