Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne provides a preview of the Free RPG Day premiums for 2025.

Free RPG Day takes place June 21, and the nice folks at Gaming Days LLC kindly sent preview copies of most of the items included in this year's kit, which they expect to sell out by the end of May (so get your orders in now if you have not already done so).  I think I have commented on Free RPG Day since at least 2012 and here are the items that caught my eye in this year's offerings:

Qrawl.  This looks like a Choose Your Own Adventure variant, or at least the version enclosed in the kit looks like that.  What I really like about it is the format of the sample, which is designed to get customers moving through the store.  It comes with six one-sheet adventures, which get hung in various locations throughout the store.  The player moves from adventure to adventure, scanning the QR code on each sheet.  When they complete the final adventure, which the directions say to place by the cash wrap, the player shows their results and gets a Qrawl sticker showing they defeated the dragon.  I am a fan of anything that gets people to walk around the store.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Cartoon.  Sirius Dice has acquired a license for the 1980s D&D cartoon and is producing a line of pins featuring the characters from the show.  The one we received featured Hank the Ranger but I assume they will make pins featuring the entire cast.

Dungeons & Dragons/5E.  Always the most popular items, at least with our customers, the kit I received contained no official Dungeons and Dragons materials (Wizards of the Coast has not participated in Free RPG Day for over a decade) but does have half a dozen 5E-compatible books, seven if you count the emergency d20 from Foam Brain.

Goodman Games provided The Dying Light of Castle Whiterock, which is both a standalone and promotes the Castle Whiterock Kickstarter campaign.  Kobold Press includes Well of Shadows, usable with both Tales of the Valiant and 5th Edition D&D.  Loke Battle Mats includes Scry, Scry My Little Eye, an adventure with battle maps and cards and three separate offerings from Ghostfire Gaming:  Aetherial Expanse, Grim Hollow and Arora, each a separate campaign setting.

And the Rest.  There are well over two dozen additional items in the kit including sample dice and figures, promo cards, and offerings for Nightfell, Otherscape, Starfinder, Pathfinder, the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game, The Expanse, Arkham Horror, Star Trek, Fallout, Dreams and Machines, Wires in the Woods, Obojima, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (really not a role playing game), Basic Roleplaying, DragonBane, Root and G I Joe/Transformers.  There are also 10 Baldur's Keep miniatures from WizKids in the kit, and Level 1 included its sixth indie RPG anthology.

Several publishers are using Free RPG Day to promote Kickstarter campaigns, for Piaga 1328, Thunder Road Vendetta, Titanskeep, Shift, and Arzium, with introductory rules teasing the Kickstarter campaign for the game.  I hope these last few include more than one to three copies of each item as only having a few to give away really defeats the purpose of putting them in the kit (see "A Warhammer 40K Launch and Free RPG Day").  Missing from this year's kit, or at least the samples I received, are Free RPG Day logoed items which are always nice to use as incentive items but not really necessary for the event.

Comments?  As always, send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.