The Walking DURF
So, some of my favourite bits of writing have come from taking Part in Game Jams - you can find a few of my resulting offerings on my itch.io page or in the Downloads section of this site. I don’t participate in that many, some I start and never finish others become the inspiration for greater things.
Through the 14th October to the 14th November I took part in DURF Jam 2023, the challenge being to write something for use with DURF. If you haven’t stumbled across DURF, it is a rules-light dungeon-fantasy tabletop RPG inspired by the best of both the old and the new school of TTRPGs. It's free to download and designed to be a bare-bones system you can stick things on top of without having to worry too much about (in the game authors words) “it fucking up some obscure rule”. A sentiment I greatly appreciate…
Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Zombie movies and I haven’t yet met a Zombie TTRPG that I didn’t like. In fact I’m sitting by the postbox right now using the power of positive thought to will my copy of Free League’s new The Walking Dead Universe RPG - a co-production between AMC Networks and Free League - into existence. So when this Game Jam came up my mind went straight to “The Walking DURF”. Some years ago I wrote a game called YOLO which used the excellent Wushu rules, however I have found that Wushu with its rules light frantic beat ‘em up cinematic action isn’t for everyone (just try it damn you), and the attraction of taking YOLO and rewriting to use the more traditional and recognisable DURF was just too much to pass up.
Anyway, the result was “The Walking DURF”, available here on the downloads page and direct on itch.io (follow me on itch if you like what you see - everything I publish on there is free for you to download and use). I fear I unnecessarily complicated my modern weapon rules with the ranges - should have just stuck to subjective ranges with a penalty for exceeding them and a bonus for point blank. I might go back and fix that for version 1.1.
If you do read it or better still play it then please do let me know what you thought, you can leave comments here or reach out through my contact page.
Derek.
