OC What is LibreRPG?

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.