It’s Free RPG Day on 21st June! It’s happening at a game store near you! There’s so much cool stuff in the big box of goodies this year!
Notably, there’s nothing from us in there, for two reasons.
1. We’re making so many games already, folks. We did not have time to stop and make something for this too.
2. We’ve got 107 free games on our website and we think you should play one of those instead.
Wait. Hang on. We had 107 free games this morning. By the time this goes out, it’ll be closer to 120. And Grant’s doing another one next week. That’s how fast they proliferate. There’s no stopping them. If you don’t play them the number will just keep growing, probably, and I think it might be exponential, which is the worst kind of growth.
Not only do we have over a hundred games you can grab right now, for free, you don’t even have to leave your home to get ’em. And if, like us, you’re in the middle of a British heatwave, that’s quite a bonus. It’s hell out there, folks.
If 100+ games to choose from seems a little daunting, fear not! The collective wisdom of Rowan, Rook & Decard is on hand to act as your game sommelier.
Find a New Favourite Game
We’ve got free quickstarts for pretty much all of our games. They all come with juicy starter scenarios, pregenerated characters, and just enough of the rules and setting to get you playing quickly.
In the quickstart for Spire: The City Must Fall, your cell of drow revolutionaries tries to murder a bishop during a solar eclipse. Nobody has ever deserved it more than this bastard. Politics, the ethics of direct action, and you can play a woman who’s part spider if you want.
And for Heart: The City Beneath, you get to protect a sacred place from coral-boned monsters (so you can work through any lingering guilt about that cleric you murdered in Spire, presumably). You’ll have to delve deep into a dungeon that is both alive and calling to you, promising you your heart’s desire if you’ll only succumb to its call.
Until recently, if you wanted to play DIE: The Roleplaying Game you had to buy the entire book, which is somewhere in excess of 400 pages. But now you can download the brand new quickstart.
DIE is an isekai game for heartbreak enthusiasts: get the old gaming group back together, stumble into a living version of your old campaign setting, and take stock of how profoundly you failed to become the people you thought you would be. Interpersonal drama? Check. Weaponised nostalgia? Check. The ever-present possibility of rejecting the responsibilities and pains of adult life in favour of dwelling in the sweet, illusory realm of adolescent fantasy? Check.
Finally, we’ve just updated the quickstart for Hollows, our upcoming game about slaying big gribbly monsters that are also the manifestation of another human being’s worst choices and impulses.
This tale of a bishop’s cruelty and avarice, writ large in a rotten pocket of reality you can lance like a boil, remains the best way to descend into the murk and misery of the Isles. Come for the nightmares, stay for the tactical combat and crunchy, dead satisfying, cooperative fights.
(Grant. Chris. That’s our third quickstart about churches. Everything OK, lads?)
Tell An Elaborate Joke
Quickstarts are like a first date, right? You look back on them years later and hopefully you go “that’s the moment I fell in love.”
Grant’s one-page games are… not that. I’ll let you work out your own metaphor. But they’re punchy, generally either very funny or heartbreakingly sad, and playable in about 2-3 hours.
Consider THE ORC POPE IS DEAD… No. Absolutely not. No more dead priests. Moving on.
What about HORSE AROUND THE HOUSE, a game that Grant only belatedly discovered is a horror game. You, a desperate cast of minor-league actors kept on set against your will and best interests, must perform the season finale of a doomed sitcom whose headline star is half a ton of completely untrained horse.
Or maybe it’s Grotty Little Garbage Wizard Summer! In KENKU BIN WIZARDS, your coven of nasty little birdmen armed with knives and junk magic will defend their turf against all comers. It’s like Blades in the Dark if you were a vile crow person with a name like Jackie Hotsauce or Skit Happyslap.
Not interested in animal crimes? These games are a full spectrum of what Grant Howitt (and frequently collaborators) are capable of – like the kids in peril survival horror of BE PREPARED, in which a troop of scouts find themselves prey to the ancient horror of the woods.
Or Sample Some Exquisite Experimental Game Design
Minærva McJanda (formerly UFO Press, now RRD) has been making short, powerful, immensely affecting games about as long as Grant has. There might not be as many, but they span just as vast a breadth of topic and tone.
We’ve just added a dozen of Minærva’s games to our site, and they’re only the tip of the iceberg: there are plenty more coming. If you like Grant’s bite-sized games, you will absolutely like these. If you don’t like them (that’s fine, I suppose, takes all sorts and all that), you might well find something here that speaks to you.
Enjoy the frisson of workplace romance against a bullet-riddled backdrop of action in BE MY BODYGUARD.
Sit with your fellow retirees and regale each other with tales of times gone by in HERE, AT THE END.
Or, as three life stages of the same detective, tackle the case that defines you in REFLECTIONS.
ROLL AND PLAY
Can’t decide? This simple D20 can help!
Help Yourself!
Free RPG Day’s a lovely idea, but why stop there? If you played one of these games every week for a year, you’d still be less than halfway through them by next FRPGD.
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