free rpg day

Today I went to the first (hopefully) annual Free RPG Day at Millennium Games. I'll be the first to admit I'm not generally a huge fan of the store, but I've been in there a lot lately for my Friday night games and on the whole the staff is friendly these days, which is a welcome improvement from years past. The store is still kind of a mess, but considering how much space they provide for people to show up and game without dropping a dime, I guess we shouldn't really complain.

As for FRPGD itself, I'm not sure how it was supposed to work - I've heard rumors of shortages in materials, and suppliers and venues backing out at the last minute, and of course no one wanted to give away the good stuff, so it was all light modules or demos. The way Millennium put it together, you had to play an event to get the swag for that game system, which was fair, although with ten systems representing at about an hour each, one was obviously limited by one's free time. Additionally, however, they were giving away stacks of their back stock; the things that had been "in the back" for years that nobody was ever going to buy. I know in a lot of hobbies that would be insulting, but this is gaming after all - I snapped up not one but two defunct game systems based entirely on urban desolation, and look forward to perusing them in the near future. I also wound up with a copy of the new Changeling demo, in which I have only an academic interest.

At any rate, in order to obtain these items, I signed up for a quick run through of the Scion combat system, despite the temptation to check out the Call of Cthulhu demo (or more to the point, the hot redhead playing it), which I'm really glad I did. Scion is somewhere between Exalted Modern and Anansi Boys, where the characters are children of the old gods, fighting off the spawn of the Titans, in a modern setting. The combat system, it turns out, is much like Exalted with all of the rough edges sanded down. Downright sexy, in other words, to the point where my mind was filled with visions of making a nice big wooden board to represent the combat cycle and making players provide tokens for their characters, and on the whole I think I'm probably going to be running that when I run out of steam for Buffy, an event probably not too far in the future.

All in all I rather hope the towel doesn't get thrown in on this; I think this could grow into a very good annual event if it gets more support from suppliers (and hopefully some more venues to demonstrate that the suppliers have a real reason to participate).