Last Saturday was Free RPG Day as many of you were aware. I only had one local store participating, and they had a two-book limit, so Mrs. Droid and I grabbed:

• Revenge of the Kobold King - A Pathfinder adventure from Paizo.
• Treasure of Talon Pass, associated dungeon tile, and miniature - Wizards of the Coast’s trifecta of free RPG goodness. They were very generous this year.
• The Harn quickstart rules and adventure - Strangely, Columbia Games didn’t bother to advertise this on their website.

I hope you guys were able to get some good stuff. I would have loved to have the DCC gazetteer, HEX (Hollow Earth Expeditions) quickstart rules, and Trail of Cthulhu adventure, but alas such was not to be. I suppose I could swing by and see if they have leftovers.

So, what about that “x100,” you ask?

Well, how about a getting free access to a prolific RPG company’s entire backstock? That’s exactly what you’ll be able to do once the massive project that Mongoose Publishing has just undertaken gets finished. Called The Grand OGL Wiki, its mission is…well, I’ll let Matthew Sprange from Mongoose do the talking:

We produced a great deal of OGC under D20. Most of these books are now out of print, with just PDF copies available - by the end of the year these will disappear too, as it is not realistic for us to remove D20 licensing off every product we produced over the years. Just too many!

However, it seems a shame to have all this material simply disappear, so. . .

If there is any interest, we would be prepared to make the vast majority of our D20-based content available freely. In the past, there has been talk about an OGC Wiki of sorts, and I think we can kick such a project off in a sizeable way.

If a volunteer (or volunteers - you might have to be some sort of maniac to go through all this material solo!) were to come forward and create a suitable web site, we would happily supply electronic versions of our D20 lines for translation of OGC to such a web site. We would be very free with the material permissable, allowing you to effectively cut and paste large chunks of ‘fluff’ text alongside the OGC.

This would include all the Quintessentials, Slayer’s Guides, Encyclopaedias, Ultimates - potentially, even some Babylon 5 material, if someone is prepared to remove all the licensed text (no Conan though, as that is still current!)

Mark Gedak indicated some interest and has started the project over at our old friend the Wikidot (I tried to warn him ). Here are some links to get you started. (They could use some help…after all, they’re extracting OGC and text from probably 100 pdfs or more.)

The EN World thread that started it all.

The Grand OGL Wiki homepage.

Update: Since I originally posted, several other companies including Paizo Publishing(!) have signed off on their content joining the Grand OGL Wiki. It’s becoming a movement…this could be the biggest thing to come out of the OGL!

I really hope they can pull it off, and they’ve got a pretty good start going! Some smaller publishers are joining in the effort, but hopefully we’ll also see some other large ones get in the game once they decide their 4.0/GSL strategy. In any case, kudos to Mongoose Publishing for such a gesture…it’s an RPG geek’s dream come true!