Last Laugh "Holy shit, it's Tickles the motherfucking Clown." I hope you’ll indulge me and this little bit of table fiction featuring a short reprise of my first character in my group's Cyberpunk Red game.

Umdaar: Fate’s Best, Maybe Last, Worked Example For over twenty years, Fate has been a pillar in indie gaming. From its newsgroup origins in 2003 through its Kickstarter breakout in 2013 and on to today, Fate’s clever design and extensive modularity have kept it relevant to mechanics nerds and…

BYD out there going

Not even "Everybody is twelve" theory suffices for what we just saw, as your typical twelve year old would have found it embarrassing beyond belief.

All of our TTRPG plans have been turned upside down by one player's international temporary assignment. For me, though, that means it's time to pick another game to GM.

Soothwardens Quickstart Review – Linked and Luckless "A Warden with a Link is starkly aware of where their partner is at all times. It is like knowing your hand is at the end of your arm; there when you need it. But it is also the ache in your heart, the lump in your throat, and the tingle in your…

I want to believe that modern D&D not making any effort to make sense implies an untapped market of gamers looking for internal consistency and complexity. Then again, the GURPS forums have more online users 'right now' than most TTRPGs on itch have lifetime sales, so 'untapped' may be relative.

System Hack: Making a Useful Character Questionnaire Character questionnaires aren’t new tech by any means; even before they started to be ingrained into character creation and session zero procedures, lists of key questions have been used extensively in TTRPGs to give players a starting point…

I'm thinking about my next #ttrpg campaign, and in doing so I'm thinking about what it takes to give parts of the world a real sense of place, or at least what it takes to encourage my players to stick around long enough for all of us to find that sense of place.

We're far enough away from the mountains of ZineMonth and GenCon that there were a lot of cool and quirky indie TTRPG projects for @levelonewonk.bsky.social to find in the valley of June's Crowfunding Carnival!

Post an album you've listened to 100 times. I know I'm a bit weird, but when you consider that I bought this album with my pocket money at age 10, you'll better understand how weird I can be.

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026 Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close…

I'm in Texas, for work. This isn't really a post, but I'll be back to it next week.

Weekend Update: 5/30/2026 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.

New wall art. Appreciate you, Dad.

It's interesting, my first thought was that still being in diapers when AD&D 2e was released would kill my grognard cred. Then I realized that, at least according to the demographic research WotC has done, the median D&D player was about as old when 3e came out as I was when 2e came out.

If you need an excuse, here you go. Not only is D&D/Disco Elysium a phenomenal mashup, but the worldbuilding specific to Esoteric Ebb is fantastic.

Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons As readers of the site know, I’m a cyclist in addition to a gamer. I spend at least as much if not more time riding and working on my bikes as I do playing, reading, and writing about RPGs, and riding my bike is an integral part of how I get around…

Finally, the conclusion to Nat meets Donnie. This may come as a surprise to some, but the events here lead directly into how Donnie ended up going into DIE.

I'm imagining Calvin's Dad insisting that Calvin only plays GURPs, as it builds character.

Introduce yourself with 10 bands / artists you’ve seen live Rammstein Gojira Lorna Shore Spiritbox Mastodon Perturbator Health Carpenter Brut Ministry Steely Dan

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tech Tree In RimWorld, the tech tree is the conceit which allows the game to work with its ‘societal drift’ conceit. Tribes of nearly cavemen, “modern” colonies, and ultra-tech feudal lords all coexist thanks to a set of technological ‘research projects’ which…

In my opinion Evil Clown World slaps, but I am the one who forced @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social to write clown lore into Cyberpunk Red in order to support my 24/7 clown PC.

I'm slowly chipping away at my next worldbuilding project, constantly being pulled between writing a seemingly living setting and writing a setting that's functional for a game.

Very good thread. I need to note, mostly for context, that the underlying principles here would all be taught to you in the first semester of business school or, if you had access to one, even a single survey class. Mine was called Business for Engineers, back in college.

Solar is going to surpass coal in ERCOT this year. Times ... they are a'changin'. www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...

Allow me to say: FINALLY.

Extra! Five years of Weekend Update In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on…

Last 4 TTRPGs played: Break! (Player) Cyberpunk RED (Player) DIE (GM) Urban Shadows (GM)

I played Mixtape last weekend and really enjoyed it; it got me thinking about 'Mixtape moments' in my own adolescence and why I keep coming back to coming-of-age stories.

There may be plenty of professional disagreements among TTRPG creators and journalists but the fastest way to unite everyone is try to shove AI into the space

Good post. Blades in the Dark can be a good example of too much assumed familiarity (be that with PbtA or narrative games in general) leading to areas where explanations need improvement...but the episode Wil is breaking down is still heavy on misreads and mistaking preferences for requirements.

Weekend Update: 5/9/2026 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.

A look at the 4th campaign of #CriticalRole so far by @nihachi.bsky.social, and what lessons can be taken from it that aren't just 'have a company' or 'be a voice actor'. Practical tools for every table! cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/05/08/c...

Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026 Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with…

Without stating your age post your favorite film released the year you turned 18.

The key to becoming a better cyclist and writer is volume, how many miles you write or words you write. So what's the writing equivalent of dragging yourself out on the bike when you don't feel like it?

Satisficing and RPG Design Economics is the study of resource allocation and management; behavioral economics is the study of how theoretical economics meets practical, human reality. The split between theory and practice is an entire subfield of economics, and arguably other disciplines benefit…

This kind of mixed use urban planning is illegal in America

The penultimate section of Nat meets Donnie. The nerd party takes a turn, and the author recalls altogether too many house rules of beer pong.

This is a dance off. If you see this repost a dance.

System Hack: Mashups Hobby games is a pretty broad field, with both upstarts like TTRPGs and trading card games as well as board and miniatures games which go back decades further. The whole field is brimming with designers taking their ideas about set, setting, and mechanics and committing them…

Uncovered in a culling of ancient file boxes: My handmade GM screen for CYBERPUNK, circa 1989. I photocopied rules pages, typed out reference sheets and house rules with a first-generation Macintosh, and glued and taped them all onto a Car Wars GM screen. 💾☎️📠 @rtalsoriangames.bsky.social

May of 2025 kicked off a year of notable 20th anniversaries in my life with 20 years since I graduated high school. April of 2026 wraps up the 20th anniversary tour with 20 years since my first Spring Carnival at Carnegie Mellon. As the title states, a lot can happen in 20 years.

Thanks to the similarly-named DLC, I actually thought for a hot second this was a spinoff of the Fallout show until someone corrected me. Both are set in Pittsburgh, though.

The GDMBR: www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-m... Two to three months to ride it, the other 9-10 months to train for it (hopefully with other bike tours). This has been my dream sabbatical for at least the past three years now.

let's see how many of these blurbs for DIE RPG Backerkit will let through their quality control net

My current RPG campaign has ended. While I'm catching my breath, what can I learn, and how will it translate to running something that, if I succeed, will be completely different?

TTRPG about me First game: AD&D 2e Last game: DIE RPG Longest game: Cyberpunk RED (Jan 2023 to present) Favorite game: Electric Bastionland Favorite mechanics: Burning Wheel Favorite art: Mothership (layout is art)

A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric Ebb Video games owe a lot to tabletop roleplaying games, with mechanics, terminology, and tropes all being borrowed during the 1980s and 1990s. For obvious reasons, though, the two media drifted, and even video games calling themselves roleplaying games have…