Audio EXP: #150 – A week of good RPG free downloads

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 28th of May 2022, and the title of this episode is “A week of good RPG free downloads”.

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #150]

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Sixel Publishing is in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.

You can read the interview with Mike Sixel on the blog. We talk briefly about making dragons more dangerous in Dungeons & Dragons. Mike has a whole supplement on that and argues that, at the very least, most encounters with solo dragons need to be more interesting.

The news hot off the digital press last week was that the free to download playtest rules for the official Cowboy Bebop RPG were out. That turned into a popular story.

It also turned out to be the tip of an iceberg of free downloads and other cost-effective ways to get games. Some good bundle deals are coming up, but let’s first look at the freebies.

It’s very easy to miss this freebie. In fact, it’s surprisingly easy to miss the fact that the official Batman RPG is on Kickstarter. It is! It is playing second fiddle in Monolith’s crowdfunding campaign for the third expansion for the board game Batman: Gotham City Chronicles.

It’s there, though. So if you want the Batman RPG, then that’s where you need to go. You’ll also find both the French and English versions of the Batman quickstart there. Or, of course, linked from Geek Native.

Stranger things have happened, speaking of which, season four is here.

But, back to the freebies. Evil Genius Productions, who seems now to be known as Evil Genius Games on DriveThruRPG, have put the Everyday Heroes quickstart up for free.

So what? Well, this is the out-of-nowhere but well-connected startup with the official license to the following RPGs;

• Escape From New York
• Highlander
• Kong: Skull Island
• Pacific Rim
• Rambo
• The Crow
• Total Recall
• Universal Soldier

Everyday Heroes is the 5e and d20 Modern mashup ruleset that’ll power the interlocked collection. It’s on Kickstarter now, hence the timing.

The whole Quest RPG is free to download. That’s new. You may have previously bought a copy.

The classic Quest is free, and the Core Deck of the card-based game is free too. Of course, both are only downloads.

There’s a Cosmic Fantasy edition on the way, with some sci-fi in it, which explains this time. That’s likely to head to Kickstarter too.

CMON’s RPG of the very popular Zombicide board game is out and on DriveThruRPG.

In fact, there are a few Zombicide RPG supplements out too, which you can read about on the blog.

Key among them, perhaps, is the generous 56-paged free quickstart.

There are some pretty famous designers in this title. I’ve not had the time to take a look, but I must do so.

Lastly, and perhaps not to be outdone, Wizards of the Coast also released new free but playtest rules. There’s a new Unearthed Arcana called Giant Options out.

These are playtesting rules and, in this case, with a giant theme. There are some new feats but the focus, as is typical, is on subclasses. This time around, they are;

• Path of the Giant (Barbarian subclass)
• Circle of the Primeval (Druid subclass)
• Runecrafter (Wizard subclass)

The Path of the Giant has the ability to let you throw creatures like gnomes and halflings around.

Speaking of smaller than average, but totally cool, characters, there’s a new Willow series coming to Disney+.

You may have never seen the Val Kilmer and Warwick Davis movie, and if you’ve seen it, you may well consider it to be fantasy cheese.

I counter that it’s a classic and surprisingly uncheesy, despite, well, some cheese.

Warwick Davis played Wicket, a famous Ewok from Star Wars and appeared in Harry Potter. Actually, Davis is a prolific actor with an impressive IMDB but I always think of him as Willow.

Davis has also done plenty of important charity work, with health and mental health a focus. That’s the one negative I want to touch on this week, before hitting the bundle news, as research from Preply, an education site, has revealed that more than half of gamers have changed their online identity to hide from abuse.

Usually, this happens on shooter games, voice chat, and Xbox and Playstation, but it’s not restricted to that. Typically, it’s women having to obscure who they are they kick ass, and that’s a shame. No one should have to.

There’s good bundle news this week. Nothing free, but some impressive deals.

A challenger for the best bundle this week comes from Goodman Games with Fifty Dungeons on the Bundle of Holding. These are DCC adventures, and the first tier costs less than $20 and gets you more than $250 worth of downloads.

Also on the Bundle of Holding, there’s Neon City Overdrive, an RPG with supplements from Peril Planet.

Over on Humble, you can get a physical Starfinder supplement or the core rules in PDF. In total there’s more than £300 on offer in the Bug-Buster bundle.

There’s also a bundle to help Top Cow celebrate their 30th anniversary. That’s a must for comic book fans.

Lastly, before I go and for a laugh, I wrote a fantasy cake generator to celebrate Geek Native’s greatest failure to date.

What’s that? That’s a mind flayer vomiting up a Snap rainbow. I thought it would be good merch, but no one else did, and it’s had no sales. So, I turned it into a cake, there are pictures, and ate it all.

And on that note, let’s wrap up there, enjoy your freebies and see you next week.