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Any recommendations?

Pathfinder and D&D 5th edition both have big free chunks. I think Pathfinder is such that the complete rules are available, but not background (look for the PFRD for details). The D&D Basic recent release is more limited (only 4 classes, and the 'primary' variants if those, fewer options) but it may be a bit more helpful option.

Eclipse Phase is a transhumanist sci-fi game and has a lot of material available under Creative Commons licensing, thus freely available. EP is neat, but the setting looks a bit daunting (you will likely need a spreadsheet for character creation).

Otherwise, check out DTRPG for cheap/free releases.

What are you looking for in terms of genre?

STAR WARS by West End Games Every book, every supplement, a few unpublished things, and a host of books converted from the Star Wars D20 over to D6

I found the fallout PnP roleplay free online once, and had never seen or been in a RPG before. SO decided to GM it. For about 5 years I GM'd using that rulest (never had played in an RPG still) and got many people playing them and it still gets used a lot today.

Its simple, freely done and very much the same as the video games.

Best RPGs I have ever run where all from this ruleset and the games are still frequently talked about many years after.

Highly recommended

http://fallout-rpg.narod.ru/PnP.html

All the stuff I used is here.

You know, you can just type random word followed by D20 into google and find a fan made version of something.

Heroes Against Darkness is an awesome D20 game. The rulebook, is big, fully fleshed out with both a Player's Guide and a GM/Monster Manual section, the artwork is great, and it's totally free directly from the designer's blog.

He basically took everything he thought worked great from all of the editions of DnD, and completely threw out the rest. For instance, magic users use anima (mana) points to cast spells, and every spell of each level is available as soon as you hit that level for each type of magic user. There is no once-per-day, or memorized spells.

Though there is a lengthy section of the GM guide dedicated to putting certain DnD tropes back into the game, like bringing back memorized spells.

It's awesome and I would totally recommend it. I am going to be a first-time GM and I could literally run every standard fantasy setting I can think of with this one book for the rules. I may even buy the Rise of the Runelords adventure path and just use Heroes Against Darkness templates for the monsters.

http://heroesagainstdarkness.blogspot.com/p/heroes-against-darkness-downloads.html

Also, try going completely crazy and running Swords and Sorcery, the free reprint of original, old, old, old-school D&D.

Thanks for this, ill give them all a look.

Also, im not fussy about genre, im open to trying anything.

Fate Core is free. As is all the various editions of Talislanta. I recommend both.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Heroes Against Darkness is an awesome D20 game. The rulebook, is big, fully fleshed out with both a Player's Guide and a GM/Monster Manual section, the artwork is great, and it's totally free directly from the designer's blog.

He basically took everything he thought worked great from all of the editions of DnD, and completely threw out the rest. For instance, magic users use anima (mana) points to cast spells, and every spell of each level is available as soon as you hit that level for each type of magic user. There is no once-per-day, or memorized spells.

Though there is a lengthy section of the GM guide dedicated to putting certain DnD tropes back into the game, like bringing back memorized spells.

It's awesome and I would totally recommend it. I am going to be a first-time GM and I could literally run every standard fantasy setting I can think of with this one book for the rules. I may even buy the Rise of the Runelords adventure path and just use Heroes Against Darkness templates for the monsters.

http://heroesagainstdarkness.blogspot.com/p/heroes-against-darkness-downloads.html

Also, try going completely crazy and running Swords and Sorcery, the free reprint of original, old, old, old-school D&D.

I'm going to second this one. Much, much easier to work with than D&D in my opinion and a very well made rulebook.

Are you by any chance a Pokémon fan? They have a D20 RPG for that too somewhere called Pokémon Tabletop Adventures. It's actually pretty decent in my opinion (if a little complicated)

Also, I'm also going to throw in these lists of free RPGs out there too. Are they good? No idea. Do some of the links not work? Well... yes. But there are a LOT of these here.

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/freerpgs/index.html

http://sillyhatbooks.com/about/games/

http://www.1km1kt.net/cat/rpg

Even 1D4Chan has a few of them.

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Category:Homebrew_Rules

Hope it helps!

I'm actually switching things over and instead of running a Rise of the Runelords campaign, I am now going to be using Heroes Against Darkness to run a campaign set in the Nentir Vale from Keep on the Shadowfell. Everything about the area in that setting is perfect for my little group of friends, just not the 4E rules.

I found pretty much every single map for the towns and regions of the area using Google Images, and found a blog that gave the entire outline of the area, including map key locations for all the major settlements with detailed fluff info foe each location. Looks like it'll be a huge bit of fun for my first major foray into being a GM. Because I'm new, I like how it's an encapsulated region, that does not rely on any of the wider world, save for the Iron Circle raiders from the far south.

Add to that the immensely user-friendly qualities of Heroes Against Darkness, and the only hard part should be writing the fluff for some really good adventures.

HaD has a really interesting way of handling monsters, in which they are MMO-style characterizations of monster roles (striker, brute, minion, commander) of which templates are given all the way up to Level 10, and all you have to do for populating an encounter is determine what you want each monster to be doing, what the encounter level is depending on the strength of the party, and simply slap some special abilities on the existing templates.

In two seconds you can have stats for a Troll, for example, of level one all the way to ten, with nearly no bookwork (yay!) involved other than putting one or two "troll-like" abilities of your choice on whatever you might want that Troll to be or six monster classes: The standard "Grunt". A "Striker" that throws things or darts in to attack. A "Brute" that is doubly-tough for it's level. A "Commander" that encourages/forces it's underlings do special things. A "Minion" that is easy to kill, The obviously-named "Caster". Or make it a "Boss" of any of the six monster classes to have a single monster be a challenge for the whole party without having to have some mega-huge thing attack them (Bosses simply double the health and effective level of a monster, and give it two initiatives).

Everything foe each monster class is already calculated per-level and listed in the book. For a newbie-GM, that is AMAZING.

Also, no choosing skills or feats to give players analysis-paralysis. Each class gets a big handful of new, interesting things to do with each time they level up, with a level 10 Warrior, for instance having a full 18 completely different things they can choose to do as a feat/skill/attack. No problem of magic-users getting much more powerful than other equally-leveled classes, because they might get several spells at level "6", but the Warrior and the Rogue in the party get that many new abilities to use, too.

If you're into something you can learn in about 5 minutes instead of having to pore over hundreds of pages to get an idea how to play, FUDGE and its derivative, FATE, are both released under the Open Gaming License.

You'll need specialized dice but it is well worth getting them.

Try this:

http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/

or this

http://onesevendesign.com/lasers_and_feelings_rpg.pdf

Will have a wee look at all of these with some friends, cheers!

Bit of a shameless self-plug, but here's one I wrote a while back with the aim of simple gameplay and really only two core mechanics outside of character creation. At the moment the only expansion is a star wars one, but the idea is you can port the mechanics into any setting.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/600387.page

Openquest 2 also has a free basic edition that is more than enough for a party of adventurers to get their teeth into. d100 based. Completely classless. You can build whatever you want based on how attributes and skills work/depend on each other. I highly recommend it.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/127007/OpenQuest-2-Basic-Edition

I'd take a look at Labrynth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, or Dark Dungeons, too - they're free retroclones of the early versions of D&D and they're still a great introduction to tabletop roleplaying. Much simpler rules than most newer games, but closer to traditional board games than most of the rules-light story games.

Doesn't DriveThru RPG also have free RPGs?

Also, Dungeon Squad I've heard is a good hack and slash one for beginners without a lot of detail to story. I haven't tried it though. There's also a 40k expansion of it somewhere if you look.

FATE stuff is usually a good bet, free or "pay what you want" being the model for most the fate driven stuff.