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The beauty is that you can still buy and play all the old stuff. There are both official reprints of the old 1st & 2nd edition games as well as free/low cost clones of everything pre-3rd edition (the Original game as well as the early "Basic" box set games). A great many of the adventure modules are available in both PDFs and hardbound reissues of the more iconic ones.

As for the price of the books, $20 in 1980, adjusted for inflation is $57. It's still hard to swallow when you can buy a printed copy of Basic Fantasy for under $5.

It's like 2nd edition without THAC0! http://www.basicfantasy.org/

Mod parent up; just because WotC are pulling these PDFs, people need to know that there are the OGL clones. The Old-School Renaissance really has an opportunity here.

In addition to OSRIC for AD&D 1e, if you want some old-school goodness from the old Moldvay boxed sets you can get Labyrinth Lord , and if the original boxed set (OD&D) is your thing then you can get a couple of different flavors of Swords & Wizardry depending on if you like just the original three books ("white box") or items from the Greyhawk supplement thrown in. In addition, there are other games that are old school like Basic Fantasy which is very similar to Moldvay B/X with some bits of AD&D, and stirred with D20 for ascending armor classes.

Note that all these are available in PDF absolutely free, and also available for sale in softbound or hardbound (well, OSRIC is getting there, it's not quite there yet).

Even better: missing Dragon and Dungeon magazines? No problem: there are magazines like Fight On! and Knockspell to take their place.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet. Essentially an open source version of the D&D boxed sets from my youth. While I haven't played D&D for about 25 years, it was still fun to flip through those pdfs...

I haven't played for years, and am really turned off by recent D&D publications. If I get back into gaming, I'll probably use what my brother has been working on developing with others: http://www.basicfantasy.org/main.html

Don't play D&D myself (or rather haven't since the early 80's) but a previous slashdot story linked to this you might find interesting.

Do you want to get off the Wizards of the Coast treadmill? Do you miss the old editions, but like the simplified, unified mechanics? Want to play a game that's essentially "open source?" Check out Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game (BFRPG). It's very similar to taking some d20 mechanics and retrofitting them to the old Basic and Expert sets that many of us started with as kids.

At first I didn't think I'd go that way, but it's really grown on me. It's a complete game in a few pages and has streamlined mechanics (except for the thief skills, but that suits me, actually). There are many add-ins to adjust it for flavor, and you can use much of your old B/X, 1e and 2e material with some minimal changes. You should really check it out. It's even a supported, living system and the creator is quite friendly and approachable, and many folks discuss it regularly.

Oh, yeah, if anybody would like to join up with an old-school (ie, dungeon crawling/swords & sorcery) BFRPG game in the Sugar Land, Texas area...