What to Get at Free RPG Day

Free RPG Day is June 21st this Saturday! The event, which was initially organized in 2019 by three gaming retailers, is now an annual event where local gaming stores receive quickstarts, one-shots, and samples of the latest and greatest games published in the industry. Players get a taste for the latest and greatest games, and FLGSes get people flooding in (hopefully to buy stuff.)

2025 is no different. Over 700 gaming stores will host the event across the United States this year, and each store will receive more than thirty items to give away.

But what sorts of content will be available? We’ve got an overview of all the big releases and what we think is most worth your attention. Thanks to HayabusaJack on Reddit for publishing his overview of what most gaming stores will have.

Quickstarts:

Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying Universal Engine quickstart holds three adventures built around the setting-neutral ruleset and an overview of the rules. Chaosium has been pushing BR content more lately, so this was a curious addition.

Magpie Games’ Root The Roleplaying Game offers pregens and Laurel’s Canopy, an adventure for players to try out the TTRPG based on the popular anthropomorphized political board game.

Modiphius has three games this year:

• Star Trek Adventures is republishing The Celestial Algorithm, which was published last year as part of the Second Edition Quickstart. Players discover a strange machine that manifested out of a wormhole in Federation space and attempt to explore it.

• Dreams and Machines is an original post-apocalyptic setting where machines have taken over and humanity has to recover.

• Fallout is releasing Machine Frequency, a prewritten scenario from the Wasteland Warfare expansion book. It has been released in the past at previous Free RPG Day events. Players assist a scribe from the Brotherhood of Iron with recovering a downed Vertibird’s crew.

Son of Oak Studios is promoting a pair of quickstarts built around the City of Mist engine:

• Legends in the Mist is a fantasy-themed take on CoM featuring a short adventure. It is duplicate content from the quickstart printed by Son of Oak when they sought to fund Legends in the Mist on Kickstarter in Feb. 2024.

• Otherscape is the company’s “Mythic-Cyberpunk” game, which combines mythology-styled magic with cyberpunk vibes.

Free League Press is releasing The Magistrate’s Gamble, a short adventure based on the DRAGONBANE ruleset. The players are asked to break into a wizard tower and steal a necklace.

Green Ronin’s The Expanse Roleplaying Game received an update earlier this year, and it is getting an adventure to correlate. Players are sent to the moon to investigate a shipwreck that crashed several months ago.

Exalted Funeral’s The Land of Eem and the Monty Python TTRPG are published in a double-sided booklet. Eem is described as a “Muppets meets Lord of the Rings” and is more lighthearted about fantasy. How can you go wrong with something called “Curse of the Chicken-Foot Witch?” Monty Python is also built around its fantasy-themed storytelling from Holy Grail.

Finally, Red Raven is publishing a quickstart for Arzium, its fantasy world setting. I don’t know a ton about it, but sounds fun.

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Adventures

Adventures are just short campaigns or one-shots that players who already own the rules can run.

Renegade Game Studios is publishing a GI Joe/Transformers team-up where players will try and stop Cobra and the Decepticons from harnessing a new form of Energon.

Kobold Press is publishing the Tales of the Valiant/Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons one-shot Well of Shadows, a third-level adventure in which players will attempt to discover the fate of a group of knights sent to stifle the spreading corruption.

Goodman Games is releasing Castle Whiterock, a campaign about a recently unveiled ancient watchtower that holds eldritch secrets. The game can be played with Dungeon Crawl Classic rules or Fifth Edition D&D.

Paizo has two adventures for fans.

• The Starfinder adventure is the Battle for Novarush, where players will have to escape a space pirate ship and try to escape the Corpse Fleet alive.

• Pathfinder fans have The Scourge of Sheerleaf, a story about how a village will hire adventurers to defeat a dragon that is kidnapping their people.

Edge Studios is expanding the Arkham Horror series, which is exploring the Comets of Kingsport. A group of pre-made adventurers must find a cursed researcher before he unleashes dark magics on the city of Kingsport.

Obojima is a Studio Ghibli-inspired setting that recently released. The D&D one-shot, titled Tales from the Tall Grass, is a short adventure about helping a remote village acquire heirlooms from a gang of harpies.

Ghostfire Gaming went all in this year, with three D&D one-shots built in all three of its universes

• The horror-focused Grim Hollow is getting an adventure titled In the Beast’s Wake about a fallen kingdom and a hunt for “the Great Beast.”

• Aetherial Expanse is more themed toward Spelljammer and science fiction, but its one shot (titled Whispers of Chaos) features a crew of adventurers hunting for a stolen book.

• Arora is a post-apocalyptic setting focused on dragons. The one-shot is titled Into the Living Sands and tells the story of “The Great Water Race,” an event designed to acquire ncessary supplies in a desert plane.

Mana Project Studio has written a D&D adventure in its Nightfell setting, which is all about a sunless world and builds on previous campaigns published by MPS.

Where the Zal River Flows is a one-shot published by Hexed. It’s a story about a power vacuum around the land of Zaltroonia and adventurers' efforts to survive in a corrupted land.

Marvel Multiverse Roleplaying Game is making a play to win over fans of the Thunderbolts movie. While this booklet is a self-contained adventure around the new group of heroes, players also have access to digital copies of pregenerated versions of the Thunderbolts and quickstart rules.

Thunder Road Vendetta RPG, a TTRPG about a very lethal car race, has a short adventure about chasing down bandits and getting revenge.

Level 1 has a series of short 3-4 page RPGs.

Booklets

Wires in the Woods is a two-player journaling adventure designed by Critical Kit. Players are a pair of creatures out investigating strange artifacts, from human-made trash to abandoned ruins.

Piaga (Plague) 1348 is a TTRPG about an undercover army fighting a war to end the “Revenant Plague” and its consequences. The game is published by the Italian publisher Need Games.

Hit Point Press is trying to get eyes on Shift, its new setting-neutral ruleset. I’ve not had a chance to try it myself, but a quickstart for the system will be available.

Everything Else:

Free dice, scratch-off d20 cards, pins from PlayDnD and Sirius Dice and miniatures of The Emperor from Baldur’s Gate 3.

What I’m Getting

I think the Shift quickstart is interesting, and I am eager to read it myself. There are a lot of setting-neutral ruleset, but I’ve adored Hit Point Press for years, and I want to see this book succeed.

I’d also try to get my hands on the Thunderbolts one-shot. I recently acquired the Marvel Multiverse book and would love to try it. (I think they should have built the adventure around the Fantastic Four, but that’s my preference.)

The Land of Eem also interests me since I know they are running a crowdfunding campaign right now.

But what are you excited about? What are you looking forward to trying? Let me know! I’d love to know what you’re excited about.

Also, a reminder to buy stuff from your local store. Without your financial support, FLGSes will disappear.

(thanks to Hayabusajack on Reddit for posting an early preview of the game’s contents)