Even though I have not had time to play one in over a decade I am still fascinated
by roleplaying games and actually buy quite a few of them. But why buy role
playing games when there are dozens (approaching hundreds) of free role playing
systems available on the Internet?
The pen and pencil RPG market has always been relatively small compared to
other traditional publishing enterprises, so designing a system and profitably
publishing it is an iffy proposition at best. Instead, a lot of folks are putting
the roleplaying games they have designed on the web as free downloads. As with
anything free, the quality varies widely, but on the whole I am impressed at
how professional and playable many of the free games are.
So where do you find free RPG systems? There are several directories on the
web:
- Uncle Bear’s has an extensive
list of free RPGs by categories with brief descriptions - The Free
RPG WebRing is (surprise) a web ring of sites that host free RPGs
Unfortunately it us hard to find many reviews for free RPGs. Brian Gleichman
is trying to do something about that situation — on his site he posts a
new review of a free RPG on a monthly basis.