Gamelandia is my go to place for Free RPG Day goodness. In addition to letting you pickup Free RPG Day goodies, they also run free RPGs. I was able to signup for two RPGs.
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Kids on Bikes
System: Kids on Bikes 2e
GM: Molly
6 Players, Ages 13+: Morgan Hua (teen bully), kid scout, teen slacker, teen scout, teen worker, teen animal friend.
I just wanted to try this out. We took 1.5 hrs generating the characters and the town we were in. So, we only spent 1/2 hr having an adventure.
I actually liked the character and town generation. You pick an age group (kid, teen, adult), then a template. A majority of the character creation is either answering set questions based on your template or a d20 die roll and table lookup which may lead to another question. PC Stats are dice which range from 1d4 to 1d20.
I wound up with Billy the Teen Bully (template). Afraid of Adults in Suits. Who is Gross (a strength) and Rebellious (a strength), and Obnoxious (a flaw). I had a Black Bike (+1 fight) with a Milk Crate (lets me carry a large item, a tuba). In my backpack was a Jar with a Scorpion in it, Firecrackers, and a Super Soaker water gun. My highest stat was Fight at 1d20+2. My weakest was Charm at 1d4. Most skills require a 8+ to succeed, during our game, we sometimes needed a 20. The good news is that dice explode, if you roll the max on a die, you keep on rolling. If you miss by 5, it's a Failure with Serious Consequences. If you miss by 10, it's a Catastrophic Failure.
We picked Las Vegas as our town. Various round-robin questions created a Ferris wheel, rollercoaster rides, an alcoholic row, a friendly homeless guy with scorpions (where I got the jar from), a radioactive nuclear crater, a church near the crater, fragile powerlines, a Joshua tree forest, a military base, etc. We drew representations on a sheet of craft paper. Some buildings were created when we rolled 1d20s onto the map and dropped buildings onto the map determined by the die roll and where the die landed.
We also created one rumor per Player which may or may not be true: The water tower is full of root beer, there are underground tunnels connecting various buildings, mutants worship under the church, ghost children ride the rollercoaster, etc. GM wrote out the rumors on Post-It notes and slapped them onto the map.
Then we were ready to play. GM asked why we were together. I proposed that since we had two scouts, we were biking to the Joshua tree forest. I wanted to get more scorpions, but lied and told the others we were going to look for a scorpion nest, so I can set my scorpion free. We find some baby scorpions and when the others were looking away, I tried to catch some more, but got stung instead (failed die roll). After some first aid which wrapped up one of my hands like a giant mitt, the kid scout (my little sister) opened the screw top lid of the jar and tried to dump out my scorpion and failed, it clung to the inside of the jar. Then another teen bully showed up. I convinced her to hold out her hand (I rolled 1d4, but got a total of 15, the d4 exploded three times which was a minor miracle) and I upended the open jar onto her palm. She fled, leaving her orange bike (10 speed) behind. We went through her stuff and looted it. The teen slacker tried to pickup my scorpion and had a Catastrophic Failure, it wound up stinging him up and down his arm. So, we had to rush him to emergency care. We had 7 bikes, but only 5 riders. Teen scout upgraded her orange bike to the 10 speed. Teen worker doubled up on teen slacker's bike which had a banana seat which can take two passengers. So we left teen worker's bike and teen scout's bike behind. On the way to the emergency room, kid scout and teen scout crashed their bikes with the teen scout getting road rash and a damaged 10 speed bike. At least we got to the emergency room, three of us needed it. End of adventure.
I enjoyed the process and random tables for the PC and world creation. This was the highlight of the system. Though it takes too much time for a one-shot. And if you skip this process and just hand out pre-gens, you miss out on all the creative fun. The game play was ok, but not great. Some tests required a 20 to succeed. I asked the GM afterwards and her response was, "You're picking up scorpions with your bare hands." Ok, point taken. I guess realistically, we would have put the jar over the scorpion and then slid a sheet of stiff paper underneath, then flipped the jar over. I guess difficulty level is all in the details.
Some other games such as Brindlewood Bay, shorten the PC creation process by having fewer questions which makes it faster to generate a PC for a one-shot. And there's no initial world creation, but details for locations are added when PCs encounter them.
For this game, the table was blessed with imaginative Players. We had an adventure with scorpions and bikes, but that was because we were willing to do risky things. This could have easily become a snore-fest. If the highlight of a game is session 0 (PC and world creation) and not the game play, there's an issue.
Law and Obligation
System: Cosmere RPG
GM: Anna
6 Players (3 empty seats), Ages 15+: Morgan Hua (Talys - Agent), Rasla - Scholar/Hunter, Divira - Leader/Windrunner.
On what they thought was a routine task to deliver a message, a group of heroes must protect a budding Radiant from a skilled and powerful foe. Can they get to him first, and can they convince him to embrace a difficult truth?
We actually played the Free RPG Day scenario. GM had played the system before, but wasn't completely familiar with the system. We ran into some problems when we started combat. I skimmed the free Stormlight Starter rules afterwards and found that we didn't follow the combat rules at all.
I only read the first 20 pages of the first book of the Stormlight Archive series. And I had put the book down slightly more than 10 years ago. I let the other two Players pick PCs first. Both had read multiple books, one said she had read the first 4 books.
All the PCs were 3rd level or split class characters. Some PCs had 3 page character sheets. If they did magic, they had another 2 pages explaining their Stormlight abilities.
The world is very rich (though I did feel a little bit lost, not having read any of the books).
I did have fun playing. 3rd level PCs were pretty powerful, so I wonder how unbalanced this becomes at even higher levels.
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