Beautiful and Terrible as the Cheesecake Factory

Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!

When you use such images, always make sure that 1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but the photograph you are using to see it is not!), and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.

Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.

the entire reason photographers put their work on places such as Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons is to make the photos available for anyone to use as long as they follow the rules. each photo being helpfully labeled with what the rules are, which on Unsplash is usually either (a) "pay for a license", or (b) "free with attribution for non-commercial use, but for commercial use, pay for a license". note that non-commercial use of a category b photo is still a licensed use, it's just a different license.

on Wikimedia Commons, many photos are in the public domain, thus available for anyone with no rules to follow. the rules on the rest vary, but Wikimedia Commons requires those rules to include that modified versions of these photos must also be available for anyone to use and modify. again, that's licensed use. that's the copyright holder saying it's available for anyone to use, here's the rules. anything in the public domain, there are no rules because there is no copyright holder.

With the updates to the OGL, you might be looking for a way to play your fantasy game without having to worry about supporting a company that doesn't hold the interests of the community as a priority. These series of recommendations are specifically about exploring dungeons in settings that might possibly have dragons, and require little to no time, effort, or money given towards Wizards of the Coast. Moreover, most of these games heavily encourage home-brew, rule hacks, and your own custom creations!

Ironsworn, by Shawn Tomkin.

In the Ironsworn tabletop roleplaying game, you are a hero sworn to undertake perilous quests in the dark fantasy setting of the Ironlands.

Others live out their lives hardly venturing beyond the walls of their village or steading, but you are different. You will explore untracked wilds, fight desperate battles, forge bonds with isolated communities, and reveal the secrets of this harsh land.

Are you ready to swear iron vows and see them fulfilled—no matter the cost?

Ironsworn is majestic. Character motivation is built in during creation, so you start the game knowing something about who your character is and what they want - and from the very beginning, your character’s story is vital to the campaign. You can approach problems from a number of different approaches, including combat, persuasion, physical prowess, and more. 

The game is built for solo, co-op, and guided play. This means that if you have a friend who’s willing to GM, they have plenty of help in coming up with plot. If you have no-one who’s willing to GM, you can still play the game - and if you have no-one who’s willing to play the game with you, you can still play it. Finally, and this might be the best part: Ironsworn, a 270-page PDF full of lore, advice and foes… is free. 

DURF, by Emil Boven.

DURF is a rules-light dungeon-fantasy RPG in the vein of games like Knave, Troika! and Into the Odd. When it comes to character background, appearance, and history, much of what you decide will be up to you: your character backstory doesn’t have to influence your stats if you don’t want it to. Your character’s stats are boiled down to three: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, and you have an inventory of 10+ your Strength. The game is rules-light, but the rules that are there make combat similar to what you see in D&D: you have to roll higher than your opponent, account for range, and most rolls depend on a d20. 

Spell casting isn’t limited to specific classes in DURF, because there aren’t any specific classes. However, that doesn’t limit what your character can do to grow. You can increase character stats, add new spells, and consult a trove of content for this game created by people who love it, much of which is either free or incredibly reasonably priced! If you find yourself writing a lot of your own content for your D&D game anyways, you might enjoy the really creative community that’s popped up around DURF and similar OSR games.

World of Dungeons, by John Harper.

World of Dungeons is a simple, quick-play, dungeon crawling game, using one of the core mechanics from the Powered by the Apocalypse rules system. It's compatible with Old School Renaissance and original D&D monsters, dungeons, and adventure modules.

This is another game that doesn’t require a lot of dedication to convert what you know and are comfortable with into a new system. It’s also an introduction to the standard PbtA conceit of rolling 2d6 for every action and a three-tiered level of success that moves the plot forward, even if you fail. Failure in PbtA games can be just as interesting and engaging as successes - and once you’ve got the hang of this mechanic, there’s a whole world of games available to you!

Tunnel Goons, by Nate Treme (Highland Paranormal Society).

Tunnel Goons is a simple table-top role-playing game. It was originally only included in the zine The Eternal Caverns of Urk. It's a light weight 2d6 system that can be applied to many different genres and settings.

An extremely streamlined system, Tunnel Goons is only 4 pages long and is pay-what-you-want. You only need d6’s to play, and have three stats to take care of. If you enjoy roleplaying but find the idea of transferring to a new system daunting, you pick up a game of Tunnel Goons to try out something new without having to learn a bunch of new rules or spending a lot of money. 

This game is small and simple, but it’s also been hacked a number of times for many different genres, which means that if what you like about roleplaying is coming up with new settings and new character options to play with, you’re right at home here!

Realms of Terrinoth, by Fantasy Flight Games.

Terrinoth is a land of forgotten greatness and lost legacies. Once ruled by the Elder Kings who called upon mighty magics to perform great deeds and work marvels, the land has suffered greatly at the hands of its three great foes: the undead armies of Waiqar the Betrayer, the demon-possessed hordes of the bloodthirsty Uthuk Y’llan, and the terrifying dragons of the Molten Heath. Many of its great cities have been cast down into ruins, and many wondrous secrets and powerful artifacts have been lost.

For hundreds of years, Terrinoth slipped into gloom and decay. But heroes arise just when their lands need them the most. Courageous adventurers brave the ruins of past ages and the foul creatures within to uncover the treasures of their ancestors. The Daqan Barons, inheritors of the ancient kingdoms, rebuild their walls and muster their armies, while the wizards of Greyhaven gather runes of power to awaken guardians of stone and steel. These preparations come none too soon, for the ancient enemies of the lawful races are stirring again, and Terrinoth needs champions of courage and cunning to stand against the rising darkness.

If what you like about D&D is the collection of options and stat-block builds that you can lovingly craft, the Genesys system that runs Realms of Terrinoth has plenty of options that help you build your own backgrounds and create your own classes. So if the setting doesn’t have what you’re looking for, it can’t stop you! The dice system is fundamentally different in that the dice don’t have numbers on them at all - they provide you with successes, failures, advantages and threats, which means that it’s possible to succeed and also running into obstacles, as well as fail and still experience a boatload of good luck! This is the only game on this list that isn't an indie game.

Cairn, by Yochai Gal.

Cairn is an adventure game for one facilitator (the Warden) and at least one other player. Players act as hardened adventurers exploring a dark & mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities.

Based on Knave by Ben Milton and Into The Odd by Chris McDowall, Cairn is an attempt at making Into The Odd semi-compatible with popular OSR settings like Dolmenwood. Character generation is quick and random, classless, and relies on fictional advancement rather than through XP or level mechanics. The game itself is rules-light but functional, leaving most rulings up to the Warden.

Cairn is an excellent example of how creative and generous the indie ttrpg community is, especially within the OSR scene. A free rulebook, it is designed to be used alongside other popular games in the OSR scene, and has many of its own adventures designed by the community. These kinds of games are wonderful for players who are excited about exploring fantastical and dangerous places, and solving the variety of problems that appear within.

Blades in the Dark, by John Harper.

Blades in the Dark is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and, above all, riches to be had — if you’re bold enough to seize them.

You and your fledgling crew must thrive amidst the threats of rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful ghosts, the Bluecoats of the city watch, and the siren song of your scoundrel’s own vices. Will you rise to power in the criminal underworld? What are you willing to do to get to the top?

Blades in the Dark is a setting that has amassed a large following for a number of reasons: it has free player resources, it prioritizes fiction-first gaming, it has a tight set of rules that are easy to learn and expand upon, and the setting fucking slaps. It’s the parent of the entire Forged in the Dark family of games, so if you don’t want to play criminal masterminds in an industrial city - you don’t have to! There’s so many games published under this ruleset that fall under different themes, such as Band of Blades, a military fantasy setting, Into the Dark, a dungeon-delving game, and Blades Against Darkness, a game about adventurers exploring tombs and new frontiers. FitD games provide a tight setting and focus for your group, so you’ll always know what your players are working towards, and there are number of interlocking systems that you can pull on to increase your chance of success - at the risk of pushing your character a little closer to stress and trauma.

She is not that.

She is Elon Musk. She is Trump. She is a powerful monster with the money to end lives.

Giving her money and creating a demand for her books by engaging in fandom should be seen the same way owning a cybertruck is seen. Harry Potter gear is in the same category as MAGA gear.

I need to see the same disgust and outright hatred of her that I see about all the evil men in her category. I don't know if people see her as less dangerous because she's a woman or if people are worried that hating on a woman will get their feminist card revoked, but she needs to be taken more seriously by a lot of people. She's a big name heavy hitter with more money than anyone should be allowed to have.

Her shit fit and past legal actions caused Amnesty to take the report down. Like she's sued people to hell before, so it's not unreasonable to be concerned when someone who's used her wealth to ruin people who disagree with her comes after you.

And then taking the report down while they figure out what to do isn't good enough. She's apparently trying to team up with anyone else who didn't like being in the report to sue Amnesty International into the ground about it.

It's Amnesty fucking International.

The human rights charity.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

I also know she won't care, but I'm still supremely disappointed in her. Just, she made something a younger me enjoyed, and has ruined it by bending all of her resources and will toward bigotry. After dedicating her last (otherwise terrible) book to the cause of anti-trans narratives, she's done nothing with her time and (Harry Potter) money except this. Eradicating trans people has been her only project.

And it's disgusting. It's genuinely horrible. I think it's worth reflecting on how truly pathetic and sad it is that this is where she's ended up. It's sad and pathetic in a way that still causes massive harm, but it's just... I dunno. I can't imagine living like she does. Surrounded by wealth from my only success of a 30-year-old project, and bending all of it towards hate for over kind of person, and vengeance against anyone who disagrees with me.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to be play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

Like you describe, I play roleplaying games as a guided improv thing. As a player, I describe in-universe actions that I think my character would take. In this view, the point of the rules is to:

Make something happen in response to that.

Make that thing interesting. Different people find different things interesting, which is why there exist multiple games.

Resolve disagreement. The world should feel real and players should not often think "come on, that's bullshit". Consistent rules make this a lot easier.

All these goals are perfectly well served if one player makes everything up, but when that's what "GM" means, it sure gets hard to find a GM. The reason to have rules is to take some of that work off their plate.

I'm willing to do the fiddly dice maths as the price of a fun improv night. But I don't enjoy it: it throws me out of the imagined world. So obviously I want the rules to be as light as possible.

Wait, actually I've found another possible source of disagreement:

The folks who don't bother to learn the rules they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math

The D&D 5e player's handbook is 293 pages long. I'm perfectly happy to read it several times and work through a dozen examples before I show up to the table, and to bring various cheat sheets, and to try to learn the rules that others explain to me. But I am simply not able to:

Learn the rules well enough to be able to play without constant assistance, in less than 3 or so sessions

Learn rules that don't come up for my character at least a couple times per session, ever

Quickly read and apply a rule for a given situation; either I get help, or it's a laborious, game-halting process

It's not that I don't bother. I actually, highkirkuinely can't.

It's the same for non-roleplay board games. A decent board game player reads through the rules of a medium-complexity game, forms some idea of how to play well just from that, and usually can review the game after playing once. I need one or two playthroughs just to figure out how to make legal moves, never mind a strategy.

I've included dnd 5e as a familiar point of comparison, but other than that, all of these are games I really respect the design of.

You have rules-light unopinionated games, like Into The Odd, where the mechanics are kept extremely minimal so you can bring them in at key moments but mostly just resolve everything through the conversation loop. You have rules-light oppinionated games, like monsterhearts, where although the mechanics are simple and streamlined, you'll refer to them quite often, and they'll be shaping play quite heavily. You have rules-heavy unopinionated games, like dnd 5e, where there's a lot of crunch and minutia to the game but a lot of it actually boils down to GM interpretation or gets handwaved away. And you have rules-heavy oppinionated games, like Vampire v5, where the game mechanics are pretty detailed and robust and will be pushing the direction of the game quite hard.

But lets discuss the one you asked about, "Highly Oppinionated + Rules Heavy". Vampire v5 is a game about playing as vampires, but it's not just that. It's a game about playing in vampires in a very specific setting, with a very specific tone and themes. Even compared to other editions of Vampire, it zeroes in on one particular experience you can have with vamp games: it wants you to play as younger, less experienced, less enfranchised vampires who need to come to terms with what they are, and must struggle to hold onto their humanity in the face of the monstrousness of vampiric existance. V5's mechanics all act to reinforce this. There's a tight loop of feeding and getting hungry, and the mechanics constantly tempt you with power (extra dice to your rolls) if you accept the risk of getting hungrier. And as you get hungrier, some of the dice in your dice pools are replaced with hunger dice. And when those hunger dice roll well enough, you'll start to lose control of your actions (there's a table you can roll on for the specifics of how) as your hunger takes over. And as well as creating complications you'll need to deal with, when you lose control of your actions, you'll go against your moral beliefs, and your humanity tracker will be degraded, making it mechanically harder and harder for you to relate to humans. Of course, if you want to stay in control of yourself, you can reduce your hunger by hunting, but hunting still requires rolls that can create complications, and the easy methods often also risk your humanity tracker. So, you see how it's all a big feedback loop? Each bit of this process is mechanically relevant. All the parts interlink and your actions have mechanical consequences that intersect with other aspects of the game. So when you're playing vampire, you'll find the rules are constantly nudging you one way or another, incentivising or disincentivising certain actions, or sometimes even actively forcing events. The way these elements intersect reflect the setting and its themes.

Playing vampire is what I'd call mechanically hands-on. At any given point, you need to be remembering to apply the mechanics so that the feedback loops actually work. If you handwave things in this game without requiring rolls for them, the game stops working because now you aren't tempted to increase your hunger, and so you aren't risking those complications and the whole loop of the game falls apart.

For the game to work, underneath the narrative conversation-loop there's a second layer of tracking the mechanics of things. And sometimes those mechanics will rear up and say that, right now in this moment, this is happening. And that loop will push the game forward without even really needing much GM planning. You can set up a situation and just kinda let the players do their own thing, and the push and pull of the dice mechanics will create a cascade of consequences and complications to deal with, and there's your narrative right there.

This might seem like it's hard to learn, but it's really not. The actual mechanics of a vampire game are pretty simple - I'd argue simpler than dnd 5e - but they kick in constantly. By the end of a session, you'll have got the hang of it, because you'll be getting a lot of practice and it's all the same underlying mechanic. Sure, last time you rolled Manipulation + Ettiquette to blend into a fancy party, and this time you're rolling Strength + Athletics to kick down a door, but it's basically the same mechanic every time, and the consequences - success, failure, bestial failure, messy critical - are the same each time.

Anyway. Here we get to the actual point of my argument, which is that simple rules needn't mean incomplete rules that require constant improvisation to make them work. There are a lot of games where the mechanics are extremely tightly written; they're simple and streamlined, but you will be using them constantly, and they will drive play. Like how I described vampire working, but with a much smaller character sheet.

Let's take Monsterhearts as our example here. Monsterhearts is a game about playing supernatural teen melodramas & romances - think buffy, twilight, riverdale, etc - and it's very much about queer characters. You play as a collection of secret vampires, witches, etc that are all attending high-school together and are all engaged in petty overblown teenage relationship drama. It's a lot of fun.

Monsterhearts uses the PbtA engine, which means it uses a mechanical system called moves. A move consistes of two parts: a trigger and an output. A trigger is something that happens in the fiction - "when you lash out angrily at somebody" or "when you're put on the spot" - and when that thing happens in the fiction, you always trigger the move. Generally you'll rolls some dice, and get one of three results: - The GM uses a GM move, from a list of Things To Do to push the narrative forward. - You kinda get what you want; the move will explicitely say what this means mechanically and in the fiction. - You totally get what you want; again, the move will tell you what this means. There's not really much interpretation. You do the back and forth of RP, and then a move is triggered. You pause the narration, resolve the move, and the move will tell you what happens as a result. You add that to the fiction, and then continue roleplaying. Like with the vampire example, simply applying the moves will create complications and consequences. You don't need to make these up, the game mechanics will tell you; generally, there's a list of options to pick from. For example, let's say you rolled the mixed success to Run Away. The move tells you that you get away, but have to pick; either you cause a scene, you encounter something worse, or somebody left behind gats a string (a metacurrency for emotional influence) on you. No need for the GM to make much up, the events flow naturally from the rules.

Monsterhearts's mechanics are very simple. I could teach you how to play in fifteen minutes. You can make a PC in 5 minutes. You can fit everything you need to play - literally every bit of mechanically relevant information - on two sheets of a4 paper.

I think the problem is that dnd 5e gives people a really bad impression of what learning a game is like. 5e's mechanics are fiddly and pedantic and unintuitive and full of exceptions and special class abilities in a way that means there's a lot of mechanical slop to slog through, but underneath that there's not really any underlying depth. So starting off with 5e conditions you to think that this horrible learning-burden is what all games are like, which simply isn't true.

The thing is that DnD's mechanics aren't really oppinionated. There's not really an underlying feedback loop like there is with Vampire, and applying those mechanics doesn't naturally push the fiction forwards like Monsterhearts does. So, combine that with how dense and finicky they are, and of course people will struggle to engage with them! And if you're not engaged with them, particularly if all the mechanical heavy lifting is being done by the GM, you're not going to learn them properly, and this is - as OP says - a self reinforcing probblem.

Once you're in this mindset, you'll take the 5e approach to other games, meaning that you *won't* see how they're different. If you try to run vampire v5 like dnd 5e, you'll be applying mechanics in a wishy-washy, arbitary fashion and ignoring bits when you don't feel like it, and the game won't fucking work. So the conclusion becomes that all games are the same, and the effort of learning a new game is wasted, because the game is never actually engaged with properly.

(Also, the dirty secret: everybody makes mistakes playing rpgs. That's normal. It matters less that you're getting every detail correct and more that you're keeping the big overarching mechanical systems - like hunger in Vampire - moving as intended.)

Maybe this sounds harsh, but reading through your post, it genuinely sounds like you've never actually engaged with an oppinionated game on its own terms; hence you view game mechanics as the 'price' you have to pay in order to do freeform RP.

Serious question: why not just do freeform RP? You can just do that! It's fun, and it's free. I do it all the time! Why are you actually bothering with all these dice and character sheets and rulebooks?

The concept of a Move, as PbtA has them, is an action that the player takes that the world responds to. When they're well-designed, a Move gives the player interesting options to pick from, and hands the GM ideas for what to do. The typical format is "when x happens, roll +stat", and then providing both sides of the table with options and outcomes based on the result.

The thing that's really neat about that design is that the Triggers in the Moves tell you what the game is about. Things that don't get Moves can still lead to significant play, but the Game itself is telling to bring players back to a select few actions that are important for the kind of story it's tell to tell. A game without many Moves for combat is geared towards nonviolent solutions, a game with multiple moves for interrogating people and scenes will tend towards investigating. In some of the more modern, Brindlewood-style games, there are mechanics for putting clues together to solve mysteries.

Contrasting that with something like 5e, it's a little all over the place in terms of mechanics that move the story along. Most of the mechanics by volume address fighting and combat scenarios. The majority of spells are listed based on combat applications. So there is an opinion about how people in this world engage with physical threats. But when you're investigating a mystery (and a lot of DMs love mysteries), the mechanics don't really give you anything beyond "did you locate a clue? Yes/No". There's a hidden information game with no way to adjudicate how much information gets revealed and when.

Players have to rely on their own assessment of the available data (while trying really hard not to metagame). And if the scenario can't be solved, it's assumed to be the GM's fault. Not that the game lacks tools for this kind of play, and that characters are designed around fighting, with mysteries as an afterthought.