I thought it was about time to update the links etc for how to play D&D 5e for free.

The only outlay you need to make is for some dice, pen/pencil and paper. Oh and for printing out some character sheets. Otherwise using an electronic device of some kind you can use everything else digitally.

First up you need the rules. Luckily WotC released the core rules to Creative Commons earlier in the year. Sadly it’s not all the classes, spells and monsters. But it’s a good chunk. So you need to get the D&D 5e SRD .

In a couple of weeks time Mike Shea aka Sly Flourish will be putting some of his Lazy DM stuff out under a Creative Commons license. And as Mike said on his live steam/podcast this week once out this could almost be considered the DM Guide for with the SRD.

However while you wait you can get the samples from one or two of the full products for free (which may have some over lap with the stuff that gets released under the Creative Commons).

So you can get a really useful sample of the Lazy DM companion, and Forge of Foes for free.

Using bits of these you can create your own adventures and monsters and never need to buy a thing. Yes really! Mike has videos on his YouTube channel where he shows these two documents in use. Well worth watching.

But if you are creating your own adventures you might need a map. Dyson Logos is the only place you need to go. He has hundreds of maps you can use in your own games for free. Plus if you watched one of those Mike Shea ol’ YouTube videos I mentioned earlier he uses a Dyson Logos map for the adventure he created using the extracts, and you get to see how to populate the dungeon.

But maybe you want some free monsters, etc to drop in your adventures made by a publisher. You know cut down on the work you have to do. Well Kobold Press have your back.

Kobold Press have a lot of their stuff under the OGL, which you can get here. I personally prefer the Kobold Press monsters to the WotC stuff.

A great free first adventure to try is the The Delian Tomb by Matt Colville.

You can get free blank character sheets here. The link also has some pregenerated characters to.

Now Mr Shea also has some free adventures and pregenerated character sheets that are samples of his various books, Fantastic Locations, Fantastic Adventures, Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot, and Fantastic Lairs. You’ll find the download links on pages I link to.

I hope folks find this useful, and get to try D&D 5e for free (if they have the dice already).