Freebies – Games, Rules, and Adventures

This post will be periodically updated with references to free homebrew rules and adventures, as well as entire free game systems. The potential number of items on these lists are massive, so this page can’t possibly be comprehensive, but hopefully it will serve as a good launching point for exploration.

D&D 5e

• DungeonMastersGuild – Sister site of DTRPG with a more D&D-specific focus. A big list of free and Pay-What-You-Want among the vast quantity of D&D resources here.
• ENWorld – Collections of user-created free stuff for D&D and other games on their downloads page.
• TechnoSkald’s Forge – Blog with a list of links to official, free, downloadable adventures from Wizards of the Coast. These links don’t seem to reachable through their current site navigation but are still live and have been preserved here.
• The DM Lair – Some homebrew free adventures.
• /r/UnearthedArcana – Reddit group for homebrew rules – lots here (of varying quality)
• Bonus_Action – Instagram user with a long list of homebrew magic items complete with illustrations.

Mighty Protectors

• Monkey House Games – Occasionally posts new official powers and supplemental rules.

Game Systems – Whole rule sets to get you started on playing a new game at no cost! There are free games by the hundreds these days, it seems, so this list will focus on broadly-defined systems that are adaptable to many needs.

• The open source(ish) D20 system on which D&D is based has been widely adapted as the basis for other gaming systems. Free rule sets for SRD20 include versions of games like Mutants and Masterminds, Traveler, and lots of others (some free, some not). Open Gaming Store has a wide variety of products (a few free, most inexpensive) to support many of these games.
• D&D Basic Rules – The gateway drug that Wizards of the Coast hopes will get you to buy lots of their products later. Enough to run adventures for the traditional Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue classes.
• OpenD6 – An open-source, generic RPG rule set which uses only six-sided dice. Has an active support community and an assortment of both free and for-sale implementations.
• GURPS Lite – GURPS, the generic game rules from Steve Jackson Games, has been around for quite a long time and has server as the building block for a variety of genres. A slimmed-down version of the basic rules is now available for free.