I decided to go ahead and try listing my free games on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow as “Pay What You Want” games. I’m starting by listing my generally forgotten 0e supplement Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome as a test. I listed it yesterday in the afternoon and it already has 31 downloads, so it seems listing items on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow does get them exposed to a different audience.

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is a supplement for 0e games — either the TSR original or retroclones like Swords & Wizardry (which which it is fully compatible). It is a compilation of my 0e house rules from the late 1970s — along with a few current day additions. Here’s the “product description”:

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is a set of house rules for the original 1974 (0e) version of the world’s most popular tabletop fantasy roleplaying game (and modern clones, like Swords & Wizardry). These house rules are modern renditions of the house rules the author used with his original edition games in the 1970s.

Some of house rules included:

• A simple “skills” system based on class and background instead of lists of skills
• A Hit Point/Body Point system where Hit Points represent fatigue and Body Points represent actual wounds.
• Ritual Magic
• An alternate alignment system
• Critical Hits and Critical misses
• A class based weapon damage system that ends class weapon restrictions.
• An optional Armor system that ends class restrictions on wearing armor
• An optional class: the Mnemonic Mage
• Optional Divine Intervention rules

This digest-sized edition of Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is designed to be printed double-sided using the booklet-printing feature of Adobe Acrobat, the pages can be folded and stapled to create a “0e” style digest-sized booklet.

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is free and is still available in all the usual places, it is just now also available on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow. (If you are wondering if it is better to “donate” via paying what you want on DriveTruRPG/RPGNow or directly to my Paypal account, I see much more of the money if you donate directly to my Paypal account — and you also get access to donor goodies.)

I’d like to thank everyone who replied to my Experiences Publishing Free Games on DriveThruRPG/RPGNow? post from a couple of weeks ago. Without the information in the replies, I would have never bothered to try this. Thank you very much!