Today was Free RPG Day.

For those of you not in the RPG know, Free RPG Day is like Christmas for us tabletop gamers! The organizers of this day pull together free modules and samples from all the big (and small) gaming organizations who want to participate and offer free materials for promotional purposes, and distribute them to brick & mortar gaming stores.

Above is our FLGS, Dungeon’s End. We run Pathfinder games here every Sunday, and today we did Free RPG Day there.

Originally, I was to run a game as well, but the Pathfinder players were mostly spoken for and so I joined my husband’s game. We ended up playing the module from Gaming Paper titled Slavers of the Sunken Garden.

Our cover seems to have been cut incorrectly, but if it’s free can I really complain?

The first thing you notice about this module isn’t the cover art…it’s the map.

Twenty sheets of high-quality gaming paper create the map used for almost everything in this module. And I do mean high quality! At one point during the adventure I accidentally got a little too excited and knocked Diet Coke all over two of the sheets. The paper recovered very gracefully - it’s a little puckered, but not a stain remains!

Unfortunately, the module didn’t come with pre-generated characters, which is a standard feature of modules like this. My husband had to use Hero Lab to create a party for people…so he decided to create level 7 versions of the Pathfinder Iconic characters.

Our party consisted of four level 7 characters, due to a shortage of free players.

The module says it’s for levels 6-8. I’m not sure about that, though. The encounters were very, very difficult for a party of four level 7s, especially the end boss. It felt hard enough that I feel a level 6 party would very easily wipe.

All things said though, this module is very, very good. It was a really nice one-off. We normally just do campaigns and adventure modules that are very roleplay heavy, so playing with some new people in a carefree, unconnected module was kind of liberating!

I don’t want to spoil anything, as Gaming Paper is soon going to be selling this module/map combo on their website HERE. But this module took us 6 1/2 hours to beat, which is within the time that they estimate in the game itself.

I’m not sure how much replayability it has, but if you can get your hands on a copy and have an afternoon to spare, I definitely suggest it. Just make sure you have built your level 6-8 characters beforehand. The character generation itself would make this a 10 hour endeavor, which is a little much.

Also, my husband won candy dice. They tasted so damn good. :q