On June 22nd, Noble Knight Games (along with many game stores) will host Free RPG Day 2024! This is your chance to try out all kinds of awesome new tabletop role-playing settings, styles, and adventures, and you’ll be able to take some home with you to break out with your own group. For new RPG players, you’ll get to find a rule set or a story that’ll suck your friends into a grand quest. For wizened adventurers, this is a great chance to broaden your horizons and find your next campaign.
I’m highlighting a few of the items on offer this Saturday below, but be sure to swing by the store to jump into events, win prizes, and explore all the great RPGs.
Avatar: The Last Airbender in Tabletop RPG Form
Who wouldn’t want to do some elemental bending of their own? Avatar Legends brings the show’s vivid universe to your tabletop with beautiful sourcebooks and accessories, letting you create your own adventures across the Four Nations.
The core book offers up five different eras to pick from, giving ample opportunity for you and your fire-bending friends to immolate hapless towns in just 
about any setting you prefer. Additional source books give you adventures featuring famous characters, mechs, and that most crucial of activities: underground tunnel racing.
The Free RPG Day offering, Rebels and Refugees, is a standalone adventure set during the Hundred Years War, an easy plug into an existing campaign or viable as a one-shot to give your group a taste of the Avatar Legends universe.
This is an RPG that, due to its source material, is suited to both to adults and younger audiences that might not need the bloodier violence of D&D and other indie RPGs. The mechanics aren’t as involved either, making Avatar Legends easier to spin up, especially with all the gorgeous art and production quality.
It’s a bit obvious, but if you’re a fan of both tabletop RPGs and Avatar: The Last Airbender, then Avatar Legends should be on your list to try.
Return to Dark Tower with a Side of Story
The lines between boardgaming and tabletop RPGs are often blurred, and Return to Dark Tower RPG is a perfect example of why that should keep happening. Focused on delivering, per the publisher, ‘pulpy fast-paced action’, the point here is simple: slim down complicated stats and focus on the story.
Return to Dark Tower RPG uses the MAZES gameplay system (both MAZES and Return to Dark Tower RPG are designed by Chris O’Neill), which divides most elements into four simple stats and gives each character a single die to roll, with various bonuses and negotiated successes depending on your GM’s mood. No faff and little fiddling, which suits Return to Dark Tower’s setting just fine.
This isn’t a grand campaign RPG, but rather one designed to give you great one-shots and shorter adventures. Take an afternoon with your pals and slaughter some baddies beneath the ominous Dark Tower, or solve a murder mystery in a single evening. If you’ve acquired the Return to Dark Tower board game, all the components are shared, which means you can play on the beautiful map, leverage the monster tokens, and so on. It’s a great way to extend the cool things you already have into a totally new game.
For Free RPG Day, 9th Level Games is giving out the ‘fun-shot’ Sword of the Brigand King, which lets you jump right in, whether or not you own the board game. As a self-contained, story-telling sword and sorcery, wannabe adventurers should snap this one up.
The Hollows Brings Dark Souls to Your Tabletop RPG
Not every RPG needs violence at the center of its game, but sometimes it’s good to go in with a clear purpose. With The Hollows, that purpose is epic boss fights, supported with a tactical ruleset meant to bring you into the battle with crisp, cinematic combat.
Using several D20s and a unique grid, The Hollows eschews minion-driven encounters for the big show, delving your hunters into demon-dominated nightmares to find the horrors at the heart of it all. You’ll create narratives from both successes and failure, gain abilities based on weapons wielded and creatures slain, and adventure through a rules-light but tactically crunchy game.
Much like Bloodborne and Dark Souls, you will die. Also like those titles, your hunter will come back, potentially stronger than ever.
The Hollows shines best when combining its terrifying atmosphere with its bosses, known as ‘entities’. Far stronger than your individual characters, you’ll need to leverage positioning, teamwork, and the monster’s attention. One hunter might attract a fiend’s deadly gaze, opening up a sneak attack for a second’s plunging blade, while the third preps a protective shield for when the blow comes. Any missteps might doom your party, or unlock fun, engaging new challenges to overcome.
This isn’t your cozy tabletop RPG, or one flush with charisma checks. You venture into The Hollows because you want danger done differently, and at Free RPG Day, you can take your first steps with the Quickstart Guide, packed with hunters, monsters, and plenty of diabolical ways to die.
Hunt Monsters the Way Your 5E Campaign Deserves
When you’re spinning up a 5E campaign, you can create just about anything you want: political intrigue, stealthy heists, a grand quest with the fate of the world at stake. Sometimes, though, you just wanna go duke it out with some crazy creatures.
Enter Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting, a tome providing all the ins and outs you need to take your pals on a critter carving quest. You’ll find rules and rolls
for tracking quarries, cooking meals on the plains, crafting sweet, sweet gear from the beasts you battle, and even a collection of monster-focused character sub-classes (and a whole monster tamer class).
While all this blends your 5E game with the Monster Hunter videogame franchise, the true glue that makes this supplement sing, for me, is the Familiars chapter. Seventeen familiars. Cute, helpful, chaotic little pals just like the Palicos and Palamutes that’ll add laughter and good roleplaying fun to your campaign. I mean, who wouldn’t want to use their dragonling to lure some great serpent into a devilish trap?
Crowdfunded earlier this year and published by Hitpoint Press, Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting is packed with useful details, awesome artwork, and the sort of quality you love to see from an RPG supplement made with care. You can snag a copy of your own on Free RPG Day, and keep an eye out for the delightful extra bits too, like the crafting catalog and GM screen.
Deal Out a Story, One Card at a Time
Being a GM means coming up with scenarios or coloring up adventures with nasty villains, intriguing allies, or terrifying plots. Divining these story elements isn’t always easy, with creation falling on a spectrum: some love starting from zero, but struggle with refining details once their world is made in whole cloth. Others mold motives and spin twists with sinister skill, but find building anything more than a stock city and a mustache-twirling foe difficult.
The Story Engine Deck is a quick-fire tool to assist in those moments when you’re stuck or lacking the coffee you need to juice that imagination. Using five decks, you can shuffle and draw fresh elements like characters, places, motivations, and so on, gilding them with an aspect card (reading traits like ‘possessed’) to get that last little bit of wonderful thrown in.
What makes The Story Engine Deck viable is its speed and flexibility. Whether you want to pull it out mid-session behind a GM screen to whip up a new encounter on the fly—when your players, say, decide to venture off script and you need a new bandit lord or zombie dragon to fill the gap. Deal out a couple cards and bam, you have some flavor – maybe that dragon was a socialite assassin cursed by his last victim to live forever alone and feared in some grungy cave? The Story Engine Deck won’t write all that for you, but as a creativity launchpad, it’s worth a look on Free RPG Day.
All Those Stories and So Much More at Free RPG Day
The bits and bobs above are just a taste of what Free RPG Day and Noble Knight Games are offering when you stop by the store on June 22nd. There’ll be events, prizes, a special “one of everything” raffle, and all sorts of good stuff. Check out the link to get all the details, including snippets on the neat adventures not included here (of which there are many, because this is one stuffed day).
Whether you’re reminding yourself what RPG stands for, or if you’re a snuggle-toothed veteran of a thousand campaigns, Free RPG Day is a great opportunity to check out the incredible creativity exploding the role-playing space. With a few dice, an open mind, and a fresh book in hand, there’s no limit to the adventures you and your friends can have.
