DriveThruRPG is the internet's premier RPG product site. The core of every role playing game is the rules, rules which come in books, books which are sold at your friendly neighborhood game store. Sadly, it takes a certain population density to support a slightly niche hobby so many rural areas didn't have one or had very limited selections. This was just the way things were. Catalogs and the like kept a lot of small publishers alive but obscure titles were often next to impossible to find. Then the internet happened and everything changed. As table top gamers and early internet adopters composed the same general demographic the early internet was rife with RPG discussion boards. It's a short step from there to ebooks and an even shorter step to online publishing. As of ubiquitous tablet computers it's far easier to carry around your entire extensive collection digitally as pdf files than it would ever be to haul around a back pack of rule books. This has also brought down the barrier to entry for publishing allowing for a plethora of titles that have never been anything other than digital.

While DriveThruRPG sells and distributes hard copies of some products, every item on the site is available for download, mostly in the form of pdf. Files are automatically marked with customer's names in the lower left of each page of the file as a very weak, very unobtrusive bit of copy protection. Other than that, the site offers exactly what it says in the name. You show up, pick out what you want, pay for it, and off you go. Now I've never been a very impulsive shopper but like a lot of people when a major Steam sale occurs I've made some purchases that in retrospect I didn't need and barely wanted. The prices are just that low. Well ... for me, DriveThruRPG is the same way ... except the average prices are even lower, and there is a ton of stuff that's just plain free, and unlike Steam there is no video pitch it's just the blurb so if you really want to know what's inside you've got to buy it. Have I bought a lot of crap because of this? Yes. Do I regret the habit on the whole? No. Like I said really cheap and a lot of gems. If you have an interest in table top games visit DriveThruRPG and just start with the free stuff ... see how long before you end up spending forty dollars.

IRON NODER: WE'LL RUST WHEN WE'RE DEAD