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.

An interesting thing I’ve noticed in the last few years is that another RPG term has been experiencing linguistic drift. I talked about this a little in the context of the term ‘heartbreaker’ a while back, and now the term that we’re seeing shift is ‘railroading’. At first I was thinking about this in terms of linguistic precision (and as such risking becoming an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud), but the more I thought about it the more interesting I realized the implications were of the drift.

I've started running Urban Shadows recently, and it's one of only a few games I've decided to run again in the last few years. How can I do games better a second time, and will I be revisiting more games now?

The thing that separates the TTRPG hobby from most others is commitment. The oft-stated platonic ideal of TTRPG gameplay, the long-running campaign, requires you and three to five other people to carve out time on at least a monthly (and preferably more frequent) basis for possibly years in order to play through a game of typical length. Although one-shots certainly exist, as well as con games where you need only bring yourself, fact is that if we talk about how mainstream RPGs are designed, the campaign is how they’re meant to be used.

The time between Labor Day and the Autumnal Equinox is a bit liminal no matter how old you are, but at the beginning of adolescence it was both my time to look forward towards school but also, perhaps more importantly, look back towards camp.

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.

There’s an old axiom, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Even in creative pursuits this still sometimes comes to pass, where the only way to press forward on multiple ideas is to combine them into a single much wilder idea. Such was my solution to a constraint presented by my gaming group’s annual “Beach Weekend”, our excursion to Delaware to play RPGs and drink beer for three days straight that’s been going on (mostly) uninterrupted since 2012.

A word of advice: Don’t wait to take any of your company-issued PTO until the end of September.

ALT: Key & Peele: A-A-Ron Classroom Skit

Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for September! Even though I didn’t get the summer off, I can sympathize with not wanting to go back to school as we head towards Labor Day here in the states. Turn…

A short and late post this week; let's talk about all the literal (and figurative) falling block towers.

As summer wraps up, I get this distinct feeling that the remainder of the year accelerates; autumn rushes by you and all of a sudden it’s December and time to think about an entire new year that will also go too quickly. I don’t think it’s just me, but in the last couple of years I’ve had a headline event every month from August to December and that certainly makes the back half of the year feel faster.

Crowdfunding began to change the RPG world in 2012, when Monte Cook Games campaigned Numenera. At the time Monte Cook was best known for his work at Wizards of the Coast, and a new game with new mechanics in an unfamiliar science-fantasy setting was not what one would call a sure bet. On Kickstarter, though, the project gathered more than half a million dollars and made it clear that the DIY financing opportunities presented by crowdfunding were very real and very useful.

Got sick this weekend, unusually and surprisingly. There's no post this week, but I'll be back at it in another day or two.

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.

I have been working on a setting for a future campaign for a few months now. It’s perhaps not that far outside of existing conceits, but it’s still different; enough so that I’ve been puzzling about what and how much information to give my players. Luckily I have a few touchstones; the idea that got me writing was a Dying Earth setting, but one that was kind of an unholy mashup of…

Major news, as Paizo and DriveThruRPG announced today that the full catalog of Paizo products would be available on DriveThruRPG.

Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston offer insights as Brookline strives to eliminate crashes resulting in deaths and serious injuries.

Parasocial relationships are a weird artifact of the streaming age, but parasocial becoming social is not a part of being an RPG blogger I have ever gotten used to.

This pre-order bundle contains both the hardcover and PDF versions.Shipping for the book is expected to begin August 10.The PDF will be delivered immediately. GURPS lets you be anyone you want in any ...

Every time I plan a new game, it’s an explosion of possibility where anything can happen. But when I’m sitting alone getting everything ready is the exact moment I’m most afraid that all we’ll have is a wet lump of clay.

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.

I wrote a little fiction as I did some prep for my online group's next game: Urban Shadows, set in Pittsburgh.

It’s a Tuesday night. The Steve Jackson Games forums have over 220 active users right now, and Mongoose Publishing’s forums have nearly 600. While sandwiched between a few anime-styled games, DriveThruRPG’s top sellers are heavily represented by vintage properties. Their top 10 is split between four anime games (Fabula Ultima, two Twilight Sword books, and ‘The Legend of Heroes’) and six systems with original publication dates between 1977 and 1987 (Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Traveller, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay).