LINKS

Most of these links are taken from a longer list of links called The Big List of RPG Links by Kyle Arron.

Systems/General

Wizards of the Coast: Dungeons & Dragons and other D20 systems
White-Wolf: World of Darkness, Exalted, and more
Steve Jackson Games GURPS, Munchkin, and more
Metal Opera Defeat the MAN with the power of ROCK! Very freeform
RPG.net

Getting a game group

NearbyGamers, where you sign up and appear on google maps, able to see other gamers near you.
GameCircle.org, a campaign wiki, forum and contact service for Australasian gamers.
Wham-bam player recruitment - just go to a cafe, and drag the people at the next table into it.
"What is roleplaying?" and why can't I get a group, boohoo
Why it seems hard to recruit new gamers
Recruiting gamers (rpg.net version, few comments)
Recruiting Gamers (sjgames version, many comments)
A small circle of friends. Instead of game groups, game circles. Bill Stoddard, rpg authour and generally switched-on guy, talks about "What I've done... is to come up with an idea for a campaign, and then pick out people who might fit into it and invite them to play. There is no preexisting group of players: the group is created by the individual players accepting my invitation to play, and lasts only as long as that campaign lasts."
Building a Player Network. "You can call it a club, organization, cabal, or other such name, but ultimately if you want to play more often and play with people who more closely match your gaming preferences you will need to join or form a player network."
Really long discussion on specific things to do to better include women in gaming - zdashamber talks about... you guessed it. Don't ask boys or even men about women in gaming, ask a woman.

Keeping a game group

or, Running an interesting game

Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good Gaming. A good general discussion of roleplaying, types of gamers, how to make a campaign, and so on.
An example of sex and relationship as themes in an rpg, talking about some people's campaigns with lots of sex, and others with none, and all in between and why...
A long thread talking about player vs GM power/responsibility. Notable for flames, but also interesting.
Another one about player control vs GM control, it has "protagonization" in the title, but is interesting anyway.
Gnome Stew, articles by GMs about GMing.
Rules light games: what's the infatuation? A long discussion of rules light games, but with most of the discussion focused on freeform vs focus, GM vs player power/responsibility, etc.
Sexism and game settings, and (for my post) whether GMs bother talking to their players.
When campaigns jump the orc, important to know when there's no more hope.

Free rpgs and discussions

You don't need a wad of cash or bitorrents to game or get good gaming advice

Red Zone Gaming, Idaho based gaming e-zine, videos, and podcasts.
John Kim's list of free rpgs, links to over 500 free rpgs, many of very good quality, and almost all with some interesting ideas
Chris's compendium of free rpgs, another link list
1,000 monkeys, 1,000 typewriters, a host site for free rpgs which tend to the thespy side
RPGNow.com's free rpgs, a website of mostly for-money rpgs, but with an extensive free section.
YourGamesNow.com's free rpgs, another paid-for site with some free rpgs
rpg.net, the largest rpg discussion site - avoid the non-rpg subforums as they are a crowd of communist perverts
thefreerpgblog, a blog dedicated to the discussion and promotion of free rpgs, hosted by the maker of one of the most professional of them, Icar.
RPG Bloggers network, a feed of many rpg blogs.

Gaming resources

Making a more interesting character and game

Treasure Tables' GMing wiki, an excellent series of articles on running game groups, preparing campaigns, and so on - also, they're written by different people so you get different points of view.
The Big List of RPG Plots - sitting there munching your cheetos wondering what to run your group through, and it's ten minutes before the first ones are showing up, half an hour late? Use this!
Roleplayer resources, a page linking to many articles about character creation, development, working with other players and so on.
Gamer Chick articles, including how to roleplay (well) the other gender.
Postapocalyptic media, a site looking at books, movies, roleplaying games and computer games with a postapocalyptic setting; also a forum.
Rules for Party Creation.

Character Sheets

RPG GM tools, HexMapper, DiceRoller, RandomCityGenerator, all sorts!
Autorealm, a freeware program for making fantasy maps; it does not offer a random map creator, and is about 3Mb.
Theban Mapping Project, "a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes [...] the TMP has concentrated on the Valley of the Kings. Modern surveying techniques were used to measure its tombs. From the data collected, the TMP is preparing 3-D computer models of the tombs."
Pyramids and Temples of Egypt, "information on pyramids and temples, which includes computer-generated reconstructions of what the pyramids and temples might have looked like when they were first built [...] many interactive ground plan maps, photos, paintings and drawings".
Mad Irishman Productions, page of different character sheets. The focus is on d20, but there are sheets for Ars Magica, Rolemaster, James Bond, all sorts. Also many other gaming resources, such as maps of Russia for Ars Magica.
Fonts of various kinds, good for getting just the right font for that character sheet for this campaign.
Wasteland: the postapocalyptic photo series. Very inspiring...
Onamastikon, Kate Monk's big list of names of people of different cultures and times.
Wikipedia's list of public domain images online, spice up your webpage or rpg pdf with images without shafting anyone's copyright!
Mike's Images, a big site with screencaps from Xena, Hercules, Firefly, Aliens, Lord of the Rings, etc etc etc. Great for getting just the right character image.
Maps of the Ancient World - even if you're not running anything in the ancient world, you can at least steal the place names for your own game world.
Topoquest.com, Free USGS topographic maps of the US and parts of Canada
Low Fantasy Population Generator, online or downloaded tool to get the number of nobles, charcoalers, cobblers, salters and adventurers in a region of a certain size and type.
UK's Defence Image Database, all sorts of militaria
Illustrated guide to herbs for rpgs - Huge list of herbs usable in RPGs, with information on where to find them, how rare they are, how much they would cost in AD&D terms, preparation, and effects.

Soundtrack music

Free downloads of public doman or Creative Commons music

Celestial Aeon Project
Project Divinity
Frozen Silence
Roomful of Emptiness
Warehouse of Distant Dreams
Sounddogs - sound effects, mood music - worth paying a bit for, but there are 30+ second samples of everything, which should be enough for lots of moments in games.

Historical resources

For those who like historically-flavoured games

Armour Archive, a page about armours of history with the aim of making modern examples for reconstruction or SCA.
Warrior Clothing in Ancient China. Better than those anime.
Levantia, site about the late Roman Empire in the Near East. Byzantium is a great place to adventure.
Timeless Myths - about Celtic, Norse and Arthurian myths and stories, very good for getting that flavour to a campaign.
Roman army re-enactment, Legio XV in Germany, and Legio XXX in Italy. The Italian site links to many others.
Monstropedia, An online encyclopaedia of monsters from real-world myth and legend
English Historical Recreation, images from modern-day recreators of the Anglo-Saxon era. Very good, many images and authentic
Wychurst, a project to build a reproduction of an old English village of Saxon times.
Viking re-enactment and information
Late medieval re-enactment in Norway, focusing on 1397-1434, with a particular focus on mounted combat (page in English).
Resources for the Suzerain Roleplayer, another big list of links to stuff about Asia Minor and the Middle East in ancient and early history
Streets of Shanghai - webpage of Shanghai in the 1920s, from a roleplayer.
Snowshoemen, a recreation group focusing on late colonial North America. Pop on that Last of the Mohicans soundtrack and grab your dice.
Action Squad. Real life "adventurers" exploring strange old building, tunnels, closed asylums, etc. Good images for a post-apocalyptic or horror campaign.
Military unit organisation, a thread here with discussion of and links to... well, that.

e-zines

Since magazines are all company-specific now, it's a good thing we have the web

The Iridia Zine - a general roleplaying zine, with a common focus on GURPS and D&D, publishes in pdf and print weekly - over 40 issues now.
Knowledge - Current Events. A zine taking current events and converting them into stuff for campaigns. Though it focuses on d20, it's of general interest.
ODDS, the Tabletop Roleplaying E-Magazine
Places to Go, People to Be. ...devoted to role-playing and role-playing games. It is put together by gamers, for gamers and contains what we believe to be the highest quality material about our games available. It is dedicated to gamers everywhere, and in particular to those in Australia and Brisbane. Irregularly publihsed (last issue June 2005), but with lots of old issues available.
The Oerth Journal, a zine dedicated to keeping the old World of Greyhawk going.

Campaign & setting webpages

Reading "actual play" usually suxxorz, but NPCs, maps and so on are great.

Tiwesd�g Cl�ewen, Dark Ages low fantasy campaign. Where magic is magical, and monsters are monstrous.
Northenden, a medieval low fantasy game.
Saduria, "I like gritty campaigns where the players and characters are challenged by their lifestyle, geography and society as much as by huge monsters. Saduria is very much a reflection of that philosophy. Magic is a rare thing and not to be taken lightly..." A very detailed set of pages.
Gehennum, a fantasy world that breaks the pseudo-European-Tolkien pattern, set in something rather like Polynesia.
John Kim's Buffy campaign
Fallout 3 files. From an abandoned version. May help you run your own Fallout campaign. Docs and so on, not the code stuff.
David Icke, not a roleplaying page, but good conspiracy-horror-scifi campaign material. This guy thinks that the ruling classes of the world are actually all alien blood-drinking reptilians.
Alien abductions - like Icke's webpage, also not a roleplaying one, but with many articles on alien abductions of humans and their plans to create alien-human hybrids to take over the world. Good for a Delta Green campaign, perhaps?

Crazy shit - relating to The Forge and other RPG loons

How we gamers are all brain-damaged. Why I Hate Ron Edwards #1
How we gamers are like child sex abuse victims. Why I Hate Ron Edwards #2.
Coming RPG Releases. WHy I hate Mike Mearls #1 - because he hates every game ever made.
IndieGamingSceneBlog. The posts mock the Forge, the comments mock the mockers.
GNS Suxxorz, a Socratic Dialogue, in which I thoroughly and unfairly diss Ron Edwards.
Theory Wars, a play-by-post game in which you take on the role of a wannabe god/guru or roleplaying game theory.

Funny shit about roleplaying

The roots of roleplaying, in which David Wesely talks about how he invented polyhedral dice. Then here is described "The Secret History of Roleplaying" (scroll to about the middle of the long page). And then the dungeon crawl is described by the sole survivor of the TPK. They even LARPed a little bit.
CHEETOISM, the original thread!
Roleplayers as dancing monkeys. This thread depicts different types of players as... monkeys.
"I wear the Viking Hat!" - in which Moochava describes how GMs should deal with argumentative players. He goes on to describe how sometimes it's good for the GM to "just pin the player to the table and hump his hams."
RPG Theory I learned from rpg.net - examples of stupid shit people say about rpgs
The infamous Creepy Gamer thread on rpg.net, now locked after a thousand days with 5,169 sanity-draining and credulity-challenging posts
The Gaming Stories of Al Bruno the Third - links to a heap of stories of El Disgusto, Psycho Dave, and other crazy people Al claims to have gamed with
The Hybrid rpg livejournal - no-one can explain to you what Hybrid is. You must experience it for yourself.
How to use semantics to avoid defending your weak ideas
Flame Warriors Home An illustrated guide to the many types of flame warriors found online. Like astrology, you can't diagnose yourself, someone else has to pick which one matches you.