Andonome

The licence doesn't appear on the page.

Itch lets you select a licence, which will help people search. Under the game, Edit --> Metadata, and select which creative commons licence (there are many).

I don't know if Google docs count as a 'source file'. It's clearly the source. Is it a file? I guess everything's a file if you go by the UNIX definition, so 'close enough'?

Licensing riddles aside, it looks great, and it's nice seeing a fast-paced intro that gets straight into what the game's about.

That's never been the case with any of the open source movement. If someone says their project is open source, then they give out files which are not the source, we would normally say that's not open source. We don't ask Microsoft if they feel that X, Y, and Z are 'the core components' of VSCodium. It's just not open source.

Providing text is good, and you might say the text files are 'open source', if they have a licence which allows modifications and so on. But you can't make closed-source pdfs out of them, and say 'this has text, which is open source, so I feel like it's open source'.

I get that it seems like a small distinction to some, but it's been an important distinction since the inception of the open source movement, and without it, we won't be able to tell open source projects from projects that have open components which people 'feel' are core.

"Open source" [files] means the source of the pdf. If the source files aren't available with the download, it's not open source.

I hope it doesn't come across as a small point, as it's a pretty big deal to me. I've spent years looking about for others doing open source RPGs, but most people using the word 'open source' mean something like 'copying this pdf is okay', which makes it very difficult to find open source RPGs under all the false signals.

Are the source files included in the drivethrurpg link, or somewhere else?

it’s now on my list!

Glad to hear it!

s there a simple way to just download a bunch of pdfs

Yes. Each book's repository comes with a download link.

• Metabind: a collection of the core rules, players' book, and GM's book, all stuffed into one. Getting the books separately is better if you're printing, but a single pdf works better for searching.
• Missions in Maitavale - a full campaign setting and long story.
• Goblin hole module, the intro module.
• Goblin Horde, another goblin-filled introduction module, but this one is in the style of more traditional fantasy RPGs.

But fair warning: despite the hyperlinks, the books all prioritise printing. Reading two-column bright-white pdfs can give you a headache.

I couldn’t make the downloads work in my phone

Thanks for letting me know!

It appears that (some parts of?) this is available in English and in German,

We only have the tiny core rules translated right now, and the character sheet.

Would this be suited to playing with kids, too?

The system is just 2D6 + Attribute + Skill [ + Equipment sometimes ]. Should be fine for kids who are okay with small sums.

The books have one or two spots of harsh language.

I've just playtested and released a oneshot module. If you have any questions about running it, let me know!

much obliged!

Ye gods, I finished this video and now I'm going grey.

Worth it though.

The internet's fine - the web's the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, 'make good art', write and share good content, don't feed the machine. Sounds like you're doing that already if you're on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren't all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT...download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It's a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

Yea, 'bottom-up' is a great way to put it.

Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one 'from the icy South', and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.

The thing is, this is still tying culture to race.

I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.

So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I can't use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.

Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.

So in the end, I've decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.