In Mythmere's Blog today he has talked about showing appreciation for free RPG resources. Meanwhile -C at Hack & Slash talks about deciding to charge for his stuff because folks have been downloading his hard work and not even bothering to say thank you.
I will admit that I can be quite blase' about the effort some of us bloggers put into our blogs and other pieces of work, but these posts have really struck a chord in me.
My favourite free resources include:
The free downloads at Dragonsfoot - they have a host of free stuff for a wide range of editions. Although I can find their forums a bit outspoken, that does not diminish the quality of work that is posted there.
Goblinoid Games has produced free pdfs of its games, notably Labyrinth Lord (which got me back into Basic D&D) and Mutant Future.
Two of my favourite worlds are discussed in great detail in Canonfire (for Greyhawk) and Candlekeep (for Forgotten Realms).
There are some free magazines out there, most notably Encounter and Dyson's Dodecahedron.
Although I have not seen any activity there for several years, the Vaults of Pandius still holds a huge amount of info, a lot of which can be borrowed for your own campaign.
The forums that discuss D&D in its various forms often have some good stuff posted straight onto the boards. Quite often there will be dedicated areas for creative stuff rather than discussions and opinions, such as the Goblinoid Games Open Workshop.
As for the stuff on blogs - you need only take a look at Cyclopeatrons's list of OSR blogs to realise the huge output of the OSR blogosphere. Some of it is opinions and discussions (which I usually don't get involved with) but a lot of it is damn good stuff.
So if you enjoy using this sort of RPG material, by all means do so. But please show a bit of manners and say thank you.
There's a lot of good stuff out there, OSR-wise and otherwise. The Underdark Gazette is a pretty good place to look for loads of Freebies. But even they can't list them all.
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