Welcome to the Bundles, Freebies, and Sales News, the weekly column at EN World that helps make sure you don’t miss out on big tabletop RPG bundles, charity fundraisers, and sales from around the internet.
Freebies and Pay What You Want
Note: While “Pay What You Want” downloads are available for free, please support the creators if you are able!
DriveThruRPG ran its first game jam, PocketQuest 2022, and now the results are available for us to enjoy! The rules for the jam were pretty loose: Rules-lite stand-alone games of no more than 20 pages and centered on the theme of “Summer Camp”. Over 100 titles have been submitted for the jam ranging from horror to romance to fantasy to sci-fi to sports to solo/duet blogging games and pretty much anything else you can think of. If you’re looking for up and coming new designers and indie publishers, there’s plenty on display here.
Egg Embry, who you likely know from his interview series or crowdfunding columns here in EN World, released the playtest version of his own RPG Human…Almost. The game uses a variant of the Forged in the Dark system to create a post-cyberpunk police procedural mystery RPG that puts the players in the role of detectives solving crimes in a near-future setting that raises the moral and ethical questions around what it means to be “human” in a world of artificial intelligence and cybernetic implants. And here I thought I was the only person who remembered the 2013 sci-fi TV series Almost Human that only lasted one season on Fox…
OSR fans out there have a lot for you this week, starting with The House of Falknor from Old School Role Playing. This OSRIC adventure sends the party to spend a weekend on the estate of Lord Falknor by concerned relatives to investigate why the Lord, even at his advanced age, seems to be the youthful beauty he was 30 years ago with the physical prowess to still compete in and win tournaments.
Yet another in my pile of “Random System-Neutral Tables to Make Your Games Better”, we have 120 Fantasy Food Inspirations from Periapt Games with a collection of food times for fantasy settings. The collection features six tables of random food and drink divided in half with the first 10 entries for mundane foods and the second 10 adding a bit of magic. So for magic-light settings, roll a d10 and for more fantastical ones roll a d20. There’s also a printer-friendly PDF included with reduced color and artwork to save on ink or toner.
Over on DM’s Guild is a useful tool from Matthew Koentjoro to help develop your campaigns with your players, 101 Story Questions for Worldbuilding. Pose these questions to your players (or just use them as writing prompts) in order to build the tiny details that make your setting come alive, like “Your character has been here before, what’s a local landmark you’ve heard of significant to martial artists or athletes?” or “Your party has heard of a local bandit group, what do these criminals call themselves and who is their leader?”
Necromancer PCs always seem to get the short end of things as dealing with the undead is a “villain” thing scoff! but John Beardify has you covered with The Necromancer’s Apprentice, a collection of thirteen new spells from the necromancy school to add more flexibility and utility to that most misunderstood school of magic.
In Cabin Fever by Tom Gregory, residents of the small town of Dewhurst have become increasingly ill over the recent weeks eating the meat provided by the local trapper after finding a “new source”. The meat tastes normal and doesn’t appear rotten, but is somehow…off. Can your party of 3rd level adventurers discover the cause of the illness?
Bundles and Sales
Note: I have included end dates when listed for the following sales, but please be warned that those without published end dates may end suddenly so be sure to plan purchases accordingly.
With Gen Con winding down, there’s still time to take advantage of some timed sales online from several publishers. Evil Hat is offering 20% off your entire purchase through their webstore including both digital and physical products (Note: physical products can only ship to the USA). When checking out, use the code SUMMERGAME2022 to apply the discount, limited to one use per customer.
Paizo also has a coupon code for 20% off their products in their webstore as well. There’s not a lot of time left on this one so be sure to hurry, but the code gencon2022 will get you a discount on your order. Exclusions: Not valid on preorder, backorder, subscriptions, or third-party PDFs.
Also ending soon, Steve Jackson Games has discount prices across the Warehouse 23 webstore along with bonus incentives for physical products. If you spend $20 on physical products, you get a free micro dice bag; $50 gets you the Illuminati 1000 Piece Puzzle; $75 gets a randomly-chosen Meeple d6 dice set, and $100 or more gets a randomly chosen full-size dice bag. All swag is cumulative, so you also receive the incentives at all lower levels as well. Prices are determined by the total order before applicable sales tax and shipping costs and is not valid for pre-orders or orders shipping outside the United States. Sale prices are on all dice/dice game/dice bag/hex base products, all Car Wars products, and select products for GURPS and Munchkin.
Beadle & Grimm discounted their in-stock premium editions of products including Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting, Descent into Avernus, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and more.
VTT users have a decent selection of bundles as well this week as the Fantasy Grounds Lute Bag: Bard Colleges Bundle on DM’s Guild collects nine different Bard subclasses. From the College of Fashion, College of Flames, College of EMOtion, the Bardic Origins collection, and more, these products are all ready to install to Fantasy Grounds and integrate into your rules collections.
Charity Bundles and Sales
If you want giant robots shooting lasers and missiles at each other, there’s no better place to go than the original with BattleTech. The BattleTech Total War Bundle of Holding comes with everything you need to get started with both the tabletop wargame and the roleplaying game with MechWarrior: Destiny for roleplaying, the comprehensive tabletop wargame rules with BattleTech: Total Warfare, and the custom mech building and technical upgrade sourcebook BattleTech: TechManual at the core level. There’s also a bonus collection add-on that expands the rules even more with Strategic Operations that covers space battles, Campaign Operations for managing units from small mercenary companies to entire House regiments, and Tactical Operations: Advanced Rules for new battlefield tactics, weather and biome rules, artillery, and a lot more.
Also over on Bundle of Holding, Expeditious Retreat Press has the Arden Vul Bundle with the retro megadungeon The Halls of Arden Vul. The bundle features the complete megadungeon for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and other fantasy RPGs with more than 2000 encounters across 10 main levels and 15 sublevels along with all the files necessary to play on your favorite virtual tabletop.
Legendary Games brings us the Legendary Epic Monsters Bundle for 5e featuring three complete monster manuals for epic-level play in 5e. The core level features Sea Monsters, Mythos Monsters, and Latin American Monsters and the level-up Epic Collection adds on the rules for running epic-level campaigns in 5e, a book of epic-level treasures, three epic-level adventures, and two collections of VTT monster tokens.
Over on Humble Bundle, there’s a massive collection of classic-inspired books in the Essential Classic Fantasy RPG Bundle. There’s five tiers total each packed with OSR rulebooks, sourcebooks, adventures, expansions, and more plus system-neutral setting books and map packs. The bundles range from seven books including the core rules for Old-School Essentials all the way up to a total of 59 books including one physical hardcover at the top tier.
Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of whatever ship you want to play on. Your mission. Explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldy roll 2d20 to determine degrees of success or failure! Yes, there’s a Star Trek Adventures bundle on Humble Bundle featuring a vast library of books for the Modiphius game. The $1 tier gets you the Star Trek Adventures Starter Set and the IDW Year Five Tie-In in PDF along with a 20% off coupon in Modiphius’s store, the $20 tier adds on the Player’s Guide and Gamemaster’s Guide for both Federation and Klingon campaigns and the Shackleton Expanse campaign setting, while the top tier for $30 features a whopping 32 titles adding to the above the Core Rulebook, all three division supplements for Command, Science, and Operations, character packs for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, supplements covering both the Alpha and Beta quadrants, map tiles, adventures, and more.
That’s all for this week! If you know of any bundles or sales starting soon, please contact me on the EN World Discord or send me a message here on EN World. Discount percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number and are based on the standard retail price provided by the site. Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, Fantasy Grounds, and/or DriveThruRPG may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.
Freebies and Pay What You Want
Note: While “Pay What You Want” downloads are available for free, please support the creators if you are able!
DriveThruRPG ran its first game jam, PocketQuest 2022, and now the results are available for us to enjoy! The rules for the jam were pretty loose: Rules-lite stand-alone games of no more than 20 pages and centered on the theme of “Summer Camp”. Over 100 titles have been submitted for the jam ranging from horror to romance to fantasy to sci-fi to sports to solo/duet blogging games and pretty much anything else you can think of. If you’re looking for up and coming new designers and indie publishers, there’s plenty on display here.
- Price: Variable from Free and Pay What You Want to up to $12.00
Egg Embry, who you likely know from his interview series or crowdfunding columns here in EN World, released the playtest version of his own RPG Human…Almost. The game uses a variant of the Forged in the Dark system to create a post-cyberpunk police procedural mystery RPG that puts the players in the role of detectives solving crimes in a near-future setting that raises the moral and ethical questions around what it means to be “human” in a world of artificial intelligence and cybernetic implants. And here I thought I was the only person who remembered the 2013 sci-fi TV series Almost Human that only lasted one season on Fox…
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $0.00)
OSR fans out there have a lot for you this week, starting with The House of Falknor from Old School Role Playing. This OSRIC adventure sends the party to spend a weekend on the estate of Lord Falknor by concerned relatives to investigate why the Lord, even at his advanced age, seems to be the youthful beauty he was 30 years ago with the physical prowess to still compete in and win tournaments.
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $3.00)
Yet another in my pile of “Random System-Neutral Tables to Make Your Games Better”, we have 120 Fantasy Food Inspirations from Periapt Games with a collection of food times for fantasy settings. The collection features six tables of random food and drink divided in half with the first 10 entries for mundane foods and the second 10 adding a bit of magic. So for magic-light settings, roll a d10 and for more fantastical ones roll a d20. There’s also a printer-friendly PDF included with reduced color and artwork to save on ink or toner.
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $3.00)
Over on DM’s Guild is a useful tool from Matthew Koentjoro to help develop your campaigns with your players, 101 Story Questions for Worldbuilding. Pose these questions to your players (or just use them as writing prompts) in order to build the tiny details that make your setting come alive, like “Your character has been here before, what’s a local landmark you’ve heard of significant to martial artists or athletes?” or “Your party has heard of a local bandit group, what do these criminals call themselves and who is their leader?”
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.97)
Necromancer PCs always seem to get the short end of things as dealing with the undead is a “villain” thing scoff! but John Beardify has you covered with The Necromancer’s Apprentice, a collection of thirteen new spells from the necromancy school to add more flexibility and utility to that most misunderstood school of magic.
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $6.10)
In Cabin Fever by Tom Gregory, residents of the small town of Dewhurst have become increasingly ill over the recent weeks eating the meat provided by the local trapper after finding a “new source”. The meat tastes normal and doesn’t appear rotten, but is somehow…off. Can your party of 3rd level adventurers discover the cause of the illness?
- Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $0.50)
Bundles and Sales
Note: I have included end dates when listed for the following sales, but please be warned that those without published end dates may end suddenly so be sure to plan purchases accordingly.
With Gen Con winding down, there’s still time to take advantage of some timed sales online from several publishers. Evil Hat is offering 20% off your entire purchase through their webstore including both digital and physical products (Note: physical products can only ship to the USA). When checking out, use the code SUMMERGAME2022 to apply the discount, limited to one use per customer.
- Price: 20% off
- End Date: September 21, 2022
Paizo also has a coupon code for 20% off their products in their webstore as well. There’s not a lot of time left on this one so be sure to hurry, but the code gencon2022 will get you a discount on your order. Exclusions: Not valid on preorder, backorder, subscriptions, or third-party PDFs.
- Price: 20% off
- End Date: August 7, 2022, at 11:59 PM Pacific
Also ending soon, Steve Jackson Games has discount prices across the Warehouse 23 webstore along with bonus incentives for physical products. If you spend $20 on physical products, you get a free micro dice bag; $50 gets you the Illuminati 1000 Piece Puzzle; $75 gets a randomly-chosen Meeple d6 dice set, and $100 or more gets a randomly chosen full-size dice bag. All swag is cumulative, so you also receive the incentives at all lower levels as well. Prices are determined by the total order before applicable sales tax and shipping costs and is not valid for pre-orders or orders shipping outside the United States. Sale prices are on all dice/dice game/dice bag/hex base products, all Car Wars products, and select products for GURPS and Munchkin.
- Price: Varies
- End Date: August 8, 2022
Beadle & Grimm discounted their in-stock premium editions of products including Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting, Descent into Avernus, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and more.
- Price: 20% off
VTT users have a decent selection of bundles as well this week as the Fantasy Grounds Lute Bag: Bard Colleges Bundle on DM’s Guild collects nine different Bard subclasses. From the College of Fashion, College of Flames, College of EMOtion, the Bardic Origins collection, and more, these products are all ready to install to Fantasy Grounds and integrate into your rules collections.
- Price: $27.77 (20% off)
Charity Bundles and Sales
If you want giant robots shooting lasers and missiles at each other, there’s no better place to go than the original with BattleTech. The BattleTech Total War Bundle of Holding comes with everything you need to get started with both the tabletop wargame and the roleplaying game with MechWarrior: Destiny for roleplaying, the comprehensive tabletop wargame rules with BattleTech: Total Warfare, and the custom mech building and technical upgrade sourcebook BattleTech: TechManual at the core level. There’s also a bonus collection add-on that expands the rules even more with Strategic Operations that covers space battles, Campaign Operations for managing units from small mercenary companies to entire House regiments, and Tactical Operations: Advanced Rules for new battlefield tactics, weather and biome rules, artillery, and a lot more.
- Price $12.95 (71% off) with variable cost Level Up option
- End Date: August 22, 2022
- Charity: Direct Relief (10%)
Also over on Bundle of Holding, Expeditious Retreat Press has the Arden Vul Bundle with the retro megadungeon The Halls of Arden Vul. The bundle features the complete megadungeon for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and other fantasy RPGs with more than 2000 encounters across 10 main levels and 15 sublevels along with all the files necessary to play on your favorite virtual tabletop.
- Price: $24.95 (77% off)
- End Date: August 9, 2022
- Charity: Direct Relief (10%)
Legendary Games brings us the Legendary Epic Monsters Bundle for 5e featuring three complete monster manuals for epic-level play in 5e. The core level features Sea Monsters, Mythos Monsters, and Latin American Monsters and the level-up Epic Collection adds on the rules for running epic-level campaigns in 5e, a book of epic-level treasures, three epic-level adventures, and two collections of VTT monster tokens.
- Price: $12.95 (74% off) with variable-cost Level Up option
- End Date: August 16, 2022
- Charity: Direct Relief (10%)
Over on Humble Bundle, there’s a massive collection of classic-inspired books in the Essential Classic Fantasy RPG Bundle. There’s five tiers total each packed with OSR rulebooks, sourcebooks, adventures, expansions, and more plus system-neutral setting books and map packs. The bundles range from seven books including the core rules for Old-School Essentials all the way up to a total of 59 books including one physical hardcover at the top tier.
- Price: $1/$10/$18/$25/$45 (94% off at highest tier)
- End Date: August 25, 2022
- Charity: Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals (user-defined, default 5%)
Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of whatever ship you want to play on. Your mission. Explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldy roll 2d20 to determine degrees of success or failure! Yes, there’s a Star Trek Adventures bundle on Humble Bundle featuring a vast library of books for the Modiphius game. The $1 tier gets you the Star Trek Adventures Starter Set and the IDW Year Five Tie-In in PDF along with a 20% off coupon in Modiphius’s store, the $20 tier adds on the Player’s Guide and Gamemaster’s Guide for both Federation and Klingon campaigns and the Shackleton Expanse campaign setting, while the top tier for $30 features a whopping 32 titles adding to the above the Core Rulebook, all three division supplements for Command, Science, and Operations, character packs for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, supplements covering both the Alpha and Beta quadrants, map tiles, adventures, and more.
- Price: $1/$20/$30 (94% off at top tier)
- End Date: August 11, 2022
- Charity: National Park Rescue (user-defined, default 5%)
That’s all for this week! If you know of any bundles or sales starting soon, please contact me on the EN World Discord or send me a message here on EN World. Discount percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number and are based on the standard retail price provided by the site. Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, Fantasy Grounds, and/or DriveThruRPG may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.
