I've been reading a lot of free RPGs recently, and I'd like to share my thoughts on them.
Nemesis (
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It's Call of Ctulhu for the new milenium, and it's really freaking good so far. The basic mechanics look exeedingly fast and the insanity rules look fun. Download Now!
FATE (
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Probably the best free universal system ever made. No, really! It's pretty standard, except for this really cool concept called Aspects. There's no fixed attributes like strength or agility, instead FATE uses Aspects.
Basically Aspects are anything that difines your character, such as a discription (strong) occupation (thief) or evan a quote ("My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!), they can be pretty much anything. You can invoke the Aspect a number of times over a session to give you bonuses. For example, if you had that qoute as an aspect you'd be able to invoke it on any roll that involved finding or fighting your father's killer. This is a very strong contender for the system I'll run a game with on the DGRX boards.
In Spaaaaace! (
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It's Futurama: the RPG.
Okay it's the unoficial Futuramaesque RPG, but you get the point.
It's totally diceless, what happens is whatever people to want to happen the most. It's worth reading just for the setting info too (hyper evolved cell phones, artificial stupidity, robosexuals).
Star Frontiers (
link)
It's only sort of free. See, there's a fan site that has all the rules in HTML, which kind of sucks, but the guys who have the copyright told them it's cool. But there's a way better PDF version that a fan put together that hasn't been given the okay by the copyright holders.
I have this version.
Hopefully it wil get the okay from the company to put it up with the HTML version.
But anyway, the sytem, while rather old school, is really simple and sweet. Three cool alien species (and humans, of course), only very lightly classish character creation, and simple mechanics that only need ten siders to work.
It's a nice little space opera game.
So free internet RPGs are good, right? Well those were, but I still have one left:
Metascape II (
link)
I'll admit I haven't looked at this one very closely, mainly because it scares me.
There's a warning that says that the game is only for "Master Roleplayers", what that means is no one will understand the rules but the writers. It say it's a "living rule book", this mean they haven't edited it. It needs a sixteen sided die, but not the sixteen sided die almost every online dice shop sells. Oh no, it's a die so special they copyrighted it. And worked the copyright symbol into the rules.
Their web store contains boxed sets of the first edition of Metascape, a game so succesful that even though it was produced in the 80's the author is still selling copies of the first printing.
Need I go on?
This sword calls me it's master, but I feel more like it's slave.