Drawabox – Crash course on fundamentals of art. Simple language and a good introduction to perspective and spacial thinking.

Androidarts Art Tutorial – A personal favorite tutorial on rendering, posing and doing character design. This one’s geared towards the beginners, so keep that in your head.

FZD studio – Feng Zhu is an industrial designer and a general film industry icon. His youtube channel has hundreds of videos mostly talking about doing concept art and illustration as a job. Invaluable if you gotten into your head that you want to do art for a living.

Gerald Brom (Warning: Boobies) – Most famous for being the illustrator for the Dark Sun series of books, he’s a favourite of mine when it comes to dark fantasy and erotica illustration.

Gerard Moebius - One of my personal idols, even though I am upset how often I am compared to him. Not everyone that draws thin lineart and alien worlds is an avatar of Moebius (or maybe they are, I haven’t checked).

Kieth Parkinson – Do you know those colourful, slightly corny illustrations you’d see on fantasy book covers or spraypainted onto trucks? Well, you can thank Kieth Parkinson for those (also Boris Veleho, Judie Bell and Frank Frazetta in large part). While I’m not the biggest fan of high fantasy, I can’t deny that his work has something vibrant and imaginative that a lot of contemporary fantasy illustrations simply lack.

Brogue – Rogue (you know, the thing Roguelikes are named for) but updated to run on modern system with some extra bells and whistles. You’d actually be surprised how in-depth it is for something that was made in the silicon dark ages. At the same time, it’s streamlined enough to be enjoyed even by the most brainrotten of modern individuals.

Moria – One of the first roguelikes that survived to the present day. The plot is what it says on the tin, explore the mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings. File size is less than an average selfie and runs on any toaster. If you’re on Linux, you can both install and play it out of a terminal.

Dread Delusion – Morrowind-like game featuring amazing art by Artyom “Tukhovic” Trakhanov. Don’t want to spoil it, but if you like the world building and setting of Morrowind, but are a bit annoyed with some of the friction, this is the game for you.

Hypnospace Outlaw – GEOCITIES SIMULATOR 1999

Cairn by Yochal Gal – Free, booklet sized fantasy dungeon crawler. Something you’d introduce to a friend that doesn’t want to spent the time or money on something like Dungeons and Dragons. Compatible with a lot of other “Old School” roleplay supplements.

Everyone is John – One page RPG about playing a deeply mentally unwell man named John. A perfect “Beer and Pretzels” tabletop roleplaying game.

FATE by Evil Hat Games – One of the only story game systems that I enjoy. A bit of an odd dice system aside, both the core and the rules-light accelerated system are great for both veterans and first-timers. Fate Accelerated especially is used for a lot of children’s TTRPG games.

Stars Without Number by Sire Nomine – Imagine Starfield, but good. Now imagine it as a tabletop roleplaying game. That being said, the best thing about SWN is that it can be a great starting off point for creating your own sci-fi setting due to being a foundation for everything from hard science fiction to over-the-top space operas.

Eclipse Phase by Posthuman Studios – Massive sci-fi epic that’s completely free. Also just a great world building project to check out if you’re into transhumanist or really mind-bending sci-fi.

RadHack by Karl Stjernberg – Zine about playing mutants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Excellent beer and pretzels roleplaying.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow – Immortal cyborg depression localized entirely within Disneyland.

…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes by Scott Alexander – Do you know those meme images where they ask you to pick a pill that gives you super powers? Well, I don’t want to spoil the story.

Galatea by Emily Short – A conversation with a work of art.

17776 by John Bois – Mortality has been cured. War, suffering, strife are all things of the past. Every fifth person on the planet was at one point elected to be the president of the United States. So, what do we do now?

Krita – Free open source drawing software. Think of it as GIMP’s cooler cousin that is aimed more at illustrators than just image editing. Even though I personally don’t use it that much, the devs are doing a great job and I recommend donating them.

PureRef – Free (at least the old version) software that displays reference images. Genuinely invaluable stuff for illustrating and modeling.

Drawpile – Great software that originally just allowed groups of people draw on the same canvas over the internet. Their recent update overhauled it into a decent enough illustration software.

Heavypaint – Bare bones illustration software that’s meant to teach illustrators value grouping, shape language and how to block things out. I found it to be a fun gimmick, but some of my friends can’t get enough of it.

Photopea – Fully online photoshop clone. Not my cup of tea, but some people that like it really enjoy using it.

Blender – Your grandmother’s dog probably knows what Blender is, but it’s essentially a free 3D modeling software that grew so sophisticated that you can do basically anything in it. Steep learning curve aside, it’s one of the better pieces of non-commercial software you can find.

BeepBox – Baby’s first HTML music software. Don’t let the simplicity fool you, I’ve created my own Dungeon Synth on this rather simple program. You can download it locally and and run it out of your browser, it’s great.

Twine – Have you ever wanted to tell your own story or make a videogame? Well this is a great tool for beginners. Essentially, it’s a simple text engine for making Choose Your Own Adventure games. Not my cup of tea, but I bet it suits someone’s fancy.

Godot Engine – Free Open Source game engine. Limitless potential, but a bit more on the technical side. That being said, there are a lot of tutorials to be found for making any type of game.

Obsidian – Genuinely fun and free productivity software that allows you to organize your thoughts into mesh wiki articles. Lots of plugins for world building and writing scientific articles.

F-Droid (Android only) – – A heavily curated repository of free, open source, privacy focused apps. Minor exceptions apply, but they are clearly stated. Has phone games that aren’t riddled with annoying ads or microtransactions. Lots of Privacy focused messengers, ebook readers, survival manuals and the like. Basically a palette cleanser from the hellscape that is mobile software.

Dither It! – Web application for dithering images. Besides looking stylish as all hell, it's a great method of compressing large images the old-school way.

Wallpaper Engine – Paid proprietary software sold through Steam. The reason why I’m mentioning it is that it’s basically a live wallpaper software that doesn’t take up that much RAM. Only complaint I have with it is that if you’re using the Steam workshop to find wallpapers, you’ll need to dig through a lot of trash to get the good stuff (the trash is anime girls by the way).

World History Simulator – Generate a planet, continent, ethnic groups and watch history unfold… indefinitely really. Great for drafting a quick fantasy world or just watching a human terrarium.

Anodyne Planet Generator – Planet generator originally for the Mothership TTRPG. Just a great all-around planet generator for both sci-fi and horror.

Watabou One Page Dungeon – This one specifically saved me a lot of last-minute DnD sessions.

Watabou City Generator – My favorite generator for generating fantasy cities. Man, some of them I just want to print out and place on a wall.