Some useful RPG links

RPG.net is a great on-line community of RPG enthusiasts and professionals, providing news reviews and forums. Drop by the Art of Game Design Forum if you are involved in writing your own RPG, or the Publishing and Business forum if you are interested in publishing one.
The Forge is an equally excellent, if smaller, page of forums, articles and reviews concentrating on indie games and gamedesign.
Places to go, People to be, is an on-line RPG, magazine that provides interesting reading.
An excellent List of free RPGs that are available on the web for download can be found at John Kim's site. Well worth the time to peruse. John Kim also provides a List of RPG Related Links that makes this little page look pretty pathetic.

Interesting in actually running a game? Try skimming through the Net Book of Plots or the Big List of RPG Plots. Both are very useful resources. An interesting site that breaks down types of plots into increasingly more complex lists can be found here.

Fantasy Author Juliet E McKenna has an interesting article ruminating about where writing for RPGs and LARPs fits into the general scheme of fantasy writing. McKenna has in fact written several articles on World Building and Fantasy. You'll find the whole list here.

And at the end of it all, when you need a bit of a laugh, stop by Middle Finger Evolution.

Some good free RPG resources...
There are several good lists of free RPGs available on the web. John Kim's page is excellent, as is Chris's Compendium of free RPGs. The Great RGP Archive is worth a look at, too, as is the Roleplaying Directory's list of free RPGs. Google has a surprisingly good directory of free games organised by page-count and divided up by genre. And of course we can always rely on RPG.net to give us a little something.

If you'd like to read some more about what is out there, then have a look at the reviews at The Forge (some of which are for free games) and the list of indie game sites.

More interested in RPG design? You might find some of the following links useful...

World Building
Good has a useful directory of World Building sites here to get you started. Although intended for fantasy fiction writer's Sarah Douglass's two articles are aplicable to any fantasy world builder. Tired of silly RPG names, don't want to call your city N'mark'Hollo'Morg? What about utilizing a name generator based on a real-world language? You can't go past Chris Pound's name generator page for just plain old fashioned goodness. Want some real names for your historical setting? The Medieval Names Archive is the one-stop site the visit. If you want some mapping software you could try Fractal Mapper, AutoRealm, or Realm Creator.

If there is an Anglo-Saxon, Viking or Noman element to your world you may want to have a look at this, this or this. If you are after medieval rescources in general then you may want to have a look at the extensive list of on-line sites given here.

System Design
John Kim has an interesting little page covering some system design definitions and terms which can be found here. For anyone designing a system however, some of the best articles around are found at The Forge. Look here for some basic ruminations, and if you're into fantasy then you'd better have a look at this and also this. Heck. Here is the whole list. Go wild.

Fonts
Gentium is a very nice font that can make for a good bodytext. Some other nice sites with a fair few font downloads inlcude Fontfreak, Flashkit, Free Historical Fonts for Downloading, and Flat Earth. "Lord" Kyl McKay has a collection of freeware and shareware Medieval and Fantasy Fonts for download. S. John Ross also has a very nice set of freeware fonts here with a significant gamers angle.

Links