A new rpg item version has been added to the database: The Millennium (PDF)

A new rpg item has been added to the database: The Millennium

by Moonlight_Fox

AB2014solo wrote:

pestigor wrote:

It's another great day because Alice is Missing isn't at the top of the hotness burning an image in my screen😜

Hmm. I'm might be playing this on Discord next week. Then again, I'm in my sixties, so should I even be playing it? 🤔🙃

I've already signed up for that game :)

by bsoplinger

I'm so glad I use an ad blocker so don't see those things

by Dutys_Fist

Three Days to the Big Easy is a quickstart for the Arkham Horror RPG released as part of Free RPG Day 2026.

I've had fun memories playing Masks of Nyarlathotep (3rd & 4th edition), but the system is a bit too cumbersome for my liking, so naturally I'm intrigued by Cthulhu, especially in new systems that I know don't follow the indie mechanics-light path, so of course I picked this up.

Contents
This booklet contains the adventure, and QS rules, and characters: Everything needed to start this except for dice. Illustrations are nice, as always, both internally and externally, but some of the pagination is a bit flawed. For instance, the book starts with a warning to skip to pg 21 for rules and skip the adventure unless one is the GM. In reality, these start on page 19, and it's on the same spread as the final page of the scenario. Right beneath the warning on the same page is also the start of the adventure. Not ideal, not really major, but worth noting, because layout matters!

The Adventure
PCs are all constructs owned by a mad wizard who has made a pact with Hell. Their patron dies, and for very handwavey reasons, awaken when this happens. They're now trapped in Hell and must get out. A great premise for an adventure.

The Adventure
PCs are aboard a riverboat that's landing in New Orleans in 3 days, hence the title. PCs generally are employees who will be running music and the like.

Very quickly, there's a murder. PCs are tasked to investigate. They should be able to figure out who did it using very circumstantial evidence.

Then it repeats and repeats again, with different murderers each time. PCs are fed breadcrumbs leading to the problem being a specific item, that's affecting the bearer into committing murder.

Structurally, it's sort of sound. We start with some skill checks, then combat, and it ends in some bigger set-pieces. But there's a sort of ludonarrative dissonance here. In that we're tasked to solve some mysteries, but the adventure doesn't really expect us to - just interrogate a PC, find a suspect who seems suspicious, and move on. And that's sort of part of the intent here - the incompleteness I feel like makes the subsequent murders work, because it's weird that the first one was so easy, right? At the same time, it just seems very on-the-rails, and is awkwardly framed as a mystery such that it will fail players who actually want to investigate and dig deeper because there's nothing to latch onto there.

There's also not really a failure condition, which is a bit unusual because the scenario is almost set up to work really well free-form, with potentially more and more murders until PCs crack the case, but that's not the expectation.

I think a good GM could take this concept, the names and everything, revamp it, and make it a good mystery though.

Another issue is I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the macguffin in this setting. An ancient artifact that brings people to murder, yes! Some idol of greed in modern form causing the same? Absolutely! But a cigarette lighter? It just doesn't feel right in the setting. I'm glad there's a backstory to the item, but it feels weak, and the scenario as a whole lacks a lovecraftian vibe IMO.

The Mechanics
The part I'm mostly here for. This is a simple, but meaty system. D6 based.

Attributes tell you how likely you are to succeed on any given die roll. For the characters here, it goes from a rare 3+ to 6. But the number of dice that get rolled is up to the PC. It's scene based, so in every scene, they get 6 dice worth of actions.

This is actually really cool from a narrative perspective, because it helps balance out who does what. We can go and do some social scenes, and everyone is needed because even the most social character will run out of dice.

Taking damage means a reduction in the dice that you get each round, which is a nice way to make players want to avoid getting injured. Of course, the system feels a bit pulpy, because a character can convert any damage to an injury and get back to full. The injury lingers of course and can cause some problems, but frankly seems to heal easily enough with medicine-type checks by my reading. Still, it's cinematic, with PCs getting hurt, but then getting second winds and getting back into the fight.

There's no skill system to speak of, but characters can have items or abilities that give them rerolls or free dice.

All in all, it's a really neat system. I'm a bit of a system grognards, and normally not excited about systems, but I have to recognize that on its face, this is a good system with significant strengths.

That being said, personally, I'm not a fan of its use for Cthulhu, because it's pulpier than I would like. Of course, I understand that pulp is in vogue, so it's understandable. I'm not complaining.

The Characters
The pulp is reinforced by the characters. We get one of our old friends from the Series: Arkham Horror Files (Fantasy Flight Games) board game series in Jim Culver, and wow, has he been power-levelled. His ancestral trumpet now summons ghosts, which is a bit pulpier than I'd like, especially at the start of an adventure, because the whole "characters encountering the mythos for the first time" is such a cool thing, and when characters can already do these cool things, in my view it takes away from the otherworldliness of their mythos foes.

Anyways, it's a genuinely nice set of characters - the archetypical bard party, something which is really hard to do in D&D, but which works well here - each character is differentiated, and there's a nice assortment. Beautiful character sheets as well, and we get 6 characters too.

What's also interesting is the variety of these characters. Not only do we get different roles, but the way they're built is very different. Some characters have poor stats, but a lot of abilities or items, and some are the opposite. It's neat, and I sort of want to see how it works in practice and whether the stat- vs talent-heavy characters feel balanced in terms of power.

Overall Impressions
I'm not sure if I'd run this. I'm of two minds here - I really like the system, and I'm a grognard who usually doesn't find most systems impressive. And yet this has reduced my desire to run this or play the RPG - the production quality is great, but I wouldn't run the adventure as written, and it doesn't feel very lovecraftian to me, and gets the vibe of Cthulhu all wrong from top to bottom.

Rating
Salvageable

by Dutys_Fist

Things go To Hell is a short Pathfinder 2e adventure for 4-ish level 7 characters, released as part of Free RPG Day 2026. It follows Paizo's annual tradition of releasing an adventure for Pathfinder for Free RPG Day.

I always pick these up because Paizo used to write some amazing adventures, but alas, those are distant days. I actually was excited because when I picked this up seemed that we had broken from the annual pattern of "We want lightning to strike twice and get something as big as We Be Goblins, so here's a new adventure with a new weird newly-playable race". But nope, we're playing as constructs this time. That being said, the adventure isn't as bad as they usually are.

The Adventure
The adventure here is a really quick jaunt. There's a tower with 3 rooms and 3 encounters. 2 Combat, one non-combat. Which... Wow. I mean, I guess Paizo actually is starting to realize how long upper level combat takes, and for what it is, it's a quick jaunt.

The Premise
PCs are all constructs owned by a mad wizard who has made a pact with Hell. Their patron dies, and for very handwavey reasons, awaken when this happens. They're now trapped in Hell and must get out. A great premise for an adventure.

The Dungeon
Alas, mechanically, we don't have time, so the escape from hell is a 3-room dungeon. It's very straightforward - they awaken, have a chance to do the RP where they talk about their character and do funny voices, and search around for a bit, until some devils pop forth trying to clean things up and combat ensues.

Then, the next room is their boss, who is a very big devil but is intriugued by them and wants to talk. Basically, they're property, but he'll let them go if they find the wizard's soul, which is missing. The PCs are supposed to negotiate here, and successes give them bonus loot.

In the next room is the soul of the wizard, who is hiding inside an animated statue. Do the PCs need to figure this out in a cunning puzzle? Of course not! He attacks! PCs hopefully win, and that's the end of the scenario.

All in all, this is 6 pages.

Thoughts
So, it's a fairly linear crawl. The adventure proper is very straightforward and boring. The middle RP encounter is interesting though, and the highlight of the 6-page adventure. But darn, is this premise such an interesting one for an adventure. Done competently, I would buy such a thing. But this..., this is the barest adventure I've seen Paizo put out.

Did I mention it's 6 pages? In a 16-page booklet? What are the other pages about? Well, 2 are front/back matter, and the rest are...

The Characters
There are 4 characters, each taking 2 pages, for a total of 8 character pages. The character statblocks usually take up a smidge over half a page, so the other half is backstory for each character. It's a lot, and though interesting, way too verbose. It would have made far more sense to devote more pages to the advenure proper.

Overall Impressions
So, it's the same formula as usual technically, but this adventure is a bit shorter, but also has a more interesting premise than usual. But I wouldn't run it. At best, I'd salvage the Devil middle encounter, and the premise as a whole. But the premise is good enough that I'll probably pick up next year's adventure.

Rating
Not Much to Salvage

by Dutys_Fist

The Kayuga Protocol is a short adventure for both CBR+PNK, released as part of Free RPG Day 2026. It's also a teaser for an upcoming Omigami RPG coming to kickstarter at some point, from which certain new mechanics are drawn.

I'm not familiar with the system, but I picked this up because someone told me it's Forged in the Dark, and I do love Blades, and good adventures for that system are really hard to find (even paid tbh), so took a shot at this to see if I could make use of it in other Blades games. Alas, it's mostly a disappointing Railroad.

Note that this is just an adventure, but there's a QR Code link to the system rules which purport to be free.

The Adventure
Though one larger adventure, this is designed as two smaller adventures which can be ran in series, or separately.

The Premise
PCs encounter a Japanese spirit who asks them to rescue an artifact from the bigbad, because they are all descendents of ancient guardians. Bigbad is of course an evil trillionaire. PCs will of course accept. Choo choo!

The Heist
This adventure takes place on a remote island in Japan where the bigbad is mining knockoff bitcoin. We skip to the manor entrance. Here, the PCs enter the house, which has a security system whereby they keep teleporting to random rooms whenever they try to get to another room. There's also some music playing. How does this work, and how should PCs solve it? Left ot the GM to handwave a solution of course.

So PCs will solve this puzzle, and then get to the bigbad's room in the basement (of course, so there's no windows. Choo choo!), where they'll fight.

He's wearing the relic as a power source. There's a clock to defeat him. After PCs win (choo choo!), they'll get the relic, which is in a box. Hopefully, they open the box, to reveal the relic is actually a baby.

We skip over the exit, and go straight to the lair.

Thoughts
I don't believe the designers understand Blades. This is an absolutely atrocious adventure for Blades. I get it, Blades adventures can be hard... But especially in a heist, this one is just a simple railroad. Where can we maybe do flashbacks? What stuff can go wrong requiring improvisation? Plus, there's a complete lack of a GM support.

And the shock twist, which makes me think that the designers should design for other systems they understand - firstly, the PCs are supposed to accept this twist, and not once think they're being played. And then, in the interlude, we have freeform RP for PCs dealing with having to take care of a baby for a bit, for a bit of meaningless freeform RP. It reminds me of the worst of nuPaizo. The sickness spreads...

The Escort
Ok, we've gotten the baby. Now, the patron spirit reemerges, reveals that this child is from the moon, and needs to be taken there. Narratively, things start to fall apart here. We get some questions in the conclusion that make clear that we have no idea what these aliens are, as it's left to the GM - but we are in some sort of a setting? Worse, there's a regularly-scheduled shuttle to the Moon, so clearly, we've explored it and should have some idea of what's going on. It's a lot for the GM to make up on the fly, especially if not prepared, as there's a lot of questions here - why are the lunar beings able to wreak hellfire on Earth, but incapable of finding their lost child? Why does this child look human? Why have they not openly threatened the Earth yet, and instead this whole thing is done in secret? Why don't the PCs try to make money out of this ransom situation? Why does the child grow up super fast, and why does the child reaching adulthood mean the end is night?

Ok, but besides the plot issues, the scaffolding here is really nice. It's a lot less detail than I like for this sort of thing. I hate the guidance of "see what questions the players ask, and prepare adversaries based on this", which just punishes players for asking, and gets them to do the heavy loading... That's I thought why I'm using this adventure, so I don't have to do that.

Ok, but we have a few complications to throw in, which is nice, I just wish we'd have a basic set of obstacles to overcome. Because in a cyberpunk city, I'm a bit confused how moving with a humanlike child can be that hard. Especially when we can flashback in details like wearing masks to hide and such in response to some of the challenges.

And there's a fair amount of details on the challenges once we get to the spaceport, which is nice, and made me appreciate this second section more.

Thoughts
So, there's a lot less detail than I'd like, but this part is workable as a starting point. Of course, a lot of prep is required, and the whole premise thing needs to be changed because the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. But useful inspiration for something set in the original Blades setting, or another setting - the whole premise makes me think on a bit of a different take on Grogu from Star Wars.

Mechanics
There's some additional mechanics whereby PCs get artifacts they can trigger to do magical stuff, but I'm going to be looking at or reviewing this.

Overall Impressions
The first adventure is awful, and it's a shame that it takes up the majority of the page count, which could have been spent fleshing the second decent adventure and making it easy to run. As is, this is useful for some inspiration, but the GM will need to do the majority of the lifting on this, and I'm not sure if it succeeds because the designers are competent, or if they just stumbled into a good idea, so based off of this, I'm not going to seek out other adventures by the same designer.

Rating
Heist
Technically runnablle
Escort
Could be good with a lot of GM work

by Dutys_Fist

From Here to There is a hexcrawl released as part of Free RPG Day 2026. It's designed for both Old-School Essentials and Bree-YARC, the latter being the author's own retroclone based on a mix of 3.x and B/X D&D. That being said, it's fairly agnostic, and there's not that many statblocks.

I picked this up because a good hexcrawl is always useful, and a good one is easy to slot in. I also find that it's more difficult to create one that's good.

The Hexcrawl
This is an actual hexcrawl, which is something of a rarity I've found. I've seem hexcrawls that are actually more linear adventures written up as hexcrawls, or just settings written up as hexcrawls, or random tables written up as hexcrawls, but this is a true hexcrawl.

What I mean by this is, there's rumors, and some ideas for why the PCs might venture here, but no pre-adventure plot hooks so the PCs go to the right place. It's not just random tables, but a set of features that are geographically placed in sensible places, with interrelations.

Speaking of, we get a whole page for how to resolve the hexccrawl, which I really like.

The Hexcrawl Mechanics
We get some additional mechanical rules for how to resolve the hexcrawl, tied in to how the hexcrawl works, which I really like.

First, if a hex has a feature, it's either marked as Roadside, Hidden, or Secret. Anything by a Roadside is automatically found if on a road, but we get tables for likelihood of finding other features. There's seperate movement tables for going through a hex vs searching a hex, which tie in to the discovery probabilities. It's a nice foundation, and shows a lot of thoughtfulness, reinforcing that for once, I've found a legitimate hexcrawl.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the size of each hex, so I'm not sure how many hexes one can travel in a day, since it's a mile-based movement system (which depends on terrain).

The Hexcrawl Proper
The hexcrawl proper features a road with some forest on both sides. It's great, and as the title implies, it's easy to slot in a game when you're traveling from somewhere to somewhere else. So nice!

Along the road are campsites sensibly placed, with references to travelers actually going by them, which is nice. There's some linked features, a temple, and a whole bunch of bandits who have presences in their lairs, at lookouts, and as wandering monsters. It's so nice to see this attention to detail. It's not an adventure - we're not expected to fight the bandits, but the organization feels so real and in play will come alive.

Also, not every hex is keyed. This is a mistake I often see in hexcrawls. Some hexes should be boring, and if every hex has a feature, PCs can be tempted to just farm the hexes one by one until they find the encounter within.

I really want to like this. Alas, there are two fatal flaws. The first is that, if, as planned, I insert this hexcrawl to use when going from a town to another town along a scarce-trod path, there's little reason to go off the road. Perhaps one might stumble on the bandits, head back to their lair, and then return to the road. But there's not much reason to explore these hexes.

Compounding this, the encounters are frequently mundane. I know, readers who have read my past reviews know I appreciate some mundanity, and detest the high-powered everything-is-magic settings of nuD&D and nuPaizo, but there's scant here to make the PCs want to explore further. Few settlements, or cool things besides some loot. Part of this is the straightforwardness of the path - if there was a bend with a bridge that was flooded, a mining town somewhere in the distance, or a blockade somewhere, one might be tempted to go a little off-piste, but looking at the existing encounters, there's few rumors I could provide in-town to encourage the PCs to explore.

But structurally, it's sound, and I feel like that's the hardest part of a hexcrawl.

Overall Impressions
The rules I might keep and use, as well as the idea to mark features by how hidden they are. It's a great one! And though I'm not sure I'd use the crawl proper, it shows a lot of promise. I will keep an eye on future products from Todd Leback. Because even though it's remarkably plain, it's the best crawl I've seen in some time.

Rating
Ok

by Steve Dubya

<div>Front Cover from Ulisses Spiele German PDF</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Front Cover from Copernicus Corporation Polish PDF</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Front Cover from Copernicus Corporation Polish PDF</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Front Cover from Ulisses Spiele German PDF</div>