Plus or Minus

Player: Can I do the thing?

Mutants and Masterminds: Yes you can do the thing.

GURPS: Fill out these forms in triplicate.

Dungeons and Dragons: Yes, but it's really not worth it unless you are a Dream Elf with the Godblooded feat and at least five levels in the Thingomancer Prestige class from Complete Thing. Or you could just play a Wizard, they get The Thing as a 3rd level spell.

Call of Cthulu: You can do the thing, but you REALLY don't want to.

FATE: That depends, can you bullshit the GM into believing that one of your vaguely-worded aspects supports you doing The thing?

7th Sea: Only if the thing is properly dramatic!

Shadowrun: Yes, but you'll need a bathtub full of D6s.

This, my friends, is the Hong Kong kaiju dinosaur critter that would one day grow up to become the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster, the Owlbear.

These guys, along with what would become the rust monster and the bulette (as well as a bunch of other weirdos that never turned up in D&D), used to fill out packages of plastic toy dinosaurs. For some reason. The sort you would occasionally find at super markets or five and dimes back in the 70s and 80s (and, honestly, I’ve seen rust monsters in similar cheap-o toy packs as recently as a couple years ago in my local Foodtown). Gary Gygax used them as miniatures in his games, and thus they transcended into legend.

I wish I could talk to the person who sculpted this thing and get a sense of what they were thinking. Its so…doofy. But magical. I’ve read that these weirdos were intended to be knock-off Ultraman kaijus and that sort of makes sense – the Owlbear does look a bit like the Kappa from Japanese folklore. Kind of. But whoever made the decision to include them in the States with plastic dinosaurs was some kind of mad genius. I love it.

A large portion of the systems I regularly plug are actually free, or at least have free versions available. A representative sampling:

Adventures of the Space Patrol

Among the Beautiful Creatures (warning: direct PDF link)

Anima Prime

Atomic Highway

Danger Patrol

Engine Heart

Genius: The Transgression

Lady Blackbird

Lasers & Feelings

Mutant Future

Mythender

Perfect Unrevised

Pokéthulhu

Risus

Tales from the Wood

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link)

Witchcraft

Another chunk are not, formally speaking, free, but have a pay-what-you-want price model, so you can put down whatever you can afford. A selection:

Clover

Die For You

Fate Accelerated Edition

Sufficiently Advanced

Under My Skin

Wushu

Some are neither free nor pay-what-you-want, but only cost a buck or two in PDF, so even at full price they’re basically impulse purchases. e.g.:

Lashings of Ginger Beer

Sea Dracula

Finally, there are games that you’ll have to pay full retail price for, but that offer free starter versions:

City of Mist

Conspiracy X

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

Eclipse Phase

Mindjammer

Mistborn

OVA