Our indie dev group just released our third playable adventure! This is the climax of a four-part set! It is now available for free on DriveThruRPG!
It’s for a free, open-source game system/setting we made that’s like cyberpunk in a post-scarcity society. Check it out! Honest feedback is appreciated.
A gang of whitehat biohackers suspect they’re being targeted. That threat is about to get very real.
On a sunny summer day, your help is needed escorting a eccentric researcher to a meeting with their collegues. It’s been six weeks since unknown actors staged a daring armed robbery on their laboratory, and tensions are running high. But when this mysterious adversary puts their plans into action, it’ll take all your skills and judgement to avert a nightmare.
This story continues to build on the previous two in its scope, complexity, and challenges to give diverse player and character types opportunitites to see more places, meet more characters, and find ways to use their specialities to help their communities in a story with around 8 - 10 hours of content.
Are the source files included in the drivethrurpg link, or somewhere else?
It was composed in Google Drive, so if you’d like an editable version let me know and I can share it.
The download contains a PDF of the adventure and some maps in various formats.
“Open source” [files] means the source of the pdf. If the source files aren’t available with the download, it’s not open source.
I hope it doesn’t come across as a small point, as it’s a pretty big deal to me. I’ve spent years looking about for others doing open source RPGs, but most people using the word ‘open source’ mean something like ‘copying this pdf is okay’, which makes it very difficult to find open source RPGs under all the false signals.
I understand. I’d prefer to share an editable file, but I don’t know if Google Docs has a native editable downloadable file, so I’ve just been sharing links.
I’ve added links to the original documents on our website so that folks don’t need to request that I share them. If there’s anything else you’d recommend that I do to make it easier to share and edit, let me know.
I don’t know if Google docs count as a ‘source file’. It’s clearly the source. Is it a file? I guess everything’s a file if you go by the UNIX definition, so ‘close enough’?
Licensing riddles aside, it looks great, and it’s nice seeing a fast-paced intro that gets straight into what the game’s about.
Thanks. I appreciate your guidance in order to try and achieve the highest bar for open-source practices.
@Andonome it all comes down to what the designer considers the core of the creation, the rules text or the fonts and graphical assets, the calculation speadsheets and databases or just the compiled layout… I hear you, though. I try to provide markdown files alongside pdfs.
That’s never been the case with any of the open source movement. If someone says their project is open source, then they give out files which are not the source, we would normally say that’s not open source. We don’t ask Microsoft if they feel that X, Y, and Z are ‘the core components’ of VSCodium. It’s just not open source.
Providing text is good, and you might say the text files are ‘open source’, if they have a licence which allows modifications and so on. But you can’t make closed-source pdfs out of them, and say ‘this has text, which is open source, so I feel like it’s open source’.
I get that it seems like a small distinction to some, but it’s been an important distinction since the inception of the open source movement, and without it, we won’t be able to tell open source projects from projects that have open components which people ‘feel’ are core.
