Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.
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The Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart is very much written as a mini-roleplaying game. It explains what roleplaying is and what it entails, what is needed to play, and so on, before explaining the rules these start with characters and their creation. A Player Character has seven attributes—Strength, Constitution, Size, Intelligence, Power, Dexterity, and Charisma, rated between three and eighteen. Character creation begins by rolling for an array of values to assign. Each attribute also has its own active value that can rolled like a skill and skills themselves are divided in six categories—Communication, Manipulation, Mental, Perception, Physical, and Combat. Depending upon the type and genre of the setting or scenario, a Player Character will need to make use of Power Points, Fatigue, Sanity, Powers, and Attack Powers. (Only one pre-generated Player Character has spells rather than powers.) A Player Character will also have a Profession which provides a standard set of bonuses to apply. The Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart includes twelve, from Cowboy and Detective to Thief and Warrior, whilst the core rulebook provides four times as many. The Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart even go so far as to provide an example of the creation process.
The system is explained simply and easily. A standard task will not modify the chance of a success, but an easy chance simply means that a player rolls only to see if the result is a critical success or a fumble. A difficult task halves the chance of success, whilst an impossible task will always fail. A critical result is one tenth of the skill chance or less, while a fumble is equal to one tenth of the chance of the Player Character failing (unfortunately, the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart does not make this clear). For opposed rolls, the quality of the rolls are compared, whether critical successes, successes, failures, or fumbles. For more granular detail, the mainstay of Basic Roleplaying, the Resistance Table is included.
The rules also coverts time for various actions and combat. The combat round is broken down into five phases—‘Preparation’, ‘Social’, Ranged’, ‘Movement’, and ‘Close’. Attacks can be parried or dodged, critical successes double base damage and ignore armour, so are very deadly. Otherwise, armour reduces damage taken, as can shields. The spot rules for cover ambushes, backstabbing, cover, disarming, knockout attacks, and more. Just as the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart actually includes an example of character generation, it also includes an example combat, which amusing involves an anachronistic fight involving an Elf with a bow and a starship captain with a laser rifle.
The Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart comes with three adventures. These are ‘The Prisoner of Richelieu’ by Anthony Warren, ‘Footsteps in the Dark’ by Nick Middleton, and ‘The Lost Temple of Garthoon’ by Troy Wilhelmson.’ These are quite short affairs and each comes with its own set of four pre-generated Player Characters. In ‘The Prisoner of Richelieu’, the Player Characters are asked by the Queen to rescue her messenger, Monsieur Treville, who has been arrested by the evil Viceroy Renault. They have to break into Viceroy Renault’s secret prison and in the process will discover his own dark nature and why the prisoners look rather pale. ‘Footsteps in the Dark’ is a Science Fiction scenario in which the crew of a starship is forced to crash land on a planet after it has been fired upon when responding to a distress call. They must fight their way past robot sentries to get to the source of the signal, and then decide whether or not they actually want to save the source of the signal. ‘The Lost Temple of Garthoon’ is a mini-dungeon delve into a lost temple for treasure in a fantasy world. Now all four come with tips for the Game Master, but all three are really extended encounters that should take a group of players a couple of hours or so to play through. Of the three, ‘The Prisoner of Richelieu’ is the best one, allowing for that much more roleplaying and planning than the other two, which rather underwhelm the reader.
Physically, the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart is clean and tidy. In terms of its content, it feels slightly dense, but the content is not at all that complex. So, it is easier to read than it looks. The artwork is good as is the cartography, the map and text do not always align as they should. It is easy to work out what the author means, it means that the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart feels rushed in places.
Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart is a basic introduction to the Basic Roleplaying because it does not cover the more advanced aspects of the roleplaying game, such as Power Points, Fatigue, Sanity, Powers, and Attack Powers. In this, it feels like an update of the Basic Roleplay introduction published in 1981 and similar in complexity to the roleplaying game built directly off of that, Worlds of Wonder, which like the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart, detailed three different settings. Overall, the Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine Quickstart feels old as well as new and is a good basic introduction to the Basic Roleplaying.
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