[Free RPG Day 2026] Fire & Brimstone

Now in its nineteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2026 took place on Saturday, June 27th. 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. Unfortunately, due to vagaries of International Customs, Free RPG Day in the UK did not take place until Saturday, 22nd August.

This review is possible due to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham.

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For Free RPG Day 2026, Magpie Games published not one book, but six—Adventure Booklet 1: Earth & Root, Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone, Adventure Booklet 3: Ash & Steel, Adventure Booklet 4: Air & Wind, and Adventure Booklet 5: Water & Mist as well as the Expanded Rules supplement. These are all for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns for any roleplaying game. This is the roleplaying adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, animated series which are inspired by the indigenous cultures of North America and Asia, in particular, China, Chinese martial arts, and the ability to ‘bend’ or manipulate the four elements—water, earth, fire, and air. Only one person can bend all four elements, and he is known as the ‘Avatar’, and not only does he serve as the link between the physical world and the spirit world, but he is also responsible for maintaining harmony between the world’s four nations. In the roleplaying game, the players roleplay characters, or companions, who are capable of bending one of the elements as well as practising martial arts, all with the aim of protecting the world from harm and those unable to stand up to misuse of power.

As with the other four Adventure Booklets, Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone originally appeared in Wan Shi Tong’s Adventure Guide, which explores and presents adventures in the different eras of the Avatarverse, including the Kyoshi, Roku, the Hundred Year War, Aang, and Korra periods. Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone presents a Roku Era Adventure whose action takes place at the Four Nations Summit & Technological Symposium in Hari Bulkan, the capital of the Fire Nation. Shortly after the opening ceremony with performances and displays by all four nations, Kuchtei, the Fire Nation’s Minister of Education, Science, and Technology bursts into the meeting hall and announces that someone has stolen multiple crates containing rare meteorite metal. When forged, this metal can be used to create unbreakable weapons and devices and so is worth more than its weight in gold! Kuchtei demands that the thief or thieves reveal themselves and when no-one is forthcoming, announces that security will increased and when the perpetrator is found, he will feel the full force of the Fire Nation’s law. In the wake of this announcement, Taqukaq, a famous Waterbender from the Northern Water Tribe approaches the Player Characters, explains the situation, and asks them to investigate, to find out not only who stole the meteorite metal, but also why.

The scenario presented in Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone is like a murder mystery in a cosy country house a la Agatha Christie, except the Player Characters are not investigating a murder, but a theft and are at a conference rather than a country house. Nevertheless, they are in a small environment, there are numerous witnesses to interview and interrogate, and there are multiple suspects. This though is a scenario for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, which means that whilst there are multiple suspects, there not one set culprit and not one set solution to the crime. Instead, the Game Master is expected to build the adventure plot and story around the actions and investigation conducted by the Player Characters. There is also not a given end to the scenario, but a discussion of how it might end, along with advice on running the scenario as a whole. This covers how to pace the scenario, escalate the situation with events, both create and handle good clues, and running the investigation. In particular, how to shift the story from its investigative process and interaction with the various NPCs and factions to combat scenes and back again, as well as some answers to additional questions that might arise during play.

Beyond this set-up—and it is a very detailed set-up—the Player Characters are free to approach the investigation however they want. To that end, all of the NPCs, groups, and important locations are described in detail and backed up with the solid advice for the Game Master. In addition, there is advice too for the Game Master on who to set up the scenario if the players are using their own characters rather than the pre-generated quintet which is included in Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone. The five pre-generated Player Characters for the adventure are all Air Nomads attending the conference on behalf of the Elders of the Southern Air Temple to help keep the peace and report back on ideas presented at the event. They include the excitable and ambitious Bo the Bold; the spirit seer Chegu the Icon, reluctant about her revered position and who also comes with an air bison; Ema the Idealist who is building devices that mimic airbending abilities; Sherah the Pillar, a covert operative; and Norbu the Rogue, a troublemaker and thrillseeker glad to be away from the temple.

Also included are details of the Basic Moves and Balance Moves in Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game—in addition the Moves for all of the Player Characters—and the techniques that are not in the core book, plus the combat exchanges, statuses, and basic techniques. Taqukaq is also fully described and there is advice too on how to use Legendary NPCs like Taqukaq. Also detailed are the various Techniques used in the scenario by the NPCs not found in the core rulebook. In some ways, the Game Master advice is so complete and feels longer than the broader description of the situation in Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone and the summit location.

Physically, Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone is well presented, sturdy booklet.

Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone is not a scenario in the traditional sense, but very much more of a highly detailed set-up backed up with all of the background, stats, and advice that the Game Master needs to respond in what will very much be a Player Character-driven investigation and story. This makes it a bit more complex to run than the previous Adventure Booklet 1: Earth & Root and the Game Master needs to prepare it with care to cover most eventualities. Fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra will enjoy the background too and overall, Adventure Booklet 2: Fire & Brimstone is great support for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game.

[Free RPG Day 2026] Creature Curation Presents #1

Now in its nineteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2026 took place on Saturday, June 27th. 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. Unfortunately, due to vagaries of International Customs, Free RPG Day in the UK did not take place until Saturday, 22nd August.

This review is possible due to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham.

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Creature Curation Presents #1 is a slightly different product for Free RPG Day because it is an anthology of three adventures for three different roleplaying games, all three of them compatible with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance retroclone designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. One of the three roleplaying games will be familiar, it previously having appeared as support for Free RPG Day with Into the Würmhole back in 2021, whilst the others will be less so. One thing to bear in mind with Creature Curation Presents #1 is that whilst it states that the quick-start rules are included, this is not actually the case. Instead QR codes are provided for each of the three roleplaying games as well as either a QR code to a character generator for the roleplaying game or a set of pre-generated Player Characters. This makes preparation a little slower than it ordinarily might have been if they had been included, but not overly so.

The first scenario, ‘Impaled Obelisk’, is for Vast Grimm, the pre-apocalypse Science Fiction roleplaying game set in a very future in which cultists have unleashed the infection of THEY, whose infection of Würms and the Grimm have hollowed out and shattered worlds, including the Earth. Humanity’s last hope is the Gate of Infinite Stars, through which the uninfected survivors can escape and find a universe where they will be free of the Würms and the gnawing… In the meantime, pirates and cultists prey on the survivors as desperate men and women gather together in Legions and explore what remains of the universe, perhaps hoping to find something that will towards humanity’s continued survival and the construction of the Gate of Infinite Stars

In ‘Impaled Obelisk’, the Legion answer the distress call of the Gallant Obelisk, a starship that went missing nine decades ago and is found to have crashed nose first into the surface of the planetoid, Caladron 7. It is unlikely that any of the original crew are still alive, but there may still be much to scavenge, some of which will be valuable, some of which might help mankind. Caladron 7’s low gravity means that the Player Characters can easily propel themselves up its length, exploring its corridors, research facilities, scientific laboratories, crew quarters, engineering spaces, and more. Everything seems to be covered in a Web Goo and none of the bodies of the crew can be found. ‘Impaled Obelisk’ is a classic ‘wrecked spaceship as dungeon’ scenario, not a little like Alien, but ‘Grimm’ in its own way. It is easy to run as a one-shot or add to a Game Master’s campaign.

The second scenario is for Raptor Ruckus. This is inspired by 1993’s Jurassic Park and is a survival horror roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are staff at the world’s new and greatest theme park about to excite the world about dinosaurs once again! Of course, things can go wrong. There can be storms or breakdowns or worse, agents of Basilisk, the anti-human doomsday cult, working to sabotage and undermine the whole project!

In ‘Airborne’, the Player Characters are returning to the island park after showing off one of the dinosaurs to investors on the mainland. They are travelling aboard a Lockheed C-130 transport along with a kentosaurus, sedated and caged. Suddenly, there is a bang and the aeroplane pitches nose down—is it about to crash? Just as bad is that one of the creature handlers draws a gun and points it at the Player Characters! Thus, the adventure starts with a bang and carries on from there as they are faced by one dangerously dinosaurous situation after another. They have to get out of the aeroplane, are attacked by Pteranodons on the way down, and find themselves on the wrong side of the fence back in the dinosaur park! And even when they get to the other side, it looks like saboteurs have been hard at work whilst the Player Characters have been away on the mainland. The scenario includes the stats for some dinosaurs, a pair of fanatical cultists, and an entertaining NPC to portray. Pleasingly, it does include a dinosaur chase, exactly as you would want, and overall, this is an excitingly tense chase scenario from start to finish that can lead into Fragmentation, the first campaign for Raptor Ruckus.

The third scenario is for Neon Bastardz. This is a near future roleplaying game inspired by Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland and all of the bad ‘B’ and straight to video trashy Sci-Fi movies of the eighties and noughties. The Player Characters are Skumdogs, lowlife-not-quite-scum pushed to take the dirty jobs no one wants to do, from cleaning the sewers of CHUDs to finding radical treasures in the wastelands for the Detroit-Prime Hyper-Lux.

In ‘Killing Detroit Prime Style’, the Player Characters are gangers, members of a war party perhaps hired to do a job for BioRent Worldwide, Detroit-Prime’s leading biotech manufacturer. The offices of BioRent Worldwide on floor #207 of the city’s megablock have been taken over by Ninja. It is up to the gangers to break into the building, ascend to floor #207, find the Ninja and beat their ass before sending them back to their dojo in body bags. Floor #207 is large with separate areas that might take up whole floors in lesser blocks, but whether the cubicle maze, client consultation room, organ storage, executive offices, and so on, the gangers will find Ninja. The gangers can earn ‘Friendship Points’ by saving civilians who are at risk, sparing an enemy who surrenders, giving an emotional speech, fighting back-to-back with an ally, and so on. They can be spent to re-roll any die, heal a downed ally, add a bonus to an ally’s attack, and so on. All very eighties buddy movie and cinematic. ‘Killing Detroit Prime Style’ is a beat ’em up scenario, very much more style than substance and easily the easiest of the three scenarios in the anthology to prepare.

Physically, Creature Curation Presents #1 is a blast of bright neon colour. Of the three, ‘Airborne’ for Raptor Ruckus is underwritten in places, but otherwise, all three are easy to grasp. The artwork is decent throughout, but the cartography is plain if serviceable.

Creature Curation Presents #1 packs in three easy-to-run scenarios that a Game Master can each run in a single session. ‘Impaled Obelisk’ for Vast Grimm and ‘Airborne’ for Raptor Ruckus are the best of the three, as ‘Killing Detroit Prime Style’ is Neon Bastardz is simplistic, but all three are solid introductions to their respective roleplaying games.

Friday Filler: Split the Hoard

You have persevered. You have made it to the end of the dungeon. The dragon is dead. You survived. Right before you are not only the dragon’s hulking corpse, but also its hoard. Mounds of gold coins and gems and jewels. Then the magical items. What matters now is how you divide the hoard between you. It would not be too difficult normally, but this time, there is a deadline looming. Scavengers are coming to take what they can and they will not take any prisoners. So, you need to pick over the hoard, argue for the best bits, and get out again. And you do not have to entirely honest about it—you can demand it or even steal it too! All of you are savvy enough to get out of the dungeons, but the question is, who is going to get out with the most and the best? As veteran adventurers, you know it is never a good idea to split the party, but splitting the hoard is another matter.

This is the set-up to Split the Hoard. This is the first card game from EN Publishing, known for the ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—and Level Up! roleplaying games. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is intended to be played by between two and five players, aged fourteen and over, and plays in twenty minutes.

Split the Hoard consists of five Player Boards and five Privacy Screens, one-hundred-and-three Hoard cards, twenty Title cards, a Dragon card, the Rulebook, and the Appendices. The five Player Boards depict five classic fantasy archetypes—Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Warrior, and Wizard—and grant an ability, mark the three spaces where the player places the Hoard cards representing treasure he has found, and shows the round order. For example, the Warrior’s ability is to win ties for Arms titles and gain a random treasure from the Hoard deck if an Arms treasure is taken from his haul. The spaces on the Player Board where he places treasures up for negotiation are marked with one, two, or three coins. One oddity is that the Player Boards are double-sided, but the same on both sides, where it would have been nice for the illustration of the hero to be of one gender on one side and another on the other, or perhaps a different ability.

The Hoard cards are double-sided. On the back is a Coin and when played face down like this, these Coin cards are used to set the prices for treasures and to purchase treasures. On the front of each Hoard card is the details of a specific treasure. These are divided into five categories—Arcane, Arms, Holy, Natural, and Wealth—corresponding to the five archetypes of the Player Boards. A Treasure card either has a ‘Rank’ or ‘Victory Point’ value. The ‘Rank’ value is totalled in combination with other Treasure cards to determine if a hero is eligible to certain Title card. The ‘Victory Point’ value contributes to a player’s final score at the end of the game. A Treasure card will also have a special ability. For example, the ‘Grimoire’ can be discarded in the Claim phase to allow a player to draw an extra hidden Title card from the Title deck, whilst in the Negotiate phase, the ‘Sword’ can be discarded to allow a player to negotiate for an extra Treasure.

The Title cards are scoring objectives for the game. Each has a victory condition such as “Score if you have the highest combined value of rank cards” for the Archmage or “Score if you possess a Ruby and an Armour” for the Captain. Five of these are the Starting Titles that are visible from the beginning of the game and can be won by anyone. The others are kept secret by the players before being revealed at the end of the game to see if their scoring conditions have been fulfilled.

Penultimately, the ‘Rulebook’ is short at just twenty-pages, but includes examples of play throughout. Lastly, the ‘Appendices’ is almost three times the length of the ‘Rulebook’ and explains how each of the Treasure cards and Title cards work. It is a handy reference that makes it easier to check the specifics of each Treasure card or Title card and it also has examples of the game’s cards in play as well.

At the start of the game, each player receives a random Player Board, a Privacy Screen, a random Title card, and four Coin cards. The five Starting Titles are placed where everyone can see them. The game is played in rounds consisting of three phases—‘Reveal’, ‘Negotiate’, and ‘Claim’. In the ‘Reveal’ phase, the players take it in turns to draw three Treasure cards and arrange them however they want on the one, two, or three slots on their Player Board, one Treasure card per slot. A Player can increase the cost of a Treasure by adding Coin cards from his Haul.

In the ‘Negotiate’ phase, each player lifts his Privacy Screen and reveals the Treasures has picked over from the Hoard. In turn, each player either takes two cards from the Hoard deck as Coin cards (that is, face down) and adds them to his Haul or negotiates for a single Treasure from another player. As long as the active player can pay the cost in Coin cards, determined by the base cost for the slot on another player’s Player Board and any extra Coin cards the player has placed on his Player Board, a player cannot stop the active player from taking a Treasure card. In the phase, ‘Claim’, Coin cards placed on Player Boards to increase Treasure prices are discarded and any Treasures remaining on a Player Board go into their respective player’s Haul. If there are no Treasures on a player’s Player Board, he draws three new Treasure cards and adds them to his Haul.

The heart of the game play for Split the Hoard is all built around a ‘I Cut, You Choose’ mechanic in which each player is deciding upon the value of his Treasure cards he is offering in each round, whilst the other players are deciding whether or not to choose something. Here is where the bluff and speculation come into play, rather than negotiation as such. Indeed, the actual ‘Negotiate’ phase is a misnomer since no actual negotiation. Instead, what a player is trying to do find the Treasure cards he wants on other player’s Player Boards whilst trying to keep hold of these he wants to score with at the end of the game. The obvious way to do that is protect a Treasure card by increasing the price that another player has to pay, but this has its own cost, since a player must invest Coins to raise that price. If the Treasure they are attached to is bought, the player will get the Coins back, but if not, they are lost. This is where the speculation comes into play. Further, a player could actually lure another player into thinking a Treasure with Coin cards attached is actually valuable or something he wants, bluffing the player into thinking that he is denying him a Treasure he wants to keep.

The aim of the game is, of course, for a player to get Treasure cards into his Haul and use them to score points at the end of the game. However, a player can also discard a face-up Treasure card from his Haul to activate its ability. The range from being able to draw more Coins from the Hoard deck, more Titles from the Title deck, take an extra Treasure from another player’s Player Board, move a Treasure from your Player Board to your Haul, and so on, manipulating different parts of the game’s play. Each player must balance the need to keep Treasure cards for the end game’s scoring and using their special abilities. Treasure cards played for their special abilities can be played at any time during the phase indicated on the card, even when it is not a player’s turn.

The game ends when a player cannot draw any cards from the Hoard deck. Each player scores Victory Points for Starting Tile cards and Hidden Title cards whose scoring conditions they fulfilled and then also for Treasure cards. If there is a tie, the winner is the player with the most Coins in his Haul. Here is where the game play gets complex in comparison to the base game play as each player tries to work out his total Rank value from the Treasure cards in his Haul to determine which Title cards he qualifies for. This is the hardest bit of Split the Hoard to learn and teach, but once everyone has the hang of it, game play is fast enough.

Physically, Split the Hoard is very nicely presented. Both ‘Rulebook’ and ‘Appendices’ are well written and provide clear explanations of the various parts of the game. The artwork on the cards is excellent and everything is solid and sturdy. EN Publishing has done an excellent job with the production values on Split the Hoard.

Split the Hoard is a very likeable game, good looking, easy to teach and play, and makes excellent use of its theme. It is a very solid filler that fans of classic fantasy roleplaying will definitely enjoy and a good first game from EN Publishing.