The Best Free/Cheap RPGs Out There
Okay so there's an orange elephant in the room, particularly if you live in the US these days. Everything is on fire, everything is crazy, people are losing jobs left and right, eggs cost eleventy million dollars, and it turns out every RPG product ever made is printed in China and is either trapped there indefinitely or costs a LOT more money all of a sudden.
Suffice to say, on the surface it doesn't seem like a great time to be into tabletop games. Thankfully for us, this hobby has a ton of generous folks in it who have always worked to offer their stuff as cheaply or free as they possibly can. So I wanted to compile some resources to share with folks who are penny pinching so they can still enjoy their hobbies!
Basic Fantasy RPG
Basic Fantasy RPG (or BFRPG for short) is sort of the less popular cousin to Gavin Norman's Old School Essentials. A retroclone of B/X D&D, it has a few tweaks and changes and a much more basic layout than the tight "control panel" style that OSE uses. That said, the PDF rules for the game and all the official adventures are free, or available at cost in print form from retailers like Amazon or Lulu (Amazon lists a softcover print copy at ~ $8). Some of the official adventures are quite well rated too, special shout outs to The Blackapple Brugh and Beneath the Silver Spire
What this gives you is a robust fantasy RPG that is backwards compatible with a huge range of products, many of which are equally cheap or free. It's a great value, Chris Gonnerman is a cool designer, it's all well worth checking out.
Cairn 2nd Edition
Cairn was the brainchild of designer Yochai Gal, who's stated purpose was to have a game he could use to run OSR adventures without having to use B/X. The first version was a scant 30 something pages; 2nd edition more than doubles that page count and gives some robust and very helpful advice for GMing the game as well. Based on the rules in Into the Odd by Chris McDowall, this is a lightweight, fast, and lethal classless OSR game.
Cairn is incredibly easy to get to the table, making a character takes all of 5 minutes, and even someone who has never played RPGs before can grasp the basics fairly quickly. There's also a ton of free or pay what you want adventures for it, as well as conversions of popular adventures made for other systems. The PDFs are free, and the physical books are offered at cost which makes them very cheap. A copy of the Cairn player's guide will set you back less than $4 on Amazon.
Pathfinder/Starfinder
Paizo, being a company that would not exist today without the generous Open Gaming License from Wizards of the Coast, has always paid that generosity forward. They have previously licensed everything they did under the OGL, and now do so under their new ORC license. That means that the entirety of the rules from every splat book and adventure ever published for Pathfinder 1st edition, Starfinder 1st edition, Pathfinder 2nd edition, and the soon to be released Starfinder 2nd edition, are available online.
While not available in print or PDF for free, there are often Humble Bundles for the system that offer a wide variety of great resources (including physical products!) for very cheap. For the rest, there is Archives of Nethys; an indexed and searchable wiki with every rule you could ever need to run the game. When I started off all I needed was this and the excellent Foundry VTT module to get off to the races. Whether you're looking for heroic fantasy or space opera science fantasy, Paizo has you covered here.
Classic Traveller
While it bothers me to no end how Traveller is spelled (and it bothers my spellcheck too), Traveller is the original science fiction TTRPG, dating all the way back to 1977. While it's had numerous editions since then and changed ownership more than a few times, the original Traveller (called Classic Traveller) is still kicking, and actually just got a new splat book about space pirates!
The original rules are available for free in a combined PDF featuring the first 3 books; this is all the core rules you need to play. If you prefer physical, that same book is available as a Print on Demand from DriveThruRpg for the low low price of $11. Other books are available as inexpensive PDFs if you want to expand play, and there's certainly a lot of material that has been released over the years. Traveller is a very classic sci-fi sandbox game, just you and your party traveling the galaxy and looking for adventure. Probably the most notable aspect of this game is the life paths character generation, which means your character can die before they ever make it to the table. It's endearing, it's sleek for its time, and it's definitely worth checking out.
Wrapping Up
There's a ton of games I didn't cover here that offer free versions, quick starts, etc. I also didn't dive into the plethora of free tools and aids out there to enhance your gaming experiences (maybe there's a future post in that). If you've got a favorite that I missed, sound off in the comments below.
While we live in interesting times, that's no reason to give up our hobbies. Happy gaming everyone, and may your dice be ever in your favor.
