#RPGaDAY2024 Day 2 prompts: “Most recently played.” Unsurprisingly, my first answer to that is “GURPS”. But that’s not really the game I have played most recently. The correct answer is that I have been playing Fellmyr with the Hargravers, a classic fantasy game powered by the Dungeon Fantasy RPG.

Pedantic? No, for GURPS is not really a roleplaying game but rather the Generic Universal Role-Playing System. Where many roleplayers believe that the rules are the game, playing GURPS has helped me see that this is not the case. As it says in the introduction to Basic Set:

Most other RPGs started out as a simple set of rules, and then were patched and modified, ad infinitum. That makes them hard to play. GURPS, more than ever in the Fourth Edition, is a unified whole.

GURPS Basic Set 1 Characters (2004), Steve Jackson Games, page 5

The roleplaying game is a chimera of elements including (but not limited to) the rules (aka system), the world you play in, the characters you create, the methods you use, the scenarios you play, and the approach you and the players take at the table. This particular game world has been played with several different styles, rules, and scenarios.

When I say I have been playing Fellmyr with the Hargravers, I am talking about the specific game I play every other Saturday in Nottingham face-to-face. We meet in a public café, sit around a table, and slip between theatre of the mind and tactical combat with stand-up paper miniatures.

Fellmyr has also been played with other groups, like the online Saturday Night crew and students at the school RPG club. All three games are different: the first sessions in Fellmyr were played with the BECMI Dungeons & Dragons rules and were much more focused on Dungeoncrawl scenarios rather than the Hargravers’ focus on urban play.

I would even go so far as to suggest that any game being played is an ever-evolving experience which is never quite the same. Even though we use the DFRPG as the core rules, the world of Fellmyr, and a broad set of methodological tools, all of those are changing session by session. Roleplaying games are never fixed entities. They flow.

All of that is as maybe but it’s wholly unsurprising to anyone who follows the podcast or the blog. To supplement today’s offering, let’s roll on the alternative #RPGaDAY2024 prompt table. Day 2 gives us “Forest” and the d10 rolled 5 for, “Write a legend or rumour”. Let’s add something to the world of Fellmyr:

“It is said that the Strange Wood which lies to the north and east of Fellmyr, is so named for the many odd creatures and happenings which occur around its fringes. Legend says that the forest was once the home to a mighty nation of Elves who built a citadel named Vallenar deep within it heart.

The strangeness of that place is believed to have been caused by the Fall of Vallenar. The Elves were driven from their realm by the assault of fell undead led by the mighty Necromancer whose name has now been forgotten. It is he who warped the forest and gave it over to darkness. Only fools would trespass there now.“

Game on!