Free RPG Day is back — grab these 5 great games, including one from Critical Role

polygon.com:

Free RPG Day is this Saturday, June 25. That’s your signal to visit a participating friendly local game store to grab some free stuff. But if all you’re doing is a flyby to see what goodies you can make off with then you’re missing the point. Free RPG Day is about creating community, not gobbling up merch. Instead, why don’t you pick up a pamphlet, plop down at a table, and start playing one of those games right away?

Polygon had the chance to preview all of the materials being given away during this year’s Free RPG Day. Here’s our pick of the five best tabletop role-playing games that you should be able to get off the ground with just a handful of inexperienced players and very little prep time.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game is a throwback ruleset by Goodman Games that evokes the same feeling of danger and exploration present in the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons. The system has been “modernized” in such a way as to be extremely familiar to fans of later editions of the game — including the most recent 5th edition.

Danger in the Air is a funnel for level-0 characters that requires little more than a working understanding of the d20 system. (If that gives you anxiety, there’s also a 44-page quickstart guide available online.) By the end of an hour or two expect to have a handful of level-1 adventurers ready for their first real quest — and dozens of bodies of those who failed in the task. What is that task? Well, it’s exploring a drifting extraplanar craft of mysterious origins that has been hovering over town for the past few days. It’s a great way to kick off a larger Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign — or to tease folks hyped for the pending reboot of Dungeons & Dragons’ Spelljammer setting.

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