19th Level

Free? Free is good. I think we can ignore scurvy pirates. Most RPGs are available for "free" if you're willing to go to some sketchy sites and be willing to justify doing so to yourself. Rather we'll be focusing on free RPGs that the creators intended to be free... I'm also going to be focusing on free complete games, not free teasers or introductions. For this, I'm going to go back to Evil Hat's Fate Core  RPG. You can go to RPGNow right now and get yourself a copy of it and pay absolutely nothing for it. That is a great deal. You get an absolutely complete game that you can use for years. I'll also give a few honorable mentions. Stars Without Number - A game I'm itching to try someday - almost went with it in place of our current Star Wars game. Kevin Crawford's games do a lot better than tell you "oh set your game in a sandbox" - they give you a ton of tools and awesome backgrounds to do so. In Stars Without Number  yo...

Two years ago I'd posted a set of house rules for Swords & Wizardry in a very rough form. It proved a fairly popular post and I've had a chance to give it some more thought - along with possibly having a White Box game in my future. What I've been learning about the White Box rules is I don't quite like them as they are.  I think there's a place for a thief class. I think magic-users have gotten the shaft at low levels. But I've also discovered they are super-easy to customize. It's very different from my experience with D&D 3rd Edition. I had a lot of fun playing with D&D 3.0 and 3.5. But one thing I found was it is a tough game to customize. For example, trying to remove miniatures or counters from D&D 3.5 is a massive undertaking, with many basic assumptions suddenly changing. What I'm going to do in this article is list a series of house rules. For the most part they are mix and match. I'll illustrate the rule and then expl...