Free RPG Day 2013

[goodmangames]

Hi everyone,

Hope you got a good haul at Free RPG Day! I had a great time at Game Kastle in Santa Clara, CA. It's a great store and they did a really good job with Free RPG Day. There were lots of freebies, of course, as well as a raffle and plenty of in-stor events. Plus an awesome presentation of DCC RPG products right in the front of the store! Thanks to all the gamers who came by for the module and the autographs and all the free swag!

How did everyone else's Free RPG day go?

[finarvyn]

Mine was a mixed experience.

(1) The DCC/X-Crawl module was one of the first freebies to run out, which was a bummer. I had several people later on mention that they were looking for it.

(2) On the plus side, there were several people with questions and I spent a lot of time discussing DCC with them. It was nice that Fair Game carries a lot of the products for folks to look at.

(3) My starting time was set up so as to not conflict with other groups, which I hoped would be a bonus but many of the other games went over so my player choices were limited.

(4) The game I ran only had a couple of players in it, but they had never played the game before. We spent some time discussing the funnel and higher-level options, as I had come prepared to run an adventure either way. They chose the funnel and the concept really grabbed them. They walked away with a very positive experience and seemed to really enjoy playing the game.

(5) I wish I had brought a camera. My post won't look as cool as Joseph's because he has a better graphics package.

All-in-all, a great day and a great way to expose folks to the fun which is DCC.

[Skars]

I spent Free RPG Day enjoying my haul of goodies in the hospital with my Son born Friday

When the extended family (the "Outlaws") came to siege our hospital room this morning and catch sight of the new arrival, I screeched my tires and made it over to Game Kastle's Fremont location to do my proud dad strut and to pickup the loot. So while your starpower was certainly a draw to head down to Santa Clara this morning, I failed my will save vs. cute baby boy and had to get back in a jiffy to make sure he was doing ok. (he was fine of course albeit smothered in kisses)

I hope you guys had a great day as well, next year I will run something with the prince in tow.

[Skars]

!!! new bookmarks I see in that photo!! very cool. That's a reminder to submit my next world tour game...

[Caffiend]

!!! new bookmarks I see in that photo!! very cool. That's a reminder to submit my next world tour game...

No kidding!!

[Caffiend]

{caveat: I plan to put session reports together for my Road Crew games separately, but I want to get started by posting something.}

Free RPG Day 2013 ~ unofficial recap from SW FL

FLGS opened at 10am. Based on RSVP #'s in our local Meetup Group, I prepped Tower Out of Time to be run twice. 4 other GMs showed up prepared to run something, but by 11:30 the paltry turnout made it clear that only one game would be going on at any one time. (The store also had 3-4 other events going on, including 2 tournaments. Oy.)

TooT went pretty well, despite one guy who had never sat at a table to play without a computer and was getting increasingly frustrated. "No gold again?!" "How much XP for that?" ...and so on, as he's use to getting instant rewards after every single deed in the D&D MMORPG. (At least he understood initiative. And I was floored that he was willing to give a tabletop game a shot, much less a non-D&D game.) In contrast, the rest of the table, stole the show, and I was basically there to set the scene, keep track of initiative, and be amused. Failures were spectacular. Deity disapproval abounded, to the point of terrorizing the party. (Cleric: "I'm gonna try to heal the thief." Thief: "Oh crap!") H'lilsk couldn't roll a spell check to save his life, and despite the halfling & thief storming into the trapped hallway (the one time the thief stopped checking first), the combats went pretty quickly and they were generally successful and ended up wading in squishy ape-ly bits. [I do plan to work the released & befuddled out-of-time antehumans into an upcoming adventure.]

Our FLGS didn't get around to ordering the Free RPG Day swag in time, but with major, MAJOR props to Goodman staff, I was able to give folks a choice of Goodman-issued goodies before they left. It had them roll a d30 for choice of who picked first, just as many convention GMs have done. In addition to the Road Crew swag, they were pretty blown away, and I succeeded in my quest to make Goodman Games the hero of the day!

As we wrapped up, David Przybyla joined us, and I flabbergasted him by demanding he sign my hard copy of The Way Station. Good way to start his day.

The head count dwindled after that, and Troy had prepped some really pretty visuals for a quick DCC run so we hopped into that. The effort he put into the temple construction resulted in phones snapping pics amidst combat. The wizard saved the girl in distress, who happened to be the warrior's sister, and the halfling took the found potions willy-nilly 'cause they smelled good. We completed the first part, but were unable to finish the follow-up since half the table had to bail at 8pm. After more evangelising the merits of DCC, converting D&D/Pathfinder players, and having people in the store tell us "I wish I'd known, I would've played", I think we got home around 10pm.

Lessons learned:
-Make sure the FLGS has DCC RPG books in stock when I'm there. They sold out before 5pm.
-Visit the store more frequently (it's an hour away) and drum up interest a week ahead of time. Maybe even give the store a sign-up sheet in advance.
-If someone RSVP's online, email/text/call them and personally confirm ahead of time. Out of 15, 6 players showed up. It was a bit disheartening.
-Start trolling the Free RPG Day site for on-sale dates in January 2014.
-Bring a cooler and buy 4x the normal order at Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe of choice, because there's no way I can leave for refills.

[Thorynn]

Report from The Wyverns Tale, Asheville NC:

The store had two slots for gaming with 5 tables, and they were pretty much at capacity the whole time. I ran TooT with the pregens and my table was full with players pre-registered on the warhorn days before the event! I had two veteran DCCRPG players, two guys who hadn't played an RPG since they were kids, and two brand new to the RPG experience. EVERYONE had an awesome time. Thanks to some fantastic spell-checks on the part of the cleric and the wizard, the combats went by very quickly. A 21 on a color spray, and a 23 on a paralysis will do that. Overall it only took about two hours to run thanks to the truncated combat and the pregens.

By the end of the day I was out of pencils, buttons, and bookmarks, and the many copies of DCC/Xcrawl had all been scooped up.

Other sessions being run were Iron Kingdoms RPG, Star Wars, DnDnext, Pathfinder We be Goblins too!, Tunnels and Trolls, and 7th Sea. If you are ever near the Asheville, NC area, do stop in. We are so lucky to have one of the best FLGS on the planet!

event site: http://warhorn.net/the-wyverns-tale/sch ... 3-06-15#76

[Icetower]

Edit: Copied from my post in DCC Community to keep all the FRPGD stuff in the same place.

Hey guys,

I'm not much of a forum poster, I hit Google + mainly for gaming, but I wanted to share my report from my blog here. In the interest of not shilling for hits on my page, I've pasted the text below. Pics are on my site.

Free RPG Day 2013 is behind me now and it was just what I was hoping it to be. I went on down to my FLGS and ran a game of DCC RPG. I chose to run Sailors on the Starless Sea as it was my first public game in a while and I knew a zero level funnel would be easiest for me to run. I would have run 77.5 The Tower Out of Time, but I had already announced that I would run Sailors. Maybe if I try to get a belt buckle I can roll that one for some people.

So we had four players to start, two of whom I know. One is a friend I've played with in my home games before, the other is a local Connecticut fellow whom I have only gamed with at Gen Con! Well, we fixed that.The other two were younger gentlemen who I believe were there to play Pathfinder. Anyway, that gave us 12 characters to start with, a couple Dwarves and a couple Halfling Traders. No Scribes or Apprentices which would not bode well for them later.

So our intrepid victi...wait...villagers approached the Keep by way of the rubble in the back. A couple nimble Dwarves clambered up to the top, secured some rope and then watched as a couple of their companions tumbled down in an avalanche that led to the death of the first adventurer. One of the Dwarves would have bit it as well, but I allowed a Roll Over the Dead roll to be used as I knew they were below the average in PC's as it was. And hey, he made the roll.

Once the hole was revealed that led to the Tomb of the Fallen, the PC's dropped a rope down and figured out the hole was only about 14 feet deep when one of them decided to look at the Well of Souls...one save later and he warned them all to stay away. They proceeded through the Courtyard when a Lucky Dwarf discovered a bit of stonework hidden from view. The PC's wanted to lift that piece of stone but were not strong enough, so as GM, I gave them a friendly reminder of the block and tackle over on the Well of Souls. First one to try to get it ended up with some nice corruptions as he spent two rounds getting out of the well. Our next brave soul, is now a dead soul as he dissolved into Chaos. Our lucky friend who made the save for the Well earlier and wanted to stay the Hell away was our next one to try for the Block and Tackle...and was able to get the chain secured and they were able to crab the cache.

Feeling invigorated, the party moved on to The Charnel Ruins and without too much trouble due to a swell first round, they dispatched the Tar Ooze, grabbed some armor, weapons, the Censer and Incense. Next on their list was The Tower of the Beast, after getting the door open we lost a couple more PC's in the same manner as Ratface Slipshot (death by Beastman Champion) but they were able to win the battle and began to search the room and rescue some villagers.

We had a new player who had arrived by this point, so one of the players was kind enough to help him roll up some guys (Thanks Tom!) while I dealt with a couple Rot Grubs. Almost lost another there.

By the way, they never went back to the hole to discover the Tomb of the Fallen, so we saved a few lives right there.

Then it was time to descend into the bowels of the Keep. Grabbing some torches, the party headed downstairs...

With a lot of caution they lit the torches and began down into the depths. They discovered the Trail of Gold and grabbed a bit of coin, ignoring the dangerous looking tunnel that led to...The Tomb of the Fallen, once again saving many lives. Moving on to The Dread Hall, five of the PC's decided to go grab a skull, while the ones who made the save checked out the mosaics and the alcoves. A couple PC's now armed with robes and skulls got the group moving down the stairs. An interesting side note, a look behind the screen if you will, I was using GameMastery cards for the items found and while I was setting up the night before, I realized that I only had two Robe cards. So, looking at what else I had, I saw cards for a Withering Hand on a rope. I decided to make the other two robes in the alcoves into the Hands and I described the other robes as having been destroyed to the ravages of Time and the other pair of Hands the same. I was hoping they would still have four PC's in vestments, but alas, it only led to two PC's wearing both items as a set. Lesson learned.

Here's where the game got interesting for me. I saw what experienced players who pay attention to clues can do. One of the PC's in a robe had also looked at the mosaics and as soon as they got down to the Menhir, he walked right up to the top, lit the candle and raised his arms in the air. Boom. One Dragonship later and they were on the Starless Sea.

As soon as the Leviathan raised his tentacles above the ship and waited...on the first round the other experienced player lit the Censer and appeased the Beast. I was actually pretty surprised as I'm positive he's never played DCC, let alone this module. More lives saved.

They made it to the Ziggurat and they started to ascend when a couple of them revealed themselves as they started to attack the Beastmen. One arrow shot later and the Shaman was dropping an effigy into a pit...the Chaos Lord had arrived! The players fought hard, dispatched the foul beast with another solid arrow shot and they were able to save some villagers and make it out with five out of fifteen characters.

Whew. Time for some coffee and eggs.

[Sveden]

I had a great time at Free RPG day at the Fantasy Flight Games Even Center. We ran 4 tables of We Be Goblins Too! over 2 slots. Another great module from Paizo and Richard Pett.

Luckily I was able to grab a copy of the DCC offering before the store ran out. Being a Pathfinder player the Xcrawl concept looked great. I had no idea that this existed until now(advertising money well spent Goodman Games!). I might end up buying the Xcrawl core book now. It sounds pretty fun.

[ragboy]

I had a couple of hours of panic when I realized that the comic store in Ft. Worth (where I was trapped for the weekend) did NOT do Free RPG Day this year. I immediately texted mi compadres back in Austin to pick some stuff up for me, but each one of them texted back that the stores were all out of all the Free RPG Day stuff. I managed to find a little store in downtown Ft. Worth: Stay Collected (http://www.staycollected.com/). Great little store. I picked up the DCC/XCrawl module, Better than Any Man (for LotFP) and Hall of Bones for S&W. I really wanted to see the C&C module, but they didn't have any...

I didn't get to play (was sitting with my father in the hospital all day), but did get some DCC in for Father's Day, which was nice.

[finarvyn]

Being a Pathfinder player the Xcrawl concept looked great. I had no idea that this existed until now(advertising money well spent Goodman Games!). I might end up buying the Xcrawl core book now. It sounds pretty fun.

By the way, if you look farther down the boards you'll find that there is an Xcrawl section. I think it's mostly been idle for awhile, but you might be able to get some chatter going there as well.

Looks like an interesting concept, but I'll confess that I've never actually tried the game.

[Raskin]

I will keep it brief, I was slated to run two sessions at my FLGS, but they only allotted a two hour time slot for each session. The session times were the same for all games, but two hour sessions is still really short. I couldn't run any module in that time frame, so I through together a quick little crawl for whoever cared to play. For the most part the players that showed up for Free RPG day were there to play the games they normally play at the store. It was hard to find taker that wanted to embrace the awesome that is DCC RPG. The first two hour session I spent talking up DCC to anyone who would listen or showed interest. By the time the second session started I was like a cleric trying to appease his god. I had made converts of two passer bys. I sat them down gave them 3 1st level pregens each and set about the slaughter.

The quick premise was that the cook from the inn/tavern they were staying in had abducted the innkeepers daughter. He offered them money, free lifetime stays at his chain of inns, and his daughter's hand in marriage for the bravest of them all. They tracked the cook back to his family's run down estate and adventure ensued. They found the door open and to my amazement they actually used the 10' pole one of them had to start poking around the room before entering. When they poked the coffee table it sprung to life and bit the pole. I rolled crappy initiative, and they went first. The warrior crushed the coffee table in one blow. Next they went through the dining room worried that anything and everything would try and kill them. When they got into the kitchen the giant pot of stew bubbling in the cauldron animated and attacked. They fought valiantly but alas Red Warrior, needed food but got to much and was drowned by the stew monster's psuedopod attack. The wizard cast a chill touch, and the mercurial effect was necrotic drain, which spoiled the stew monster. Next round he froze the now rotten stew monster and shattered it.

We had about 20 minutes left but one of the players had to return home so we cut it short. Both really enjoyed DCC RPG, and are interested in playing in a store game there. One of the employees, watched the whole thing because he was really interested. The owner and I spoke and he is really interested in trying to get a regular game of DCC RPG in the stores rotation. He and I are going to work to build some interest and we are going to go from there.

[Caffiend]

The first two hour session I spent talking up DCC to anyone who would listen or showed interest. By the time the second session started I was like a cleric trying to appease his god. I had made converts of two passer bys.

Preach on, Brother Raskin! I, too, feel evangelical whenever the topic comes up -- even during other games.

(Hey Mods, can we get an Acolyte title here?)

[Ceronomus]

Raskin? What terrain are you using there?

[Raskin]

Raskin? What terrain are you using there?

Fat Dragon Games makes PDFs that you print on card stock and cut fold and paste into walls and terrain.

Fat Dragon Games

My old blog post about it link

[Rick]

I had a great Free RPG Day. I ran two games of DCC; The Imperishable Sorceress from 10:30am-2:30pm, & The Tower Out of Time from 3:30pm until 7:30pm. Both were “sold out” with 6 players for Sorceress and 7 (I squeezed in an extra player at the last minute) for Tower.

The first game stumbled a bit out of the gate – I forgot the pregens . Not wanting to delay things any longer than absolutely necessary I just handed out the Tower Out of Time pregens, which were a level higher but when I (as a Judge) screw up I like to at least do it in the player’s favor.

It was (again) lucky to have a great group of players. I’d previously gamed with all but one of them.

That said, there was nearly some inter-party conflict when the Warrior decided she didn’t trust the Halfling (Terry “Fink” Finklebutt) with Nightraker. Cooler heads prevailed, but just barely.

Towards the end when it was clear that the party was going to turn on Ivrian I had her hide within a wall and attempt to ambush her blooded PC when they re-entered the room to confront her. It went exactly as planned until she / I rolled a 1. That was pretty much her undoing.

Oh, the highlight for me was noting that another one of the regulars that’ve been attending my Road Crew sessions had purchased his own copy of the core book. That’s at least two so far that I’ve sold on this great game!

The next game, The Tower Out of Time, initially only had 3 players signed up for it, but some of the players from the earlier game decided to stick around and play on, and another one of my regulars asked if he could play, so I found myself with 7 players and only 6 pregens. Luckily I had my tablet so a 7th pregen was rapidly created via Purple Sorcerer’s Higher Level Character Creator, and away we went.

I set this not long after the events of the first game (they were playing the same characters, after all). So the party rode in style to the Tower in the Adamantine Mole.

Stuff looted from the first adventure saved their bacon several times, actually. I think I would’ve killed at least two if not for that pseudo-flesh putty.

Let’s see, to sum up they triggered the trap, H’lisk’s spell checks were terrible, they solved the door puzzle (after getting a good shock first), and the Voidcraft landed on their favorite Inn.

Everyone seemed to enjoy both games as much as I did. Both adventures were just what I've come to expect from Goodman Games, authors Daniel Bishop and Michael Curtis, and artist / cartographer extraordinaire Doug Kovacs: Top Notch. Thanks to all of you (and YottaQuest) for letting me be a part of it.


"Hmm, nope, the pregens aren't in here, either..." (Photo courtesy of Jim Wampler)

[Relaxo]

I spent Free RPG Day enjoying my haul of goodies in the hospital with my Son born Friday

T'was truly Fathers' Day weekend for you.
Congrats!

[Relaxo]

Silly question:
For the Free RPG adventure, was it the one from the Mystery Map contest? Unless the author got really creative, I didn't recognize the beginning part of the map. (I'm totally out of touch if this was mentioned/explained already, I apologize).

[goodmangames]

Silly question:
For the Free RPG adventure, was it the one from the Mystery Map contest? Unless the author got really creative, I didn't recognize the beginning part of the map. (I'm totally out of touch if this was mentioned/explained already, I apologize).

Good question. No, this was not the Mystery Map adventure. That adventure is in the queue and will be published later this year. It is called "The One Who Watches From Below," by Jobe Bittman.

[Relaxo]

Good to know I'm not nuts.
That's exciting! it must have been an awesome entry!

[josemasaga]

Hi everyone! We held a World Tour 2013 event in Madrid (Spain), in a shop called Generación X. We couldn't offer any free stuff, but we did ran a DCC RPG game using the great The tower out of time. Seven players (nearly eight, one of them left early) delved into the tower mysteries.

A table shot:



It was a real feast of fumbles and critical hits (the halfling scored three!), and every class shined in its own right, a living proof of a perfectly-made system.

The attack of the dinos:



A great morning full of great roleplaying and dungeon crawling. They all loved the game and the adventure. A final picture depicting the bestial apes who met a quick and deadly end:

[Tortog]

I had the same roller-coaster experience as others for this year's FRPG day. I had signed up for two back to back table sessions of 2 hours late in the day. I had prepped a story sequence that started with the pregens from Imperishable Sorceress being the survivors of a night of chaos and mayhem (0-lvl funnel that didn't actually get played, just remembered) then set things up for the quest from TOOT. As they walk out the door to go questing they find themselves arriving on the upper reaches of a snowy mountain rather than the more familiar dirt and gravel track outside the Iron Axe Inn...

Of course we all know what happens to plans when they intersect with reality. Between the two other OSR style games making their first showing, the regularly scheduled Horror Trivia night, the Magic Tournament, and the 4 table 'player-grab' by D&D next: there weren't too many available players. When I got there they didn't have a table for me; or room to set up a new one, so I had to politely nudge my way into a smaller table (4 seats instead of 8 ). I didn't even have anyone to preach at... me and the other two OSR GM's just sat around twiddling our thumbs for the first 90 minutes of the first session. They went home, but fortunately for me two folks showed up specifically looking to play DCC RPG.

So I spent the next 45 minutes explaining the game; they had extensive D&D experience, and one of them was a long time GM with some tiny experience with 2nd edition. He understood the system immediately and took to it like a fish to water and played the party's only warrior rather well; I think he tried for MDoA on every attack, it was seriously impressive and entertaining to watch. The other new player was his wife, also familiar with D&D, but only back to 3.0. The first question she had for me was: "Can I play an elf?"

Me: "Sure, there's one in the pregens, but in this game elf = wizard and that's all they get to be, in this venue we don't have time to do a lot of tinkering."

Player: "I've never played a wizard. I normally play clerics; but I want to play an elf, so how do I play a DCC Wizard?" Not only was she a quick study at learning something completely new; but when she read up on Patrons, she decided to swap out the Elf King with Hraalvid Lord of Stone and so became a Geomancer.

My wife was the third player at the table, and she went with the thief pregen.

This is the smallest party I've run in DCC RPG and the first one that didn't have a cleric... I wasn't interested in running any NPC's, I figured that no cleric was a sure-fire way of speeding up the game anyway. But I observed something I thought was interesting. In the absence of regular healing (though I did scatter 4 healing potions around the map, and they used them all!) I saw that spellburning and the ability to burn luck provided a type of 'safety net' normally the purview of clerics and their 'box-o-band-aids' capacity. This allowed them to repeatedly act fearlessly in the face of danger. This has forced me to re-examine some of my approach to the ideas of luck and spellburn. It was also fascinating to see how each player chose to use their luck and spellburn in the case of the wizard. Nobody got out of there without burning some luck and one character deliberately spent themselves down to 0 luck in order to accomplish their goal.

We had a GREAT time, and I'm proud to say that we were the last game standing at our game-shop! By the time we finished with Imperishable Sorceress the only other people in the building were the employees, and the folks in the final round of the Magic Tournament... and I was watching their count down clock just as feverishly as they were. My only regret is that we didn't get a chance to start sooner and play both of these awesome modules; I don't know that we'd have gotten all the way through TOOT but we'd have been darn close. I've written up the narrative of the events and am ready to post it and the area maps I made to set the scene; I sent the players a copy for review to make sure I didn't leave anything out and will be posting on my blog soon for any who are interested. I also sent them an invite to run another session just to see what happens to the survivors of the first module. I'll forever be amazed by the stories that a bunch of strangers and some dice can create.