QuaffPotions

No one is free from criticism. Harmful ideas should be condemned, when they are demonstrably harmful. But theist beliefs are such a vast range and diversity of ideas, some harmful, some useful, some healing, some vivifying, and still others having served as potent drivers of movements for justice; that to lump all theist religious belief into one category and attack the whole of it, only demonstrates your ignorance of theology, and is in fact bigotry.

By saying that religious and superstitious beliefs should be disrespected, or otherwise belittling, or stigmatizing religion and supernatural beliefs as a whole, you have already established the first level on the "Pyramid of Hate", as well as the first of the "10 Stages of Genocide."

If your religion is atheism, that's perfectly valid. If someone is doing something harmful with a religious belief as justification, that specific belief should be challenged. But if you're crossing the line into bigotry, you're as bad as the very people you're condemning.

Antitheism is a form of supremacy in and of itself.

"In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.

Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references."

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/5/4/the-resurrection-of-new-atheism/

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/21/can-atheists-make-their-case-without-devolving-into-bigotry/

What is LibreRPG? July 16th, 2023 Intro

LibreRPG is a project to bring together tabletop role-playing games that respect everyone’s rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute the games. It’s a Free Culture and Copyleft endeavor.

Originally LibreRPG was started in response to a controversy by Wizards of the Coast, and their mishandling of the Open Gaming License. The hope was to cultivate a community based around the legacy and culture of things like Free Software, open-source, Free Culture, and Copyleft.

The community was (and technically is) on reddit, on /r/librerpg. However with Reddit itself opting for greed over what’s better for their own communities, I’m taking this opportunity to re-launch LibreRPG in a way that more fully embraces software freedom and what’s called the “fediverse”. Presently I’m making WordPress the main home of LibreRPG. In addition to that, I’ll maintain a variety of communities on a several platforms, most of which are based on federated technologies. Communities

LibreRPG Codeberg. This is the repository where materials will first be drafted. The home of the List of LibreRPGs.
Reddit alternatives: new community homes will be on KBin and Lemmy. I’m still learning how these work, but if I understand correctly, it should be possible to interact with both communities simultaneously while only having an account on one of them.
Matrix – chat space with all sorts of bells and whistles.

Agenda

LibreRPGs main contribution so far is a small list of known RPGs and rule systems that are known to respect libre values (libre equals freedom). That list will be republished here, and other projects will follow. I also intend to pull together all the systems I can find, and organize them into archives in order to help preserve them. One of the problems I ran into in the course of my research is that some systems have become unavailable due to their hosting sites no longer being around. Closing

If you know of any RPGs that fit our criteria, please let us know. If you have any ideas that might help the project or otherwise want to be involved, you’re welcomed in the communities. If you maintain similar projects, feel free to get in touch on possible collaborations.

And lastly, have fun playing some free RPGs.

Project Guidelines July 16th, 2023 Guiding Principles and Submission Guidelines

Tl;dr: If you think an RPG should be in our project, go ahead and either file an Issue, or make a Discussions post. It is recommended that you continue reading, so that you can avoid wasting your time and ours. Doing so will also help you be able to discern good open/libre RPGs from ones that in actuality are not free or open at all.

Don’t forget to check the list of RPGs itself, in case the game or system is already on it. RPGs that Fit Our Criteria

As a kind of quickstart, any RPG that’s published under one of our approved licenses is most likely to be accepted. On the other hand, any game or system published under any variant of the Open Game License will be rejected. The OGL, regardless of version, has never been a real open license. You can post a game that’s under a license that’s not on our list, but it will have to be assessed on a case by case basis. Guiding Principles

There are existing organizations who have held definitions for what is “free” or “open”. In the software world, the first and most well known is the Free Software Foundation, and their Four Freedoms. For general media, there’s the Free Culture definition. The one we’re primarily going to draw from is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s definition, since it has all the same principles as the other two, and is more comprehensive. Use

The license must allow free use of the licensed work. Redistribution

The license must allow redistribution of the licensed work, including sale, whether on its own or as part of a collection made from works from different sources. Modification

The license must allow the creation of derivatives of the licensed work and allow the distribution of such derivatives under the same terms of the original licensed work. Separation

The license must allow any part of the work to be freely used, distributed, or modified separately from any other part of the work or from any collection of works in which it was originally distributed. All parties who receive any distribution of any part of a work within the terms of the original license should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original work. Compilation

The license must allow the licensed work to be distributed along with other distinct works without placing restrictions on these other works. Non-discrimination

The license must not discriminate against any person or group. Propagation

The rights attached to the work must apply to all to whom it is redistributed without the need to agree to any additional legal terms. Application to Any Purpose

The license must allow use, redistribution, modification, and compilation for any purpose. The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavor. No Charge

The license must not impose any fee arrangement, royalty, or other compensation or monetary remuneration as part of its conditions. (A note about that last principle – it does not mean you’re not allowed to sell an open work. If you publish a book under the CC BY license for example, you can sell it. What it means is that once the sale is made or the work is otherwise conveyed to a user, that user must be allowed all of the aforementioned rights without incurring additional charges).

In addition to these open definition principles, we’re adding additional requirements in light of the OGL 1.1 controversy as a safeguard. Professional Licenses Only

The license must be written by an experienced professional in the field of intellectual property law, and maintained by such persons. Rights Protecting Institutions

Only The license must be authored and maintained by a third party organization who 1. is not in a conflict of interest with a given work published. 2. has it as their stated mission to protect and preserve these same rights.

A List of Good RPG Licenses July 16th, 2023 A List of Good RPG Licenses

This page will document a list of licenses that we think are a good fit for an RPG author who wants to respect and support free/libre and open gaming. Please note this is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. Defining Free, Libre, and Open Gaming

To know what we’re even talking about, a little history matters. These all have their roots in two movements: The Free Software movement, and the Open-Source Initiative. They’re similar, but not the same. These two movements inspired others, such as the Free Culture movement which led to the creation of the Creative Commons project. Likewise the Open Gaming Movement, which is specific to tabletop gaming, grew out of the same millieu.

It’s a good idea to learn more about all of those movements – they’ve all played important roles in shaping our lives today. But to keep this simple, the main takeaway is that there’s a bit of a split between movements calling themselves “open”, and those calling themselves “free” and/or “libre.” We’ll define our terms with these differences in mind, and maintain two separate lists – open licenses, and free/libre licenses. Free and Libre

To get it out of the way right now, libre is free. These two words are entirely interchangeable, think libre as in liberty. People sometimes prefer libre because it makes it more clear that we’re talking specifically about freedom, not merely free of cost (gratis). These libre movements assert that regarding software and media in general, we should have the rights to use(for any purpose), study, make copies, make modifications, share, distribute, and even sell a given creative work. People who advocate for this libre way of life generally believe that there is no valid space for proprietary licenses anywhere. For this reason they will tend to prefer more strict licenses that grant all of the aforementioned freedoms, but which require all derivatives to be published with compatible licenses only. Collectively we call these licenses Copyleft licenses, because what they do is take copyright law and essentially turn it against itself.

If you think that restrictive copyrights and licensing cannot coexist with these values of freedom, copyleft may be for you. Open

Open movements are similar to libre ones – they generally want software and media to have all those same freedoms, but they permit circumstances where more restrictive copyright models may exist. Because of this, they’ll often use licenses that are even more permissive than copyleft ones, allowing all of those same freedoms, but also allowing anyone to sell derivatives that take those freedoms away. Licenses

The licenses you choose for your own project depend on whether you’re making software, or some other form of media; and whether you think copyleft models or more permissive models are right for you. If you’re serious about your work, please also consider consulting with a lawyer before you commit to anything.

We believe that a good license is one that is actively maintained by real legal experts who work in the specialty of intellectual property law, and are ones that come from nonprofit organizations whose very goals are to ensure the preservation of freedom and openness that we listed previously (use, study, copy, modify, distribute, sell). Open Licenses.

Most Media: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). As an rpg creator, this is likely the choice you want for your license. If you’re looking to do things similar to other publishers, you can release your SRD with this license, and then publish your core rulebook and all other materials under whichever licenses you think are best for you.

Software: Apache 2.0 license. A software license. This choice is a bit of a challenge. There are a lot of “lax” licenses out there. We went with this one because it’s recommended by the FSF.

Libre Licenses

Most Media: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). CC BY-SA is a copyleft license, like the GPL. It’s good for anything other than software – potentially rulebooks and System Reference Documents, for example. Creative Commons has a great history of protecting our information rights by ensuring that we have a robust media commons that we can all benefit from. It’s another well-established license.

Software: GNU General Public License (GPL). This is a copyleft license specifically written for software, though you can use it for things other than software as long as you clearly define what “source code” is. If you’re making software and you want to make sure that both your version, and any modified versions will always be free, this is the license to use. The Free Software Foundation are the original protectors of software freedom. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and the GPL is well-tested.

Why Not Other Licenses?

This page is a currently a rough draft, and very much subject to change. More dialogue needs to happen, particularly from parties who are most informed on this subject matter. For now this list is being kept small, and we will try to be careful about additions, as well as establishing more detailed and precise criteria to base the list on. For instance, we know now that any worthwhile license must explicitly state that it’s irrevocable if we want to avoid another OGL mess in the future. What about product identity and Open Game License?

Some people have expressed concerns or even an outright rejection of licenses like Creative Commons, because they want a license that’s more like the OGL in defining a separate “product identity” that the author can keep under more restrictive terms. The thing is, the Open Game License and all of it’s variants have never been real open licenses. The entire structure of the Product Identity is anti-open. When you look at one of these licenses, and compare the full text of everything that’s considered Product Identity to what’s supposed to be open – all that’s left is game mechanics, which (more or less) aren’t protected by Copyright in the first place.

For any authors who want to publish with some content open, and other materials restricted: You can release the open content in one set of documents under either the CC BY license (lax), or the CC BY SA license if you want to make sure all derivatives are also kept on an open license. Then just publish your closed content in a different set of documents using whichever licenses you want to. Exemplars of this model include Ironsworn, FATE, and Dungeon World.

It’s worth noting that open or libre content does not have to be given away for free. You can use an open license, even commit your work to the public domain, and still sell it.

The OGL has never been a good option for both fans and authors alike, and it’s time to retire it and move on. What About a New License?

If that’s what anyone wants to do, go for it. Understand though that there is an existing history of problems associated with new licenses, as well as proliferation of too many licenses. What the current OGL situation shows us is that we should be using tools that are well-tested, written by people who specialize in this, and whose primary goal is the protection and preservation of freedom and openness. If an expert in intellectual property law published a new kind of Open Game License Two Point Zero tomorrow, it might have promise, but as a precaution this project would still want to give that license time to be put to the test and see how it works out before recommending it. Closing

If this project interests you, please get involved. Open discussions, file bug reports, make contributions, everything is appreciated.

A list of Libre and Open RPGs July 16th, 2023

This page will list existing RPGs and related systems that meet our criteria of freedom and openness. Like the Licenses page, this one will have separate lists for rpgs that are open or lax, and those that are strictly copyleft. Open rpgs are those published under the CC BY license, and copyleft are those published under the CC BY-SA license.

If you know of a compatible rpg that’s not already on this list, please let us know! Open RPGs Games Using CC BY License

2400 and their SRD.
AdventureLand.
Aleph RPG – and non-facebook link.
Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut.
Blades in the Dark – their SRD.
C22 – playing card based srd.
CAPERS.
Carta – solo rpg.
Commonsense.
CORE Micro SRD.
Crash! and Lanterns of the Dead.
Cyberrats CC BY licensed, but it’s based on LUMEN, which I have not been able to find a definitive license for. It deserves a closer look because a lot of games are based on it.
D10/0 – rules system and some games based around it.
D6 Pool Modern, “Prep Fast, Play Fast.”
Death Takes a Holiday.
Department Nine.
Devil, John Moulton, The.
DramaSystem SRD.
Dulse – author page.
Dungeon World – Their Github Project, SRD, and a web-based copy of their book.
Dungeons and Dragons SRD – this is the 5.1 SRD only. The Creative Commons one is better.
Fari RPGs – Multiple resources and rules systems, all CC BY licensed.
FATE is a great example on this list. Their open materials are easy to find, clear in their licensing, and they have a lot of free stuff to work with. Evil Hat’s approach should really be seen as the reference model that others should strive for.
FATE Polyhedral, a modified version of FATE that uses polyhedral dice.
Five by Five.
Forge Engine.
For the Queen.
Freeform Universal.
F-Sharp – simplified variant of FATE.
GAME(PDF) Generic Action Mediation System.
Ghosts.
Go Fast, Turn Left.
Gratitude – a horror game. Creator kit is here.
GUMSHOE SRD.
Gunwave.
Harmony Drive.
Heroes of Adventure.
Heroes of Exploding Kingdoms.
House of Masks.
In the Dark of a Fallen Empire.
Ironsworn – some of their materials are under a NonCommercial license only, but others are fully CC BY.
Libre Card Game.
Longshot.
Maze Rats.
Mist-Robed Gate.
MULRAH – one version appears to be CC, and the other OGL.
Myriad.
Nameless Horror.
Not-Too-Silly Stories.
One Shot.
Open Adventure git-hackable and everything.
Powers for Good.
Providence Junction LARP.
Quest
Resistance Toolbox, The
Return to Maniac Mansion.
Sad Press SRD Collection – several small games.
Science Fiction Mystery LARP.
Second String Superheroes LARP.
So1um.
So Now You’re a Time Traveler.
STaMTaR.
Sufficiently Advanced Technologies LARP.
Super Repo.
Trophy.
Tunnel Goons.
ORC – Organic Rules Components.
Unsung Tales.
Vaults of Vaarn.
World of Fire and Sand, A.
Worlds of Legacy SRD.

Copyleft RPGs Games using CC BY-SA License

100/3 RPG.
1 Page Dungeon Contest.
6D6, and license.
Adventures on Dungeon Planet – requires Dungeon World to play.
Anima Prime.
Aphelion Transit.
As the Tea Leaves Grow.
Artifact, The.
Basic Fantasy – including them because even though their current materials are ogl, they are making every effort to shift to CC BY-SA as quickly as they can in response to the WotC controversy.
Beast Hunters – Itch version, and SRD.
BOLT RPG Engine.
Brent P Newhall’s Musaeum – it doesn’t look like everything is under a libre license, but Dungeon Delvers, DD Deck, and Ability Score are all CC BY-SA.
Cairn and SRD.
Cap & Trade.
Cardenio’s Daughter.
Critical! Go Westerly – and author.
Daring Adventures.
Death of the Japanese Emperor.
Donjon.
Dreaming Crucible, The.
Dungeoncaster – SRD only, it looks like.
Eben Fantasy Essence – and their main website.
Enter the Avenger.
FAST.
Fifth World, The.
Fortune SRD.
Fortune Cookies and Nuclear War.
FUBAR – Director’s Cut.
Geasa.
Heroic Tales
Hodge – RPG system in the form of a wiki.
JAZZ.
Kalos – both a superhero comic book project and ttrpg.
Midgard.
MurderHobos.
Neon Skylines.
Phantom 52.
Primo Contatto.
Quest-ions.
RAWE – Red Ashe World Engine.
Scrabblenauts – RPG played with Scrabble pieces.
Shackled Self, The.
Shadow of Yesterday.
Shadows.
Siren RPG Beta.
Super Notecard Adventures
Synergy.
Tango.
The Simple Game System.
Tiny D10.
TSGS.
Turbo Dice.
VERS.
Uncharted Worlds.
Warrior and Wizard.
Weird World.
Witless Minion.
Wushu – also has a supplement, Wushu Open Reloaded.

Games using GPL License

BIND RPG.
HYPeR.
Osprey.
Pirate Party Flyerbook which uses their 1d6 system. If you know German, they’re looking for translators.
YAGS – Yet Another Game System, sounds something along the line of GURPS.

Public Domain RPGs

Amagi Games Archive – as much as possible, all these are public domain.
Aurora RPG Engine, CC0.
Awen.
Codename Spandex.
Enchanted Realms.
Four Color System.
Midian Dark Fantasy Core Set. – the DFCS is public domain, the rest of their content is under some weird homebrew license.
Pantheon.
Super Hero Fun.

Not RPGs but…

WTactics – a community hub for collaboratively creating card and boardgames. As of yet they don’t seem to have any RPGs, but all of their projects are under open and libre licenses, and it’s just that cool of a project. Sub-projects:
    Arcmage.
    gaia.
    saga.
    tinytactics.
    tinysquad.
    emata.

Credits

Zireael07’s list – The initial bulk of games populating this list comes from Zireael07’s Awesome ttrpg list. If you don’t care about what licenses the games are under, it’s an Awesome list to check out.
E Chris Garrison’s list – unfortunately the majority of links were broken here, but I did find a few games to add, so I’m including it.
Micro RPG Catalog.
RPG Net Open Game List.
FOSsil Bank – absolutely fantastic list(s).