For two days in February 2020 we presented the 2020 Birthday Bundle, a charity offer. Once again we celebrated our birthday with a brazen request: We asked you to pay money for free roleplaying games — for a good cause.
The Bundle of Holding launched 20 February 2013. We marked the site’s seventh anniversary with this benefit offer featuring high-quality free RPGs we wouldn’t otherwise be able to present in the Bundle format. You can download all these RPGs free elsewhere around the web (links below). But, for just a small donation, our customers got convenient access to them on their Wizard’s Cabinet download page on the Bundle site and in their DriveThruRPG Library — and their entire donation (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, The DOTS RPG Project. The DOTS RPG Project, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 2017, makes roleplaying games accessible to visually impaired players and other people with disabilities. DOTS has created 3D-printable Braille polyedral dice and Fate dice models, transcribes rulebooks in Braille, and works with publishers to address screen-reader accessibility.
We asked for a donation of just US$1 for the six free games in our Starter Collection as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including Heroes Against Darkness (a d20 FRPG from Hero Forge), Mercator (a conversion of Classic Traveller to the early Roman Empire), and all four issues of the remarkable mid-’90s journal of RPG criticism and analysis from Magnum Opus Press, Interactive Fantasy.
Those who instead donated $2 got all these titles and also our entire Bonus Collection with eight more free games, including all four core books in the Harryhausen-inspired Old School RPG from Legrand Games Studio, Mazes & Minotaurs (the Players Manual, Maze Masters Guide, Creature Compendium, and M&M Companion); Lightmaster (both the Lightmaster Core Rulebook and the essential Book of Tables), the retro-clone from Gurbintroll Games for all those who fondly remember Iron Crown Enterprises and zillions of critical-hit tables; Never Tell Me the Odds, the space-scoundrel game of risking everything; and Icar, a far-future SFRPG about a benevolent empire protecting humanity from its worst enemy: itself.
