As people are aware, I am a huge proponent for aspiring players and Game Masters to pick up a copy of Basic Fantasy RPG, one of the absolute best deals in Fantasy Gaming. It’s a clone of Basic and Expert D&D with Ascending Armor Class rather than Descending Armor Class and you can get all the books in PDF for free or maybe spend about $80 if you want them all in print because they’re being sold at cost.
Another game entered the space called Demons & Dragons by Gothic Church and it created a firestorm.
Why?
Because they copied the entire text of Basic Fantasy and doubled the price.
Thing is, Basic Fantasy is a Creative Commons game so yeah, you can copy it, sell it but you can’t make money on it. That’s what Gothic Church is attempting to do right now as they’ve been removed from Amazon Canada and Drive-Thru RPG when people noticed it was a copy with dedications removed, original names scrubbed and credit taken as though none of us would notice. To be honest, even I didn’t because, I didn’t even know the game existed but I write this bit to share with you Chris Gonnerman’s take on it and advise you all to keep close watch over the games you download and buy.