QuestWorlds: Core RuleBook - PDF

Questworlds (2025) is the latest iteration of one of the most influential role playing rulesets ever written. The original HeroQuest ruleset (2003) Written by Robin D. Laws and Greg Stafford, was on of the earliest successful attempts to facilitate play that felt, for lack of a better word, “literary”. The game hugely influenced Ron Edwards and the greater indie RPG scene that centered around the Forge website and birthed a whole generation of games, including Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. Like those games, Questworlds is designed to put the focus on storytelling and character development and improvisational play. But unlike those games, which use a lot of rules to push play in ways that recreate specific genre tropes and a satisfying three act structure, Questworlds is designed from the ground up to be a generic ruleset that can be used in a wide variety of genres with minimal preparation. This would seem to put a lot of pressure on the game master. And indeed, the game master is responsible for a lot of things that would, in other games, be the responsibility of the ruleset. defining what actions the players decide are “plausible in the fiction”, setting the stakes of player victory or failure when using the resolution system, and setting the difficulty of the players achieving their goals are two things that other games spell out but in Questworld are the responsibility for the game master to decide on the fly given the needs of the story. Running Questworlds is less about learning a ruleset and more about mastering a set of techniques. Teaching those techniques is where the Questworld rulebook really shines. Twenty years of gameplay experience with this ruleset has been brought to bear in this text. Every effort is made to explain how to use the rules in clear language. Every concept in the game has multiple examples drawn from one of four example campaigns set in multiple genres. This basic rule set has had many editions,but never before has one been so successful in teaching you how to play. In conclusion, this is the best available text to learn how to play one of the most versatile rulesets ever designed to play story driven RPGs. Highly recommended.

QuestWorlds is, at heart, a really simple rule system that can be used to drive almost any narrative-focussed role-playing game (a "storytelling game"), and can be explained in just a few minutes. There is one core mechanic which resolves simple conflicts very quickly, but can be expanded where conflicts are more complex and demand a more detailed narrative arc. For such a simple game, it's a surprisingly long book. It's filled not just with detailed examples, that make clear how the system is used in practice, but also with tons of really valuable advice on running and playing storytelling games. The GM advice section is a masterclass, and worth reading well beyond its value just for QuestWorlds. Plus: there are some really charming and evocative illustrations by Lionel Marty throughout. Every time I've played in a QuestWorlds game it has been easy to pick up, making it so much quicker to get into whatever matters in the setting and scenario. You won't need to refer to much of this book during a game, but it's really clearly written and I expect it will be worth re-reading. Best of all: QuestWorlds is released under the ORC license, so all the rules and guidance can be used freely in other games. It would be great if creators really took advantage of that, it's a great platform to develop more detailed, setting-specific games.