2019 Birthday Bundle charity benefit

In February 2019, to mark the Bundle of Holding’s sixth anniversary, we presented the 2019 Birthday Bundle, a charity offer. We celebrated with an audacious request: We asked customers to to pay money for free roleplaying games — for a good cause.

The Bundle of Holding launched 20 February 2013. We marked the site’s anniversary with this benefit offer featuring high-quality free RPGs we wouldn’t otherwise be able to present in the Bundle format — terrific games like Lady Blackbird, Ironsworn, and Forgotten Futures. Again, you can download all these RPGs free elsewhere around the web (links below). But, for just a small donation, purchasers got convenient access to them on their Wizard’s Cabinet download page on the Bundle site — and the entire donation (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, the RPG Creators Relief Fund. The RCRF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity founded to provide financial assistance to tabletop roleplaying creators suffering hardship due to medical emergencies, natural disasters, and other catastrophic situations.

There were four free RPGs in our Starter Collection as DRM-free .PDF ebooks:

• Lasers & Feelings: The elegant one-page Star-Trekkian system by John Harper (Blades in the Dark), plus assorted L&F hacks that adapt the rules to superheroics, magical-girl adventure, Mythos horror, cyberpunk, Silicon Valley, and more.
• Engine Heart Deluxe (Viral Games): Little service robots try to survive in a post-organic world.
• ViewScream 2E (Neoplastic Press): Rafael Chandler’s live-action game designed for video chat.
• Poking the Emperor (Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan): Courtiers vie for the favor of a senile (yet still dangerous) monarch. Parallels to contemporary politics are left as an exercise.

Our Bonus Collection added seven more games:

• The Lady Blackbird series: Lady Blackbird, Magister Lor, and Lord Scurlock — three beautiful sandbox-style steampunk games by John Harper.
• Mythender: Ryan Macklin’s full-length heavy-metal fantasy RPG of powerful humans who hunt down gods and End them.
• Ironsworn (Shawn Tomkin): Dark fantasy and desperate battles in an untracked land — vow-driven quests Powered by the Apocalypse.
• Atomic Highway (Gallant Knight Games): Post-apocalypse survival action for your inner road warrior.
• Forgotten Futures (Marcus Rowland): The original shareware (now freeware) tabletop RPG of Victorian and Edwardian sf/fantasy.