I’ve been thinking on this topic in one way or another for a long time, but have been reluctant to write on it. Gatekeeping is very real in most hobbies, and for the most part it’s toxic. What value does it have to tell someone going on 12mph rides trying to get in shape that they’re ‘not a real cyclist’? Being inclusive is how all hobbies grow and become friendlier, not fitting people to bullshit standards.

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.

Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gamin…

If you go by game release dates, 2026 is the year where Wizards of the Coast becomes the longest-running shepherd of Dungeons and Dragons. The release of 3e serves as an inflection point in how the game was designed, and as a historical note set the stage for the enormous surge in popularity enjoyed by both D&D and the TTRPG hobby as a whole in the following 26 years.

For 2026 I kicked off a new campaign with my main gaming group, at least in a manner of speaking. After playing a campaign using Apocalypse World: Burned Over for 18 sessions, one of my players triggered one of the new Burned Over mechanics, the ‘game changer’. I employed my ‘game changer’ of choice, which involved switching over the entire campaign to another system.

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.

Happy new year, and welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2026! Creators are warming up their engines after the holiday season, and we’ve got a range of things to look at. Let’s talk 2025 first. The year had a fair share of challenges for creators, not the least of which were tariffs and other economic challenges. At least one project, Magpie’s hotly anticipated trio of card-based RPGs, fell victim to this uncertainty; while the impact is certainly greater for board games and others which have physical components, it makes planning a project harder even if the physical release is secondary to getting the game into the world.

New year, new deck! Today I’ll be drawing from my copy of the Pixel Occult Neon Moon Tarot, the first Tarot deck I bought because of its explicitly cyberpunk style and themes. Unfortunately, one thing this deck has done is relabel the suits, which makes quick readings a bit more difficult. Once you use it for a while, though, you will internalize that Wires means Wands, Vials means Cups, Arms means Swords, and Zent means Pentacles.

Well, we're leaving our enneadic era behind and heading into our tenth year. If you take OD&D as the starting point of the 'modern TTRPG' (although I'd recommend taking a deeper dive), that means we've been doing this for... ~17% of the medium's lifespan? Which also means CHG has been active for longer than some editions of D&D? Oh gods.

Come one, come all, to the strangest time of the year! Join me here in the dead zone before Christmas and New Year’s, and let’s talk about how 2025 went. 2025 was a rough year, to be honest, mostly having to do with a lot of not-RPG things. Some of that did bleed over into the RPG world as well. Tariffs have made physical games more expensive to produce and buy, and generative AI continues to drag down the quality of games being produced.

I've organized five itch.io bundles. Four of them have already happened, and one of them is still live for a few more hours. Here are links to all of them1:

“Something very bad happened to you a very long time ago: you died and it hurt. You’re cursed. You’re still here and you couldn’t just stay dead. You’re definitely not in heaven, but there’s a pretty good chance this could be hell. Your heart has basically stopped. You don’t need to eat. Your skin is clammy. Your touch is cold as ice. You have to remember to breathe, to blink, to smile. Those are things people do? Right? It’ll be alright. Everything will be okay. You can get it together. You just have to find the right place and the right people and it will all work out. There are other dead people just like you. They’re suffering in just the same way you are. The quickest way to forget is blood: someone else’s blood. Your touch won’t be as cold as ice after you drink another person dry. You’ll feel a little more human. Your heart will beat like it’s meant to. Take a sip. Cut loose. It’ll be alright. When you’re in the moment, you can almost remember what it meant to feel alive.” - The introduction to Paint The Town Red

New Wonk Media is my first new writing project since kicking off Cannibal Halfling Gaming back in 2016. I knew in reading my old blogs (there are at least three different Wordpress blogs that I’ve aggregated under “The 563rd Attempt”) that there were varying missions and varying levels of discipline to my writing over the years, but even knowing that I thought I could give one more shot at something personal yet readable.

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.

It is in some ways perfect timing that only a month ago I was comparing Fate and Apocalypse World, and looking at their respective destinies. In 2013 the fourth edition of Fate, Fate Core, went from its Kickstarter to legitimately outstanding commercial success. Around the same time, Apocalypse World had just started on its inexorable upward trajectory not due to its own sales numbers but rather the adoption of its underpinnings, …