A Very Durfy Christmas
4 January 2026
Over the years I've accrued a sizeable collection of TTRPGs on my itchio accout. I love reading through the rules and picturing in my mind what kind of adventures could take place in those worlds, but I rarely get the chance to play them. With the years, as friend groups drifted and schedules got more cramped, I stopped roleplaying regularly with my usual group. So this Christmas break I decided it was time to dust off the old DM hat and ran two sessions of DURF for some friends.
I chose DURF for its simplicity. Two of the friends I played with were familiar with D&D, while the third one knew about it but had never sit down to play. I wanted something simple to quickly draft some characters and just start playing. We actually skipped the random tables for character creation, instead assigning the PC attributes based on rough archetypes for their characters (there being only three attributes, this was extremely easy) and choosing the starting equipment as we saw fit.
In the first session I ran Lair of the Gobbler, an introductory adventure for DURF with a neat dungeon. Very self-contained location, but with enough meat to resolve the situation in different ways. I really liked it! For the second session, I felt inspired to make up my own dungeon. I might clean it up and post it online later. What's cool about DURF is that there are so many modules and expansions for it. I'd love to contribute to that community, too!
As the rules suggest, the PCs started with some gold they could spend on equipment before their adventure. Shopping for armor and potions was an excellent way for my players to ease into their characters and I had so much fun making up magical items on the spot for them to ~~try to steal~~ buy with their money. Speaking of items, I love that one of the starting options in the equipment tables is a miniature goose. My friends loved their goose Manuel and it was great when he came in a clutch and turned the tide of battle against the tentacled monster in Lair of the Gobbler.
Another thing I really liked was the combination of items and stress points into a shared "inventory". I see it as representing the weight you can carry, both physical and psychological. Pretty neat! With the focus on treasure hunting, I think the system can create some nice tension around what weapons or treasures you want to keep, specially for magic-casting characters. There's something fun there that deserves to be explored further.
Something I didn't really vibe with were the hit dice. I'm used to systems with hit points, which you can mostly plan around. Lose all your hit points? You die. But in DURF can die by getting hit for a single point and then rolling badly. I worked around this extremely risky combat by adding some healing pools in Lair and a magical, healing wheel of cheese in my second adventure (which my players didn't even use in the end), but I felt like I was pushing a narrative forward in a misguided attempt of giving my players a "good experienceTM" instead of letting the game do its thing. Maybe next time I should just let them die to the first easily-avoidable trap they fail to notice. I also found a supplement with fun rules to keep playing after an untimely death. There are many ways to approach this! As always, exploring new territory is scary, but it leaves me with more ideas and the desire to keep playing.
I'd love to run some more DURF games for my friends. Perhaps we could take on a longer campaign from one of the DURF jams, this time including extra rules for magic and hexcrawls. It is a very mix-and-match kind of game, which keeps it easy to pick up and just run. I'm glad I decided to give it a try!