Free Hump Day - A Nightmare at Hill Manor

Today marks the second entry into my ongoing Free Hump Day column wherein I shine a light on something I think worth clicking to download for the low low price of the amount of time it takes to click to download. Last week's entry examined the innovative and complete package of a game with Lady Blackbird - a Star Wars/Firefly/Steampunk mash up setting with a lite-but-packed-with-dice-rolling-and-fun-economy-play game engine. This week I'll be looking at another full package of a product.

Whereas Lady Blackbird is built from the ground up and feels like an indie game, this week's entry, the newest quick start, A Nightmare at Hill Manor, from White Wolf's World of Darkness line, comes from one of the biggest heavy hitters of the industry, and it's quite the interesting product indeed.

Free RPG Day 2011: The Picks

Wednesday I gave a quick review of what this year's offerings for Free RPG Day might mean if we were trying to read between the lines about what the big companies appear to be doing and pushing for in the next couple of months. There's some interesting things you can read in to when looking at who releases a new product and who puts out a token participation item. Today I want to get in to my top five picks for free swag tomorrow, but before I do, I have one more comment. I've been excited about Cubicle 7's upcoming crack at a Lord of the Rings RPG, but information has been scarce (even with looking at a Gencon release less than two months away). FRPGD would have been a fantastic opportunity to release a Quickstart adventure for The One Ring (TOR), but Cubicle 7 really missed the boat on not providing something. I can say without a doubt that a TOR Quickstart would have easily stolen the show tomorrow. Alas, what could have been...

Anyway, now on with the picks!

Free RPG Day: Reading Between the Lines

Free RPG Day is one of our favorite days of the year, and we won't have to wait much longer for this geekiest of nerd holidays. This Saturday, June 18th, comic and game shops across the country will be working diligently (or squandering the opportunity) to bring in some new customers or at least expand their current customers' interests. Click the link above to find out more information, and while you're at it, you can search desperately to see if a retailer near you is participating.

Check out the offerings for this year below (pulled from the link above).

10 Questions with Aldo Ghiozzi, Free RPG Day Follow up

I am somewhat fascinated how so many passionate people seem to produce so many interesting things in a somewhat niche hobby. Aldo Ghiozzi is the owner of Impressions Advertising and Marketing, the company responsible for bringing us Free RPG Day. He was kind enough to spend some time answering our questions, and for that we thank him. From his very active responses to questions on the rpg.net to today, he's really shown an effort in working with the community to make Free RPG Day the best day of free stuff out there.

On with the questions!

L5R Week - Legacy of Disaster Free RPG Day Scenario.

I mentioned in a previous post that my number one pick for Free RPG Day was Legends of the 5 Rings 4th Edition quick start and module Legacy of Disaster (LoD). I've gotten less time than I wanted to digest all the good stuff I got to pick up on FRPGD, but I have made my way through LoD. Although I was most excited to get some concrete rules for the fourth edition of L5R, I want to make some comments today on the module itself. Forgive me for my low-quality pictures, but the product itself is gorgeous with huge full-color illustrations on practically every other page.

L5R has an immense setting in Rokugan. It's a mideval/feudal Japan that is huge and dominated by different major clans named after animals. In LoD, we get to experience the likes of the Crab and Crane clans as their territory borders each other's. Other major clans are named like Lion, Dragon, Unicorn, and Scorpion.

I'm not going to give away the module's story itself other than to give a quick summary. The Crane Daimyo (noblemen) Doji Haruki was gifted with the weapons of a great Crane warrior. This gift was a great honor and would work to give the Daimyo some political prowess. Right off the bat the module confronts the new player with the fact that this game is not Dungeons & Dragons. Honor and political power are the two most sought-after concepts.

Anyway, very light and early spoiler here, but the ancient weapons go missing, likely stolen, and the player's task is to find out who took them and get them back as soon as possible since they're in town for the Daimyo's big power-grab party in which he was going to show of the artifacts.

The module is put together as a series of events that end up feeling a little bit like a classic Chose Your Own Adventure children's book. As a new player/GM to L5R, I'll be honest, all the non-english terms thrown around can get a little over whelming as you start reading it. I had trouble distinguishing the second location from the third location for example because several of the words setting the scenes didn't have inherit meaning to me. On the other hand, there were some locations that really popped for me and had a lot of character. I loved the village Wachimasu, for example. It's a Crab Clan village and the people and locale were very immersive in just a couple of paragraphs. The adventure itself looks fun and fulfilling.

So what about the player's point of view? 13 pre-generated characters. I don't often write incomplete sentences, but that fact deserves one. You have so many options as a new player to try out several different styles of character. Besides this, there was something else that really caught my attention. In L5R, characters have an honor stat. It ranges from 1 to 10 and players gain benefits from having a higher honor score. It's not exactly the inverse of Star Wars Saga Edition's dark side points either. even with my players who would be used to dark side points would probably have a hard time, at first, learning how to control their honor scores.

There are several points in the module where characters have a chance to gain or lose honor. Some are obvious, but many are less obvious and will probably shock new players to the game. One great example is when the players come across a blowhard Daimyo who berates the players and won't let them get a word in. If any player tries to interrupt or talk back, they lose a point of honor. Doesn't seem fair, right? That's too bad, because in the world of Rokugan we have a little something called station. The players have a much lower station in life than the Daimyo. Because Rokugan is ruled by a fairly rigid social structure, station is important and actually matters in the game. At first this concerned me - my players would be pissed for losing an honor point when they can't understand why. Then it dawned on me - that's the purpose of this module. There are 13 characters to choose from because they're all throw away one-shot characters. I believe LoD will be a great way to help immerse your players into the rules of etiquette of Rokugan and make them excited to create their own characters.

Free RPG Day 2010!

So it's clearly Free RPG day across the U.S. (and internationally? I'm guessing no?) and people should be happy picking up all the goods available to them. I ended up picking up the L5R 4th Edition Starter, the Castles & Crusades quick start, and the Deathwatch quick start - all three games I'm very excited to give a good shot. I'm especially impressed with AEG's and FFG's effots for L5R and Deathwatch, respectively since the books are in amazing full color with great illustrations.

On the homefront, there weren't any games (that we could see) being ran using the quick starts or for general in-store demo's. That being said, both stores were more busy than general, so at least all of their customers would destined to come in today. To help support the stores, I did pick up some stuff as well including the Armory Wars fixed Heroclix set (I have Iron Man now! Woo!), a comic or two, and finally getting the other book in the Geist: The Sin-Eaters product line, Book of the Dead.

All-in-all, I came away with some great free - and otherwise - swag and am pleased with what was available. I get to get even more excited for the end of the month when I get Legends of the 5 Rings 4th Edition, I get to have our group try out Death Watch before picking it up at Gencon, and we get to play one of the most prolific retro clones out there with Castles & Crusades. Pretty good day.

How'd everyone else do?

Part Two - What I'm Looking Forward to the most from Free RPG Day

We like free stuff around here, and we have a feeling you do too. Last month, we covered Free Comic Book Day, which, whether or not it brings in new readers (its stated, intended goal), is a bonafide success at this point. The big publishers as well as indie books have a real chance to broaden their audience even if it's just within the niche audience of comic book readers. Free RPG Day is in its third year now, and there's a big question on how much it expands the RPG audience outside of the core group of fans. My guess is that likely it's not doing the job at all right now unless individual stores really push the day as something to celebrate with in-store events and discounts on items based on what free stuff there is to hand out. This Saturday, June 19th, we'll be in our local stores, but I'm not holding my breath to see what kind of support they provide to keep us inside. Make no mistake, the free items will get our feet in the door, but then it's up to the store to keep us there. I'd love to hear from anyone who goes to FRPGD and actually has a store that runs the free adventures or something similar.

Enough of my jibba jabba and complaining conjecture, let's see what actually trips my trigger!

Alderac Entertainment Group - L5R 4th Edition RPG Quickstart & Adventure

It's no secret that I'm excited to pick up Legends of the 5 Rings 4th Edition at the end of this month (still on track and down 13 pounds! woo!). There's only one thing that worries me... I've never played L5R. True, I've been reading the designer diary entries over at EN World, and I understand the basic mechanic, but still, all the Kanji (or fake Kanji, how would I know?) they throw around in the rulebook and use for descriptors is a little intimidating. Not only am I happy that there will be a way to introduce the game in a pre-generated adventure, but it'll be a nice tool to ease myself into the universe. Really I just want my players to be able to play guys like the one to the right here. This is my number one pick for the day. (5 per box)

Fantasy Flight Games - Warhammer 40K Roleplay: Deathwatch Adventure

I, just like TheBro, am extremely excited to check out how FFG handles the high-end scifi bloody action of a Space Marine kill squad. Again, like with L5R I've been following all the news and previews FFG is providing to whet our appetites for this Gencon Indy release. We're pretty big fans of 3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars around here and it looks like, with all the previews we've seen, It's going to be providing a more complex game with more options. From wargear to mission generation to team tactics, Deathwatch looks like it's going to revolutionize the way we play Space Marines, and it only seems fitting. (10 per box)







Goodman Games - Age of Cthulhu Adventure: Abominations of the Amazon Adventure

This is an interesting pick for me. Most of the stuff on Free RPG day grabs my attention because it's something I'd like to run, anything Cthulhu related gets me excited because it's something I may very well end up playing. I know TheBro's excited for this, and as far as I'm concerned, there are only a few things better in role playing than playing a compelling Cthulhu one-shot adventure. Any free material for TheBro to run just means I'm that much closer to my next game. I'm getting really good at curling up in a ball facing a corner and singing the theme from Bye Bye Birdie to myself in my futile effort to avoid Sanity loss. I have no idea what this adventure is about other than at least two abominations and taking place either in South America or on the most popular online shopping site in the world. I'm actually hoping for the second one here, but the first will work just fine. (5 per box)



Troll Lord Games - Castles & Crusades Quickstart and Adventure

I feel like I'm just starting to copy TheBro's list here, but there's a reason we've been playing games together successfully for so long: we have similar tastes and we always copy off of each others homework. I've definitely been looking into retro-clones for a while since I have no real understanding of what went into the D&D rules before 3.5 edition (and even with 3.5 I only have a tenuous understanding through the Star Wars Saga Edition rules). For a while now I've been looking at Tunnels & Trolls as Noble Knight has a really cheap boxset (I'm obsessed with box sets) for the newest edition of the game. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't tuned in this time last year or I would have picked up their Free RPG offering for FRPGD 2009. Fortunately, the other retro-clone I've been looking at, that seems to really be expanding their offerings, is available this year, and we can now learn how old people role play. Yay! (5 per box)


Guild of Blades Publishing - Heroes Forever Quickstart & Adventure

I mentioned above that FRPGD is a day for us to discover new things. Obviously we're already fans of the hobby, but I think it's important for us to reach out and try something new. Yes L5R, Deathwatch, and Castles & Crusades are games we've never played, but they also have some name recognition all on their own. Now the Heroes Forever stuff available tomorrow is only a store sample, so I won't be able to take it with me, but I'm definitely going to peruse it and check it out. I explored all the options of stuff I've never heard of from the list of items, and Heroes Forever jumped out at me most. The description from the Guild of Blades product site describes a pretty cool world, and of course, they sell a cheap box set (box set!) to get new players in, which you can see to the right here. I'm willing to give it a try and I think everyone should make it a goal to try out something new tomorrow at FRPGD.

This has gone on way too long, but I can't help it - I'm excited for the day even more than I was for Free Comic Book Day. Although the selection is much smaller, I've found in the past that I get a lot of mileage out of FRPGD. Am I excited for more than what I listed here? Definitely. I am really excited to see the 4th Edition of Dark Sun in its first official release. I'm a little sad that, due to there not being a new release for the World of Darkness game line this year, White Wolf is only putting out a new Exalted 2nd Ed. quickstart. I've loved both the Hunter: The Vigil and Geist: The Sin-Eaters quick starts as they've have really pumped me up for their following Gencon releases, but that's life. Have a good Free RPG Day!

Free RPG Day - What I am looking forward to the most Part One

My top five items that I am looking forward to on Free RPG day are, in no particular order,

Deathwatch Adventure from FFG. I am really looking forward to how FFG is going to work with an RPG in the Warhammer 40k universe. I am also interested in how much this game will draw from the Warhammer Fantasy RPG recently redone by FFG. I know this item is only an adventure, but I will take what insight into the universe I can get. (10 per box)

Q-Workshop die. I love high quality dice and Q-Workshop does not disappoint. The only caution I have with these dice is to make sure that you if you buy from Q-Workshop, you buy dice that you can easily read. Some of their dice are very difficult to read due to the incredible amount of detail on the die. (10 per box)

Age of Cthulhu Adventure by Goodman Games. I am a big fan of Goodman games in general. They are one of the few companies to take on and present third party material for D&D 4e. Now, I am interested in taking a closer look at their Call of Cthulhu adventure line. As of right now, that line has three modules out and I will pick them up or not based on how I feel about this sample. (5 per box)

Castle and Crusades Quickstart by Troll Lord Games. I have always been interested in looking at an old school rpg or "retroclone," but I never wanted to pay to just review the rules. Hopefully this game will give me a good look into this popular style of game by Troll Lord Games. (5 per box)

Dark Sun adventure by Wizards of the Coast. I know very little about the Dark Sun world other than it is BRUTAL. I love that style of play. I hope that players will actually feel like they might not survive. I have read some comments about the previous Dark Sun campaign setting and am very interested in how well it will (or won't) work with 4e. (15 per box)

Come back tomorrow for The Hopeless Gamer's top 5 Free RPG day picks!

Free RPG day this Saturday

This Saturday marks the third Free RPG day. I love Free RPG day as a lot of companies put out some tangible, free resources to check out their new or current games. Check out the link above for a list of products coming out this Saturday. You can also check out what retailers near you are going to participate in the festivities on the retailers near you page found here. Doing a quick search, I found 14 retailers within 100 miles of me participating this year. I now that I will be at two of them for sure. If you do not have one close to you, check out Noble Knight Games by following the link above as they usually have a way for you to get some of the free stuff from their website. Check back throughout the week as we preview some of the items available and list what we are most excited about seeing.

Roll The Dice - 6/10/10

Thursday = the time to start getting lazy at work and looking around the internet for things to waste time on. This is where we step in with our weekly supply of useless links to aid you in your laziness. We call this, the lazy waste of time... er, I mean Roll the Dice.

I'm a noob when it comes to the world of Graxia, but I must say that this is quite the handsome little game (pictured today, beeteedub).

You owe it to yourself, if you've never tried Legends of the 5 Rings, to meander over to EN World and take a gander at the designer diaries for the upcoming 4th Edition release for the game.

This goes beyond self-serving, but given my recent admission of being on Atkins for 10 whole days now, this thread gives the uneducated a good idea of the kinds of food I'm "limited to" while on Atkins.

I'm getting stupid excited for Free RPG day this year, and the Deathwatch quickstart is one of the major reasons.

Speaking of being stupid for something, we freaking love Neuroshima Hex! around here, that's why the Duel Expansion is our Noble Knight swag of the week!

Wizkids is going to make Star Trek 'clix. Kind of neat, but would be totally awesome if they did a fully-clix naval combat game. I call Klingons!

I can't believe this voice is coming out of this face or these words are coming out of this voice. Really, it's better as a surprise, and it's also my first official link to something on Youtube, just go watch it.

I didn't even know there was an Iron Man Noir, but the Savage Tales blog snagged a great interview with the artist, and now I wants it.

Here's another link to a game I no longer play but still drool over new game pieces for: Hordes' latest badass Trollkin, the Skinner.