A Year Older on Free RPG Day 2025
Free RPG Day is an annual event where publishers contribute quickstarts or other tabletop RPG related teaser products to a Free RPG Day kit, and participating retailers can buy these kits to distribute to their clientele. How they are distributed is up to the retailer, and the organization Free RPG Day does a good job of publicizing the event and hosting a map of all the participating locations that have ordered kits.
This year, Saturday June 21 happened to be both Free RPG Day and my birthday, so I got to celebrate two events at once. I was lucky enough to have games on the schedule at 2 different game stores in the Dallas area, Common Ground Games in Dallas and Game Nerdz in Mesquite. Here's a summary of the 5 games I squeezed into one day:
#Common Ground Games
Common Ground Games in Dallas Texas is one of my favorite friendly local game stores (FLGSes) and they always do it up big for Free RPG Day. They had three 2 hour slots in each of their 4 private rooms, and 11 total games on offer. The tabletop RPG nonprofit I'm a part of, Forward RPG, brought 5 GMs to the event at Common Ground Games each running a game, and I'm happy to say each game run by a Forward GM had enough people for the DM to be able to run.
##GAME ONE Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme: The Brachet and the Black Heart GM Eric B
Starting off Free RPG Day strong with me running the adventure in the Double Feature quickstart that Exalted Funeral provided called The Brachet and the Black Heart. This is a rather silly game that was made possible and better by me bringing the bespoke GM screen for the system, which in my mind really makes the game at public events. Without that GM screen I don't think I would've backed the project initially.
To avoid spoilers as much as possible for this Novice Quest, I'll give a brief rundown of the more interesting bits of my session. I used the 10 pregens that were provided for free by Exalted Funeral. The document which held all them had 20 pages, making each pregen double sided which I really did not understand, so I mucked with my printer settings a bit to display both sides on one side of a page.
Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme is a game where you play a Medieval themed Situation (what the game calls Class) with certain Traits from a list of 18, each represented by a die. When you roll a Test or Deed, you roll a certain Trait, but you only have up to 5 of the 18 Traits on your sheet at higher than a d4 to start, so you're somewhat bad at most things at the beginning.
What I hadn't realized, however, was it was mixing the front of one pregen with the back of another, so when I printed the 6 character sheets for the game I ended up having traits and spiffing serious abilities mixed between the sheets. I decided to make the Knight being good at Bardistry a feature, not a bug, and just totaled it up to the silliness inherent in the game continuing. Additionally, each pregen only had between 1 and 3 traits marked at the start of the session, so I allowed players to "pick up" traits as they played. In this system, henchmen are also recorded on a Trait line so I took an opportunity to allow each of the players to bring someone from a Lord's household as a Henchman. They chose: Specials the dog, Donovan the portly chef, and Billy the headsman.
I cut the first bit of the adventure because the slot I was running in was only 2 hours long, but honestly I ran the players through 4 full encounters with no issues and only minor amounts of handwaving. Additionally, we went through 2 Heads of Light Entertainment (HoLE, aka the name this game uses for the GM, personalities which affect how Merits and Demerits are distributed) and one major interlude excursion: a game show where a magnanimous host asked each player "What Do You Think Will Happen Next?"
I let them answer free form, and recorded their answers as a sort of "Wishes" mechanic and keyed them to specific places in the forest in which they were adventuring to use as a sort of checklist for how the rest of the session would play out. Honestly, this little interlude really felt satisfying to me. It gave my players the space to "in character" say what it is they wanted to happen next, though I don't believe they quite understood that in the moment.
Overall I think the adventure worked great in a two hour slot, and the system itself is rather simple with some additional layers of abstraction and absurdity between the Head of Light Entertainment and their Complaint Mail, the Merits and Demerits being awarded, and the 10 different forms of currency listed on each of the character sheets. Glad I own it, will definitely run it again, but I'll definitely give it a break for now.
##GAME TWO Nobi Nobi GM Chris R
I didn't know what to expect from Nobi Nobi. Chris had primed me before Free RPG Day itself that it's a card based storytelling game, and honestly I signed up because I hadn't to that point played in one of Chris' games even though this one was GMless (though I think it's the opposite of GMless, more on that later).
Nobi Nobi, from what I could tell by playing the Quickstart copy, is a shared Anime adventure game where we play as anime-ified traditional D&D style classes, each with a power that does a very specific thing with the 2d6 rolling one of two stats resolution mechanic. The way the game progresses is the player to the left of the active player draws a Scene Card, and acts as a pseudo DM for the active player, reading out the Scene Card, setting a situation, and inviting the player to describe how they deal with the problem. Depending on the Scene Card, it might result in the player making a roll or saying words or doing charades, but regardless it is the pseudo DM player who ultimately decides if they succeeded and get to draw a Light card, or if they fail and draw a Dark card. Regardless of whether they draw a Light or Dark card, their character gets a rather large buff of some kind.
Overall I did not enjoy this one, it does my most hated version of GMless gaming: each person procedurally taking turns to GM with a bonus down element of the game basically being a 1 on 1 tabletop RPG at a table where 5 players were sitting. The game makes no effort to engage the rest of the players in the fiction. As a whole, it was a stale experience, but Chris did a great job with knowing how the game worked, and we ended up rolling high enough to defeat God and Anime in the end.
##GAME THREE Bonus For the Queen: The Eyes Have It GMless
For the Queen is my favorite "Intro to RPGs" game, because it does better than all other short form games at procedurally emulating the idea of the Narrative Football (which I talked about last week) and uses it as both a way to define your character and your relationship to the NPC that matters most in this adventure: The Queen. On your turn, you draw a prompt card and answer it, and through answering the prompt and allowing other players to ask clarifying questions, we are all telling the story at the table in a collaborative way.
I could probably write an entire blog about why For the Queen is, in my opinion, a masterclass in how to design a storygame. This was 2 of our players' first times playing For the Queen. This game went quite a bit longer than games I'm used to playing of For the Queen, lasting until each of the 5 of us had 8 prompt cards in front of us, and we had to speed it up to end in time for the next session. This was my first time using the new For the Queen edition (made by Darrington Press), and I have to say it's definitely an enhancement compared to the old version made by Evil Hat. The components feel more premium and it's nice having the new art to all the Queens.
##GAME FOUR Dragonbane: The Magistrate's Gambit GM Michael S P
My last game at Common Ground Games for Free RPG Day was the new tournament module for Dragonbane. Mike did an excellent job printing out materials to use with this adventure, and it was my first time playing Dragonbane so I was excited to see how the game worked. I think at this point, the only Free League games I haven't played are: Symbaorum, Mutant Year Zero, and the Walking Dead. I might be forgetting one or two, their catalogue is immense.
We had 7 (!) players for this session of Dragonbane, and I could tell that made our GM anxious. I totally get it, it harkens back to my days of running D&D 5e for Adventurer's League, where 7 players was the limit and the hobby was bursting at the seams so more often than not we had the full 7 with a waitlist. Running games for 7 folks is no joke, but there are some tricks you can use to help streamline your game and keep your players engaged.
The quest before us was to perform a three pointed heist, where we were to replace three objects of note before an event at a manor party. As there were 7 of us and this sounded like something we needed to do quickly and relatively quietly, we split up. There was also the added gravitas of Mike slamming down the 1 hour sand timer on the table which gave us a feeling of the tension inherent to the adventure.
Initially I thought there were only 6 pregens so my buddy Wijs and I played copies of the same Wolfkin character. Our task was to replace one of the objects, and the GM placed the map of the manor on the table and asked us where we wanted to go. We picked a window by what looked like a bedroom and said we were going to climb the wall and enter through the window.
At that point I learned how rolling works in the system, and how death saves are still an inherent part of the system. Our GM prompted us for a role to scale the wall against our Agility. This is a roll under system where you roll a d20 against a number from your character sheet, and Wijs and I had a 17 in Agility. No problem, right?
That's when Mike hit us with the twist that if you're rolling an attribute roll, you're actually rolling against a different, much smaller number based on how high your attribute score is. That's one strike against the system for me. I roll, and get a 19, which is a failure, but not a Demon (20), which is basically a critical fail.
At that point the GM asks me how tall a floor is, to which I answer most floors of buildings are between 8 and 10 feet tall. He asked me to roll and deal 6d6 damage to myself as I fell 1 story, and I rolled much more damage than the 17 wounds I had marked on my character sheet. I don't know how death works in Dragonbane, and there's a whole section of the sheet for Death Save failures and successes. I hate Death Save purgatory. I followed that up by rolling a failure on my Death Save and a Demon on my next Death Save, killing my character. First roll of the game led to my character's death. Rip Bastonn
After a while I was able to rejoin as Captain Betrix Farsail, who has an ability called Sea Legs that is specifically only able to be used in water. The manor was in a forest, though it was plumbed. I never ended up using that ability, and spent most of the session trying and failing to solve an actual real life puzzle that's key to progressing in the adventure.
I really dislike out of game puzzles for players to do, though I do see value in them here and there to keep players occupied solving them. Generally I feel like they're either solved too quickly and don't have the punch you want them to, or they make players disengage and feel bored, or engage too hard and fail and feel mediocre. Neither of those results really impress or delight me.
Overall, my first impression with Dragonbane was a pretty bad one. It seems to be more like D&D than Lord of the Rings 5e is, which for me is not a great selling point. I see myself passing on most opportunities to play Dragonbane in the future.
#Game Nerdz Mesquite
The three Game Nerdz locations east of Dallas are the new kids on the block, and they're doing a great job at grabbing some of the market share of local gamers looking for a game store to call home. The tabletop RPG focused nonprofit I'm part of, Forward RPG, sent 2 GMs to each of these locations for Free RPG Day, and each of our GMs had enough players to run at least one game, which in my opinion is a great showing.
After I left Common Ground Games, I headed to the Mesquite location of Game Nerdz to run a 6pm game of Star Trek Adventures. Our other GM at that location was running her audition game of Root the RPG. Both games made and it seemed folks had a good time at each game, which is always encouraging to see.
##GAME FIVE Star Trek Adventures 2e: The Celestial Algorithm GM Eric B
For my final game of Free RPG Day 2025, I ran the Star Trek Adventures quickstart adventure. I didn't like how the pregens in that quickstart were double sided, so I brought out the crew of the Enterprise D from Star Trek: Next Generation, all of whom I have statted on sheets and laminated.
I had 2 players, a couple who I could tell had both seen the Star Trek shows, but one of them seemed to me to be much more interested in the mechanics while the other was more ready to roll dice and see what happened. Both of which had never played Star Trek Adventures before so I was excited to show them how the game worked. By the end of the game, both of them I felt had a great grasp on how the game worked and were able to assemble their dice pools of d20s, spend the metacurrencies, and roll against difficulties like champs.
I pretty immediately had them warp through an anomaly while in a shuttle that departed from the Enterprise, so luckily I only had to deal with 3 of the main cast: Riker, Data, and Geordi. That made juggling characters easier, but juggling characters is a big part of the charm of playing a Modiphius 2d20 game and especially playing Star Trek Adventures to me.
Avoiding spoilers for the adventure, I'll add that I tweaked the adventure by having what was supposed to be the players' ship in critical condition near the adventure site. We finished the adventure as printed in the first hour and a half of the 3 hour slot, so for the second half I had them deal with challenges of leaving the site while dealing with a raging alien freighter in a similar state of disrepair. The adventure ultimately boiled down to a lot of extended tasks and rolling against problems, and we didn't have a single combat, but I think the players had a great time and enjoyed the game!