Free RPG Day

 

While I was at Patriot Games for the Steel City Insurrection Infinity event, I realised that it was Free RPG Day, and that there was a table of free stuff in the shop. I didn't grab everything available, but I picked up anything that looked interesting to me...

First up is an example adventure for a game called Mazes. It seems to run by having different classes roll different types of dice, but succeeding at different things requires set numbers no matter the class. It comes in a notepad form with tear out pages for player handouts and character sheets.

It's goal seems to be an easy to understand, simple dungeon crawl with quite a bit of peril, and I think it's done quite well at that. If Free RPG day's purpose is to get me to try a new thing and then buy the full product, this is a pretty solid success.

With Critical Role having announced their Darrington Press imprint, they're promoting it with a one page RPG that they've played on channel. "A Familiar Problem" is a collaboration between Marisha Ray and Grant Howitt. It's mostly letting people know that Darrington Press exists, and is a handy card production of something that's previously been released as a free PDF.

Paizo's offering for Pathfinder are a couple of Pathfinder adventures. I think that "A Fistful of Flowers" is last year's, and "A Few Flowers More" is this year's. Conveniently, the shop had both year's stock so you could run both the original and the sequel without a bother. To highlight Pathfinder's flexibility, you all play pre-generated plant people called Leshy in these adventures. Having had a flick through these look like fun romps that might be a good introduction to Pathfinder.

For Starfinder, Paizo has two quite different adventures. In one, you're Skittermanders, who are small, cute alien types, investigating a weird planar thing that happened. In the other, you're a bunch of elite operatives fighting through a park against evil aliens. They're both . . . fine, I guess, but simply aren't calling to me the way Pathfinder is.

Meanwhile, Dungeon Crawl Classics has one of their "Level 0" adventures, where you play a bunch of yokels and peasants and die in droves while you try and reach level 1. Effectively, you roll up 3 or 4 PCs each, and the surviving characters become your PCs...

The premise for this adventure is a giant floating creature / ship thing that's potentially full of treasure, so you climb up its trailing tentacles to get inside it and loot it. I really love the weirdness in this one and makes clear that while it has the aesthetics of early D&D, some of early D&D was deeply odd.