Mastodawn

Weekend Update: 6/13/2026

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. […]

https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/06/13/weekend-update-6-13-2026/

The Voyager's Workshop Jun 13

I debuted my two-page module “Kaligos, Isle of the Drake King” last weekend at the Medieval Market in Halifax and I was thrilled by TTRPG game masters’ reactions and interest. My Patreon supporters will get access to it soon and it will be available for purchase in July!

#fantasymaps #anyrpg #gmtools #handcrafted #noai

INeedMana Jun 10

Sly Flourish is getting back to the topic of Lazy Gamemaster

Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster is a stand-alone book for lazy and aspiring lazy gamemasters. You don’t need any of the previous books to get tremendous value out of Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster. It stands well side by side with other Lazy GM books, bringing new angles to the concept of lazy gamemastering and new tools to help you prepare and run awesome games.

This book isn’t a rewrite of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Return focuses on three main lazy GM activities: preparing your game, running your game, and thinking about your game.

Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster breaks down the concepts of lazy gamemastering into the following topics:

The eight steps of Lazy GM Prep expanded by eight years of experiences and feedback.
Single session, short, and long campaign prep and execution.
Adventure types – what works well, where the traps lay, and how to customize the eight steps based on the adventures you’re running.
Quest models – those that work well and those that don’t.
The Lazy GM’s Toolkit with sixty tools, tips, and tricks to run your games.
Example adventure scenarios using the eight steps.
Piles of random tables and maps to inspire your adventures.

I really liked “the return…” I think that one also might be worth reading

Announcing Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster!

For the past year I've been working on a new book. I've kept it somewhat quiet, only more recently showing chapters (and eventually the entire second draft of the book) to our fine Hero-tier Sly Flour...

Cannibal Halfling Gaming Jun 10

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 from where they could figure out who they wanted their character to be outside of mechanical determinants. In recent years, though, the character questionnaire has developed into a procedure all its own, with some interesting tech for making the process more specific to both TTRPGs in general and the given TTRPG a questionnaire was packaged with. One character questionnaire I’ve used recently, the persona generation questionnaire from the DIE RPG, is both powerful enough and generalizable enough that I want to break down what it does in an attempt to make writing a character questionnaire for your own session zero easier. […]

https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/06/10/system-hack-making-a-useful-character-questionnaire/

Cannibal Halfling Gaming May 8

Critical Role for All of Us: Finding Practical Tools in the Monolith

Well, it happened: I got hooked into arguably the most gaming table in the community. And…it’s kind of hard to write about. Let's be honest: at this point, Critical Role has long since left behind the status of "home game" and is more a monolithic cultural force. We here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming have a let’s-call-it complicated relationship to both D&D (and Hasbro). I won’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoy D&D but have never actually seen anyone play it “out of the box” with no alterations. Every iteration of it I have seen has changed the rules to some extent, and there are systems that do the parts that I enjoy a better way. But I really can’t ignore the cultural significance that it holds and Critical Role timed itself well, riding the then newly-released 5th edition and captured the zeitgeist. And yet, for all that I couldn’t ignore the memes and an animated series being released I never actually sat down to watch it. There was just so much both with lore and a sheer crushing number of hours that made sitting down to catch up on a campaign seemed an insurmountable wall. And then, the team decided to do something completely different: they reset the lore, brought in a new GM, fleshed out the cast to double its original size and adopted a West Marches inspired campaign design. And credit to them for making that choice. I can imagine the temptation to stick with the winning formula until the golden goose was dead (although they did stick with D&D instead of, say, Daggerheart, but that’s another topic altogether). […]

https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/05/08/critical-role-for-all-of-us-finding-practical-tools-in-the-monolith/

Lair of Secrets Mar 4

Ken's prepping for an overland journey in his Shadowdark campaign, and thinking about weather.

The weather "hex flower" approach at Goblin's Henchman is pretty cool: it's like a hexcrawl ... but for weather. The webpage includes several variations on this theme, including season-specific flowers. https://goblinshenchman.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/hex-power-flower-weather/

#weather #hexcrawl #GMTools #CampaignPrep

ZiggyZapf Jan 30

Thinking about making a #TTRPG worldbuilding tool for creating nations and/or powerful factions kind of like a character sheet. "Oh, you've got a high Education and Resources score, so you qualify for MacGuffin Technology feat. Say hello to a Magitek empire!"

Of course, if there are any existing tools like that out there, share with me. Don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.

#worldbuilding #GMTools

The Voyager's Workshop Jan 27

Both the Map of the World and the Map of Guildenhof are available from my web store to bring some inspiration to your home brew #TTRPG campaigns. Later this year, I will be releasing (or maybe crowdfunding, who knows!) my Guide to Guildenhof, filled with descriptions of all the sights and much more!

https://thevoyagersworkshop.com/

#fantasymaps #rpg #dnd #gmtools #worldmap #citymap #handcrafted #fanatsyart #noai